A 19th century woman, Sarah Josepha Hale, authored the nursery rhyme, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” authored novels and essays, edited the journal Godey’s Lady’s Book, and was the mother of five children. What you may not know is why she is often called the Mother of Thanksgiving.
A New Englander, she had grown up with the tradition of a day of thanksgiving. She even included the concept and a detailed description of the meal in her first book. She loved the concept and the traditions so much she lobbied for it to become a national holiday. When the country was on the brink of Civil War and she hoped the holiday would ease tensions between the North and the South. She saw the holiday become more and more accepted during her lifetime, but the declaration of it as a national holiday took a little longer.
Early Life
Sarah was born in the riverside town of Newport, New Hampshire. USA on October 17, 1788 to Captain Gordon Buell, a Revolutionary War veteran, and Martha Whittlesay Buell.
She had five siblings. Anna and Charles were older than she. Horatio and Martha were younger. (Sources differ on the number of and birth order of her siblings.)
During the mid-1700s through the mid-1800s, women in America only received basic education. They taught girls reading, writing, and arithmetic until the age of 12 to 14. But Sarah’s parents believed in gender equality in education. She was home-schooled by her mother. Her brother, Horatio, a student at Dartmouth, taught her Latin, philosophy, geography, literature and more.
When she proved she was proficient in literature and of good moral character, she became a local schoolteacher. She taught from 1806 to 1813.
In 1811, her father opened The Rising Sun, a tavern in Newport. That same year, Sarah met her future husband, lawyer David Hale.
Marriage
Sarah married David Hale in a ceremony at The Rising Sun on October 23, 1813. David shared her belief in gender equal education. They read and studied together in the evenings. He taught her French and botany. He encouraged her to write and submit her writing for publication. They and like-minded friends started a literary club.
In 1822, Sarah was pregnant with their fifth child when David died of pneumonia. Sarah’s grief was everlasting. She wore black for the rest of her life.
Early Career
Widowed in her mid-thirties, Sarah had inadequate financial support for her family of five children under the age of eight. With the support of David’s fellow Masons, she and her sister-in-law started a small millinery shop. It didn’t do well and closed soon after they started.
So Sarah turned to one of the few vocations available to women of her time, writing for publication. She submitted work to magazines and newspapers. Cordelia was the pseudonym she used for some of her published writing.
In 1823, with the Masons support, Sarah anonymously published a collection of her poems, The Genius of Oblivion. It was “warmly received” if not financially successful.
Her First Novel
Sarah became one of the first women novelists and one of the first novelists to write about slavery in 1827 when she published her first novel, Northwood: Life North and South. (Titled, A New England Tale, in British editions.)
Her book offered New England values as a model to provide national prosperity. It also lovingly described the table arrangements and foods of a traditional New England Thanksgiving. Arguably, the most important part described how slavery dehumanizes slaves absolutely and not only dehumanizes the masters, but slows the world’s psychological, moral, and technical progress. It supported returning African slaves to freedom in Liberia.
Her book was an immediate success.
Editress
Impressed by her book, The Reverend John Lauris Blake, Episcopal minister and head of the Cornhill School for Young Ladies in Boston, asked her to become the editor for his new Ladies’ Magazine and Literary Journal. She agreed but preferred the title “editress.”
In 1828, Sarah moved to Boston and served as the first female editor for the ground breaking journal of prose and poetry. Some believe she was the first female editor in the nation.
In a time when American magazines were collections of reprints from British magazines, Sarah composed at least half the magazine’s content. She became a kind of national arbitrator of good taste, manners, and domestic science. She earned praise from many, including influential critic and activist, John Neal.
A Familiar Poem
She published a collection of her poems under the title Poems for Our Children in 1830. That collection included a poem originally titled, “Mary’s Lamb,” now known as “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
In order to distinguish it from a British magazine with the same name, the magazine changed its name to American Ladies Magazine.
Despite its success, the magazine suffered economic difficulties in the late 1830s.
Career Advances
In 1835, she published Traits of American Life, the first of two of her books that featured the “New Republic’s” ideals of American men and women’s equality.
Early in 1836, editor and publisher Louis Antoine Godey wanted her to edit his Lady’s Book, a magazine that reprinted British articles and illustrations. She declined his offer. She wanted to stay in Boston, at least until her youngest son graduated from Harvard.
In 1837, Godey tried again. This time he offered to buy American Ladies Magazine and merge it with his Lady’s Book. In addition, he would allow Sarah to live and work in Boston. Sarah agreed.
She moved to Philadelphia in 1841.
She continued to edit Godey’s Lady’s Book until Frank Munsey bought it in 1877.
Civic Work
In 1833 Sarah helped establish the Seaman’s Aid Society in Boston’s North End, an auxiliary to the Boston Port Society. The Seaman’s Aid Society developed job training, financial opportunities, and social support for impoverished wives and children of sailors who died at sea. This work allowed wives of sailors to keep their families fed, clothed, and housed.
In 1840, Sarah led a Boston women’s sewing circle (members of the Seaman’s Aid Society) to raise the $30,000 (about a quarter of the total cost) needed to finish the Bunker Hill Monument by holding a week-long women’s fair. They exceeded their goal in just six weeks.
She raised funds to preserve Mount Vernon.
Activist
In 1852, Sarah created a new section for Godey’s Lady’s Book and called it, “Employment for Women.” It held discussions of women’s attempts to find work.
She published the works of early advocates for women’s education such as Catharine Beecher and Emma Willard.
She continually worked toward the advancement of women. She supported Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell’s fight to become a physician, and other women’s attempts to become overseas missionaries.
Her influence and support of higher education for women resulted in changing the name Vassar Female College to Vassar College (which opened in 1861). She also advocated for more female instructors at the new college.
History of Thanksgiving
Days of thanksgiving to God were common in Christendom long before the Pilgrims came to America. These were church and feast days celebrated anywhere from early fall to early winter. Early American colonists celebrated such days irregularly.
Following the harsh winter of 1620-1621 that killed half of the Plymouth colonists, the local Natives and the surviving colonists established a peace treaty. The Natives taught the colonists how to catch eels and grow corn. Their next harvest was a plentiful one. The colonists held a three-day harvest festival in the autumn of 1621. This is what Americans commonly call the first Thanksgiving. It is likely this is a misunderstanding identified such because of its similarities to the days of thanksgiving commonly observed in New England.
Becoming a National Holiday
In 1777, George Washington proclaimed a Thanksgiving in December as a victory celebration honoring the defeat of the British at Saratoga.
The Continental Congress issued several “national days of prayer, humiliation, and thanksgiving.”
On October 3, 1789, President George Washington created the first Thanksgiving Day designated by the national government of the United States of America by proclamation.
President John Adams continued the tradition, but Thomas Jefferson did not declare any days of thanksgiving during his time in office.
Sarah’s Lobbying
Sarah adored the Thanksgiving traditions she’d experienced during her childhood. New Englanders celebrated a Thanksgiving day, but each state celebrated it during a different month, or on different days, or in other ways that the feast day she loved. She thought Thanksgiving ought to be enjoyed by everyone. So as an editor, every November Sarah’s monthly column focused on Thanksgiving as a pious, patriotic holiday celebrated as a check against temptation or a comfort in times of trial.
In 1846, Sarah began a more than a decade long effort to make Thanksgiving Day a national holiday. The only national holidays at the time were Washington’s birthday and Independence Day. She wrote presidents Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, to no avail. Finally, she wrote President Abraham Lincoln, urging him to use the holiday to ease tensions between the North and South. He issued a proclamation on October 3, 1863, that the last Thursday of November would be the official day of Thanksgiving after the years of war.
On June 28, 1870, that President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the Holidays Act that made Thanksgiving a yearly “appointed or remembered” federal holiday in Washington D.C. The law did not extend outside of D.C. and the President had to set the date each year.
Final Years
In 1877, Sarah 89, retired from editorial work. That was the same year Thomas Edison made history with the first ever phonograph recording, speaking the opening lines of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Sarah Josepha Hale died at home on April 30, 1879.
They buried her in a simple grave in the Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Legacy
Sarah was a successful and popular editor who held significant influence over fashion, literature, cooking, and morality for middle-class women in America. She believed women shaped the morals of society. But she believed women’s only role in politics was to secretly influence the men in their lives. She didn’t believe in suffrage, but she helped make women in the workplace and women’s higher education more acceptable to a public that was reluctant if not resistant to those ideas.
She promoted the ideas of play and physical education for children as “indispensable to successful intellectual effort.”
In 1860, Baltimore Female College awarded Hale a medal “for distinguished services in the cause of female education.”
Author
She published more than 50 books, including books of poetry and fiction, drama, recipes, and nonfiction including several editions of Woman’s Record: Sketches of All Distinguished Women from Creation to A.D. 1850 (1853), the first book to record women writers.
The Birth of a National Holiday
On January 6, 1885, a Congressional act passed that expanded the Holidays Act to apply to all federal departments and employees throughout the nation.
On October 6, 1941, both houses of the United States Congress passed a joint resolution that the last-Thursday of November would be the national holiday we know as Thanksgiving. In December of that year, the Senate amended the resolution to require Thanksgiving to be on the fourth Thursday of each November to prevent confusion on the occasions that month has five Thursdays. President Roosevelt signed the bill on December 26, 1941, making the date of Thanksgiving a federal law and fixed as the fourth Thursday of November. And though it was a long time coming, that made Sarah Josepha Hale the Mother of Thanksgiving.
What do you think about this Influencer who lived long before the internet existed?
Americans, did you know this about Thanksgiving? Non-Americans, if you also celebrate a national day of thanksgiving, how did yours come to be?
References
National Women’s History Museum
Bunker Hill, National Parks Service
Images
Top image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Second image: Mindwanderweg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Third image: Sarah Josepha Hale & Lowell Mason, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fourth image: Free for use under the Content License pixabay
Last image: Djmaschek, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons