PURITAN NATION:

When you celebrate Thanksgiving, you can thank a writer from a small town in New Hampshire who never gave up on an idea.

Sarah Josepha Hale was born in Newport, New Hampshire in 1788. While home schooled, Sarah developed her writing skills. She would become a poet, and one of the first American women novelists writing about New England and the horror of slavery within the nation. Sarah also became a magazine editor and supported her five children after her husband, David Hale, passed away. 

 

One of Sarah's great causes was a National Thanksgiving holiday, and she wrote about this frequently in her stories. In her novel Northwood she writes "when Thanksgiving will be celebrated together across the nation it will be a grand spectacle of moral power and human happiness such as the world has never witnessed."

 

Sarah launched a fifteen year letter writing campaign to elected officials, including the president, to make a national Thanksgiving Day a reality. Persistence was her virtue, which led to the Thanksgiving we now enjoy. 

In 1863 Sarah wrote to Abraham Lincoln "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution." 

She urged  Lincoln to make it happen "by the noble example and action of the President of the United States, the permanency and unity of our Great American Festival of Thanksgiving would be forever secured."

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