Lincoln
Hale
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In a proclamation Oct. 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln set the stage for the American national holiday of Thanksgiving and took the opportunity to call for all Amercans to seek forgiveness for the actions that had led to so many deaths during the Civil War.
But leave it to a woman to lobby for a day that keeps so many close in to the kitchen stove and dishwasher for hours on end.
Philadelphian Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Ladies Book, was not a supporter of the women’s movement by any means, but she did think that a “national festival observed by all our people” would hold “a deep moral influence…in which whole communities participate.” Godey’s served as her pulpit for decades.
Just after Union troops won the Battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln issued a proclamation setting the last Thursday in November as a day of national thanksgiving and asking the populace to repent “our national perverseness and disobedience” to God during the Civil War.
.He wrote to those who had “become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation.”
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