With the November holiday season upon us, turkey tops the menu lists for traditional American fare at family gatherings. The iconic bird remains undivided from thoughts of Thanksgiving Day, even though the original celebrants in 1621, at Plimoth Plantation, enjoyed more fish and venison dishes as opposed to turkey.
Thanksgiving Day on the November calendar—turkey or not—exists these 150+ years thanks to the historic efforts of American author and style-setter, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale. This patriotic Christian and daughter of the revolution lived an amazing life through the course of the 19th century, serving heroically as wife, mother, widow, writer, publisher, opinion shaper, and history maker.
Sarah Josepha Buell entered the world in 1788, born to Captain Gordon Buell, a veteran of the War of Independence, and Martha Whittlesay Buell in Newport, New Hampshire. Sarah’s love of learning and literature sprouted early and blossomed under the homeschool tutelage of her mother and older brother. She reveled in the grand, patriotic stories she heard at her father’s knee, who passed onto her—through the power of story—a love of God, country, liberty, and truth.
Sarah sought out opportunities for self-learning in many disciplines until she earned a teaching certificate. She accepted a position near her home where she gained a reputation as an engaging storyteller.
One day, a lamb followed a student to school and waited outside the schoolhouse for its owner until Sarah dismissed the class. She thought this was charming and wrote a story in verse about it. That little rhyme has been charming generations ever since. Perhaps you remember the sing-song ditty:
Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb.
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.
In 1811, Sarah met and married a lawyer named David Hale. Over the next ten years she gave him five children before he died in 1822. She wore black mourning dress for the rest of her life.
As a widow and single mother with strong skills and a resourceful spirit, Sarah used her academic and writing gifts to provide for her family. She first published a collection of poems in 1823. By 1827, she published a novel titled, Northwood: Life North and South, addressing an abolitionist view of slavery.
This so impressed publisher Reverend John Blake, that he invited her to take a full-time staff position for The Ladies Magazine in Boston, the most popular magazine for American women in the 19th century. Eventually, The Ladies Magazine was acquired by the periodical journal Godey’s Ladies Book, with Sarah promoted to editor.
For the next 40 years—until she was 90 years old—Sarah Hale’s editorial pen proved a formidable weight of authority on every-day American life for women and families. Her Christian faith, intelligence, strength of character, and literate lifestyle exacted tremendous influence over fashions and homemaking.
Reflecting a strong biblical worldview, Sarah’s practical, persuasive words wielded a powerful sway on public opinion. If Sarah said it—American women were doing it. She eagerly pursued the advancement of higher education for women writing:
” . . . not that they may usurp the situation or encroach on the prerogatives of man; but that each individual may lend her aid to the intellectual and moral character of those within her sphere.”
Helping women to impact “within her sphere” would eventually result in women—through the work of their pen—making a unifying, permanent mark on the American calendar and tradition during a critical moment in history.
Thanksgiving: The Founder of the Feast
Sarah’s most famous editorials centered on her personal mission to see a national Thanksgiving Day officially declared by the president of the United States. She longed to see a day set aside where every American gathered with their families, on the same day, in praise, with grateful hearts for the many blessings of God bestowed upon a growing nation. Sarah was burdened by the cultural divide between the American North and South. The slavery issue fueled this rift, and unrest settled across the country, stirring the people to prayer. Sarah believed the problem required a return to the heart of America’s founding principles in the spirit of our Pilgrim forefathers, seeking peace and unity in a shared country under God.
Inspired by the well documented thanksgiving feast of 1621, celebrated by English Christian settlers and Native Americans, she began to do more than just address this in editorials. She started write letters hoping to persuade political powers to proclaim a Thanksgiving Day for everyone in the nation.
Sarah’s pen was not a lone ranger. She instigated an army of quills in the hands of American women through an ongoing letter-writing campaign in the course of five presidential administrations over fifteen years. Her crusade for the proclamation of an official American Thanksgiving Day never wavered. Her influence on America’s God-fearing women, praying for God’s peace and national unity under the cloud of unrest between the North and the South, culminated in blanketing the nation’s capital with petitions to the purpose.
Sarah’s faith undergirded a belief in the importance of her quest. She heroically persevered through years of disappointment until she and her legions of petitioners succeeded. At the height of America’s Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation on October 3, 1863, including these words of note:
No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most-high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy . . . I do therefore, invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens . . . it is announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord . . . it has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people.
It is important to note that prior to the Civil War, each state considered itself its own country. Many issues divided them one from another. Loosely uniting together to defeat a common enemy in the War of Independence some 80 years earlier, 1860s America had reached a threshold of decision on the battlefields of the Civil War. Lincoln, as president, had to be able to unite the nation and bring peace. The path to do so was bloody and traumatic, shifting the nation with rippling effects still felt today.
Time-honored, cultural traditions often prove a powerful stabilizer in unstable times.
For over 150 years, on Thanksgiving Day each November, the stabilizing effect of tradition continues to minister peace and unity within our currently fractured society. American families from sea to shining sea gather around a table of customary foods such as turkey, stuffing, potatoes, vegetables, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. The effect of Sarah Hale’s personal mission, perseverance, and influence upon the average 19th century American woman nationwide is directly responsible for this chapter of American history being written and relevant to us today.
May we consider well the words pouring forth from our pens as women and writers, wielding them, for all the good things and beauty the Lord would use, to invade the self-destructing habits of human nature and nations.
Journal Prompt: What kind of history-maker mark is your pen leaving for future generations? Is your pen’s passion influencing within your sphere for those things that work to unify and bring peace? Who is the sphere of society you seek to influence most? What is your message? Do you have perseverance to continue writing even when if seems you are not having the effect you want to have?
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Learn more about the history of the Plimoth Plantation Thanksgiving story dramatized on The Writer’s Reverie Podcast, Episode 3, by Kathryn Ross, From Leyden to Liberty, including The Ballad of Plimoth Plantation.
Writer-speaker, Kathryn Ross, ignites a love of literature and learning through Pageant Wagon Publishing. She writes and publishes homeschool enrichment and Christian living books for home, church, and school. In addition, she shepherds writers through the steps book development and production. Her passion to equip women and families in developing a Family Literacy Lifestyle, produces readers and thinkers who can engage the world from a biblical worldview. She blogs and podcasts at TheWritersReverie.com and PageantWagonPublishing.com. Connect with Miss Kathy on Facebook.
