![\"Children](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!ewPm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20d69834-da84-474f-a99d-9aac7910a4c2_1440x907.jpeg\" "\\"Children")
<\/a>It\u2019s a good thing conservatives know nothing about the actual history of this country they claim to love so much\u2014otherwise, they\u2019d probably launch a War on Thanksgiving. That\u2019s because, if you study the path that Thanksgiving took on the way to its current culturally dominant presence in the calendar, it becomes clear that it\u2019s low-key one of America\u2019s wokest holidays. Far from being an eternal symbol of Pilgrims-and-Indians lies, Thanksgiving was, for a good portion of its history, a symbol of social reform and Northern abolitionism\u2014a day the white slaveholding South held in disdain and refused, for decades, to celebrate. The myth of Thanksgiving isn\u2019t just in sanitized denials of white settler-colonial violence and Indigenous genocide. It\u2019s also in the fiction that the holiday itself has only recently become \u201cpoliticized<\/a>,\u201d when it was never apolitical to begin with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Nation<\/em> is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s important to recognize that New England\u2019s Puritan colonists often observed<\/a> days of thanksgiving\u2014think small \u201ct\u201d\u2014to celebrate<\/a> plentiful harvests and other communal successes. Likewise, Native American traditions of feasts and festivals for giving thanks date back thousands of years<\/a>. The first national day of Thanksgiving was declared in a 1789 proclamation<\/a> issued by President George Washington<\/a>. Presidents John Adams and James Madison also declared days of thanksgiving<\/a> during their terms, but none of those became a recurring annual holiday. Historian Joshua Zeitz notes<\/a> that \u201cby the late 1840s, some form of harvest thanksgiving celebration was observed in 21 states,\u201d but the dates of each observance differed based on each governor\u2019s choosing. Southern states were among those celebrating, but as anti-slavery sentiment grew more fervent and pervasive in the North, Thanksgiving took on new sectional meanings. As historian Matthew Dennis writes<\/a> in Red, White, and Blue Letter Days<\/em>, Southern \u201cgovernors sometimes feared the feast as an abolitionist Trojan Horse\u201d\u2014a worry that wasn\u2019t entirely baseless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For decades, Northern antislavery clergy\u2014especially New England\u2019s evangelical Protestant ministers<\/a>\u2014had already been using Thanksgiving to deliver their most impassioned antislavery denunciations. On January 1, 1808, Black abolitionist and Episcopal priest Absalom Jones preached \u201cA Thanksgiving Sermon<\/a>,\u201d recognizing the first day of the federal ban on transatlantic trafficking of Africans into America to be enslaved. The Rev. Jones suggested that January 1 should be annually observed as a \u201cday of publick thanksgiving<\/a>\u201d to \u201cremember the history of the sufferings of our brethren\u201d and to commemorate the end<\/a> of \u201cthe trade which dragged your fathers from their native country, and sold them as bondmen<\/a> in the United States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, the date did become an annual day of Thanksgiving for Northern Black communities, at least until the Civil War and emancipation, particularly in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia<\/a>. Historian David Waldstreicher writes that celebrations included<\/a> a street parade to the church, followed by \u201ca reading of Congress\u2019s act abolishing the slave trade, much as white celebrants read the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson\u2019s inaugural address, or other texts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second national day of Thanksgiving declared by President Washington, February 19, 1795<\/a>, saw Boston preacher Thomas Baldwin issue a plea that \u201cthe day soon arrive when not difference of climate or features nor the color of the skin<\/a>\u2014when nothing but crimes shall consign any of the human race to slavery.\u201d In his Nov. 26, 1835, Thanksgiving sermon<\/a>, New Hampshire\u2019s Rev. Calvin Cutler called slavery \u201ca standing memorial of our shame and hypocrisy,\u201d labeling the institution a betrayal of the country\u2019s professed ideals and a threat to freedom of all. \u201cWhen the nation hold as self-evident truths, \u2018that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights\u2019\u2026 [yet] one sixth of this very nation have these inalienable rights wrested from them by violence\u2026. Is there no danger that our liberties will be infringed and destroyed, when the nation by their practice give the lie to their profession?\u201d Cutler\u2019s sermon text reads<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thirteen years later, on the Thanksgiving just weeks after the election which gave Zachary Taylor the presidency, Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson\u2014radical abolitionist, mentor of Emily Dickinson<\/a>, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson<\/a> and Henry David Thoreau<\/a>, and later, a supporter of John Brown\u2019s 1859 armed rebellion<\/a>\u2014bemoaned the fact<\/a> that there would be \u201canother slaveholding President at the head of this nominally free Republic,\u201d and warned the time had arrived when the North \u201ccould go no farther in its subserviency to the Slave Power.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And there is Boston-based Unitarian minister Theodore Parker\u2019s November 28, 1850, sermon for Thanksgiving<\/a>, delivered just two months after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which ordered that Black folks who had escaped bondage be captured and returned to their so-called masters, even if they were in free states. The demand that free Northern states comply with Southern slavery was not just gross federal overreach but belied the South\u2019s professed belief in states\u2019 rights. (Sound familiar?) Parker\u2019s fiery Thanksgiving sermon laid bare how the law had intensified sectarian passions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think I know of one cause which may dissolve the Union\u2014one which ought to dissolve it, if put in action,\u201d Parker announced<\/a>. \u201cThat is, a serious attempt to execute the Fugitive Slave Law, here and in all the North. I mean an attempt to recover and take back all the fugitive slaves in the North, and to punish, with fine and imprisonment, all who aid or conceal them. The South has browbeat us again and again.\u2026 She has imprisoned our citizens; driven off, with scorn and loathing, our officers sent to ask constitutional justice. She has spit upon us. Let her come to take back the fugitives\u2014and, trust me, she will wake up the lion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the 1850s, white Southerners had already begun a kind of massive resistance to Northern influence, reconsidering \u201csending their kids north to Ivy League universities, subscribing to Northern publications, or hiring Yankee tutors for their children,\u201d as journalist Jenny Jarvie notes<\/a>. And now, as tensions flared further, they also began to reject the celebration of Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, this did not deter Sarah Josepha Hale, who should be remembered as American history\u2019s most tireless advocate for a national celebration of the holiday. Hale\u2019s 1827 novel Northwood: Or, Life North and South<\/em>, was among the earliest American novels to offer even a cursory criticism of slavery; while her books have been mostly forgotten these days, her poetic composition \u201cMary Had a Little Lamb<\/a>\u201d remains a popular grammar-school banger today. In any case, the author rose to become editor of two of the country\u2019s most prominent magazines, and in their pages<\/a>, Hale waxed poetic about the need for a shared day of gratitude and moral reflection. Her campaign also included letters written to presidents and yearly missives pleading her Thanksgiving case to every state governor<\/a>. But as the Civil War dawned, responses from soon-to-be Confederate states were often chilly. Virginia governor and enslaver<\/a> Henry Wise groused<\/a> in his 1856 response to Hale that the \u201ctheatrical national claptrap of Thanksgiving ha[d] abided other causes,\u201d meaning the governor believed the day had been used to spread abolitionism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By now, Southerners even found Thanksgiving foodstuffs suspicious. In Hale\u2019s novel Northwood<\/em>, she had described pumpkin pie<\/a> as \u201can indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving; the size of the pie usually denoting the gratitude of the party who prepares the feast.\u201d Pumpkins were grown on New England\u2019s small farms, the symbolic opposite of the sprawling Southern plantations that served as labor camps for so many Black enslaved people. Those Northerners who ate pumpkin, according to<\/a> Cindy Ott, author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon<\/em>, were engaging in a form of identity politics\u2014\u201ca way to affirm New Englanders\u2019 identity through attachments to a place, a particular landscape, and the simple virtues of farm life.\u201d And thus, the South even held pumpkin pie as an expression of anti-slavery sentiment, or what might be termed \u201cvirtue signaling\u201d in today\u2019s parlance. What\u2019s more, since most of the South\u2019s cooking was actually done by Black enslaved women, and sweet potatoes<\/a> were similar in every way to the yams of West Africa, sweet potato pie was the South\u2019s more popular dish. That remains true at both Black and white Southern Thanksgivings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Share<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hale lucked out in 1863, when more than 35 years into her campaign<\/a>, President Abraham Lincoln finally cosigned the idea of an annual national Thanksgiving. Nine months after the Emancipation Proclamation, in a decree dated October 3<\/a>, Lincoln designated<\/a> \u201cthe last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving.\u201d That declaration did little to promote national unity, coming as it did amid the churn of the Civil War. But after the South\u2019s defeat two years later, the December 8, 1865, edition of The New York Times<\/a><\/em> carried the reprint<\/a> of a sermon by Manhattan Presbyterian minister James Renwick Wilson<\/a>. It was titled, \u201cThe Abolition of Slavery the Chief Cause for Thanksgiving.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe great blessing that has flowed to us from the late conflict is the destruction of slavery; it was only desirable that the Union should be preserved and the government saved, that it might be the defender of liberty,\u201d the sermon read. \u201cThe war has been worth all that it cost the nation; the sacrifice has been great, but the benefit greater. How great a cause of thankfulness we have in the destruction of this wickedness, those only can realize who have formed a true conception of the system, and of its far-reaching and destructive influence. The war has taught the nation a lesson which it was slow to learn, but taught it effectually.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But even after the war\u2019s end, the South\u2014or rather, the white South\u2014continued to abstain from celebrating Thanksgiving. As activist Dan Morrison writes<\/a>, \u201conly after Black people were betrayed with the downfall of Reconstruction and white unity once again prevailed\u201d during the era known as Reconciliation did white Southerners \u201ccelebrate Thanksgiving along with their Northern white cousins.\u201d And even that took decades. For example, in 1868, Texas\u2019s Austin State Gazette <\/em>suggested that the day be ignored, since it was a celebration of \u201cReconstruction, the 14th amendment and nigger voting<\/a>.\u201d Texas Governor O.M. Roberts, an ex-Confederate officer, called it a \u201cdamned Yankee institution<\/a>\u201d in the late year of 1879. Black people and white Republicans celebrated the day, nonetheless<\/a>. In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a bill<\/a> that moved Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday in November.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what of the more familiar popular myth of Thanksgiving\u2014the one in which faceless Indians \u201cwelcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear,\u201d to quote Dan Silverman<\/a>, author of This Land Is Their Land<\/em>? Puritans were associated with New England, and the North more broadly, and Southerners were loath to include mention of them even as Thanksgiving picked up steam below the Mason-Dixon Line. The First Thanksgiving<\/a><\/em> author Robert Tracy McKenzie writes that \u201clong after the Civil War, most artistic representations of Thanksgiving that included Native Americans portrayed them as openly hostile, and it is no coincidence that the now familiar image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a common table dates from the early 20th century.\u201d Silverman emphasizes that the Pilgrims and Indians story gained traction<\/a> as white Protestants, status-insecure in the face of waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century, sought a way to reassert cultural dominance. And here we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few years ago, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton\u2014who calls slavery a \u201cnecessary evil<\/a>\u201d and more than once has advocated<\/a> murdering protesters<\/a>\u2014complained<\/a> that Thanksgiving was being undermined by \u201crevisionist charlatans of the radical left<\/a>.\u201d Cotton, like the rest of the right-wing chorus singing this tune, was actually confessing his deep, seemingly infinite ignorance. The real revisionism of Thanksgiving\u2019s history isn\u2019t in acknowledging the truth of colonial violence but in whitewashing the abolitionist politics that once defined the day. The most historically faithful way to recognize that history, too long ignored, is by highlighting those radical roots. This year, let\u2019s honor tradition by once again making Thanksgiving radical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The holiday\u2019s real roots lie in abolition, liberation, and anti-racism. Let\u2019s reconnect to that legacy. Nov 27, 2025 (thenationmagazine.substack.com) by Kali Holloway It\u2019s a good thing conservatives know nothing about the actual history of this country they claim to love so much\u2014otherwise, they\u2019d probably launch a War on Thanksgiving. That\u2019s… Continue reading <\/a>