Sarah Hale, Mother of Thanksgiving
Single Mom's Letter Writing Campaign; Origins of a National Holiday
Nov 11, 2007
The writer of that most famous little rhyme was Sarah Josepha Hale, from Newport New Hampshire. Sarah loved learning and received a Dartmouth University Education. She started a private school at the age of 18, spoke fluent French, studied botany, had five children, and then suddenly, with the untimely death of her husband, found herself single. She then became the epitome of the single mom today. Raising five children on her own, she began a career as a successful writer and magazine editor. It was during this time that she published the Nursery Rhyme which was based on the true life experience of Mary Sawyer.
Dartmouth Graduate?
The only thing strange at all about this is that Sarah was born in 1788! One might wonder how she got her Dartmouth education in the early 19th century. She did it the only way a driven woman could at the time. Her brother taught her every lesson he learned there when He came home from class. This is a great credit to this young lady but not just because it took so much hard work . It also points to a strong character and confidence that she was able to utilize her "degree" to achieve so much success!
Abolition Activist
This remarkable woman published her first book in 1827, a novel titled Northwood: A Tale of New England. It was one of the first works of fiction to criticize slavery and it landed her a job as editor of the American Ladies Magazine. One idea she promoted was a letter writing campaign to churches asking them to raise money on a special day of thanksgiving to buy freedom for the slaves. She felt confidant that if she could even just get a day of thanksgiving to be recognized, that the reflection alone would go a long way in ending this terrible institution. In later years, as civil war seemed to be inevitable, she wrote to President’s Pierce and Buchannan declaring that a Day of Thanksgiving could be the key to avoiding any bloodshed. She also wrote thousands of such letters to every other local, state and national politician.
Women’s Rights Advocate
This great proponent of thanksgiving and freedom for slaves was also, naturally, a great advocate for women’s education. She called for these education barriers to be taken down at every turn. Interestingly enough, she was not a supporter of women’s suffrage. This made her very unpopular with the women’s movement of that day and may be one of the reasons that her’s is not a household name like Lucretia Mott or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. While her own view was that women should not be involved in politics, she found no other barriers whatsoever, that women could not cross. She was influential in the establishment of at least two colleges for women, Willard and Vassar.
Presidential Order
In 1863, after heartbreaking loss of life in the Civil War and only three months after that pivotal Battle of Gettysburg, she finally got one of those politicians to pay attention. His name was Abraham Lincoln. Until this time in our nation’s history, Days of Thanksgiving had only been sporadically celebrated (including that famous First Thanksgiving in 1621). Most of these had been called for by individual states. Only seven times had a president called for this kind of national commitment to thankfulness but it had never been made an annual Federal Holiday. Finally on October 3, 1863, by presidential order, President Lincoln fulfilled Sarah Hale’s plea to have a “day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival." When asked the proverbial question as to what one can be thankful for, one can always give thanks that a single mom in the 19th century didn’t stop writing letters to the president until she secured this holiday that every American has truly come to love and cherish.
Sources
Northwood: A Tale of New England by Sarah Josepha Hale, 1827, Bowles and Dearborn
The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans ,Volume 5, Edited by Rossiter Johnson, 1904, The Biographical Society
Hale, Sarah Josepha, Women in World History. Vol. 6 by Carolyn Kitch, 1999, Yorkin Publications
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