Melanie Kirkpatrick: Giving Thanks for Sarah Josepha Hale

Without the efforts of the influential 19th-century editor, writer, and abolitionist, Thanksgiving as we know it wouldn’t exist.

(iStock: Mizina)

By Melanie Kirkpatrick

When Americans sit down to their turkey dinners this Thursday, a long-ago lady editor will be an invisible presence at every table. In the history of Thanksgiving, Sarah Josepha Hale, “editress” of the popular 19th-century magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, played as important a role as the Pilgrims and the Native Americans in shaping the holiday that the U.S. has been celebrating in various forms for 400 years.

Hale’s contribution was transforming Thanksgiving from a jumble of local events marked on various dates into the shared national celebration we know today. Four presidents rejected her proposal before Abraham Lincoln took it up in 1863, proclaiming the first in what has become an unbroken series of national Thanksgivings up to the present day. The story of how Hale helped recreate Thanksgiving as a national holiday is a classic American saga of how one enterprising, hardworking individual with a good idea can have an impact in an open, democrat…