The Mother of Thanksgiving

The 19th-century editor who pestered five presidents to make it a national holiday. 

It was 150 years ago that Sarah Josepha Hale gave us Thanksgiving as we know it.

The influential editor was the best friend Thanksgiving ever had. 

We are accustomed, in a more jaded and secular age, to wars on various holidays; Hale waged a war for Thanksgiving. For years, she evangelized for nationalizing the holiday by designating the last Thursday of November for it to be celebrated annually across the country.

Besides plugging for Thanksgiving in her publication, Godey’s Lady’s Book, she wrote Presidents Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan about it before hitting pay dirt with Abraham Lincoln. On October 3, 1863, Lincoln urged his fellow citizens to observe the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

Hale had succeeded in her long-sought goal, but kept — as Peggy Baker notes in an essay about her as “the Godmother of Thanksgiving” — writing editorials about Thanksgiving for another dozen years. You might say that she was a bore and nag on the topic, if her cause hadn’t been so splendid and her understanding of Thanksgiving so clear-eyed, clairvoyant even.

Hale saw the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving as the twin festivals of the American people, “each connected with their history, and therefore of great importance in giving power and distinctness to their nationality,” as she put it in an 1852 editorial.

Via: NRO

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Obama's Stunning Snub

He almost was not asked to speak.

In October 1863, President Abraham Lincoln received the same plain envelope that was sent to hundreds of people, requesting attendance at a dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery here.

Col. Clark E. Carr, a confidant of several U.S. presidents and a member of the commission that organized the event, later admitted that commissioners scrambled to send a more personal invitation after Lincoln indicated he would attend.

Asking Lincoln to deliver a “few appropriate thoughts,” Carr said, was “an afterthought.”

You see, the dedication's real headliner was Edward Everett. A former secretary of State, U.S. senator, Massachusetts governor and Harvard president whose nationwide tour helped to save Mt. Vernon as a national shrine, Everett was considered the great orator of his time.

When Lincoln arrived, Gettysburg remained raw from the horrific battle that raged here for three days just five months earlier. More than 70,000 Confederate troops engaged 83,000 Federal troops around this crossroads town; the battle claimed more than 50,000 souls and 3,000 horses, and it changed the course of the war in the Union's favor.

The bones of dead horses still were strewn over surrounding farmlands; vultures hovered over the landscape, and unburied coffins stood stacked in town.

Lincoln had plenty of justifiable, honorable reasons to beg off from the ceremony: His 10-year-old son, Tad, lay sick with a fever in the White House; the war was going poorly out West; he was locked in a budget showdown with Congress; and his re-election bid looked grim against a general he fired for incompetence a year earlier.

Via: Fox News

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Historian: Americans Don’t Understand Meaning Behind Gettysburg Address

150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg 

Address this month

A historian said Friday that Americans often fail to recognize the meaning behind President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address ahead of the speech’s 150th anniversary this month.

Allen Guelzo, director of Civil War era studies at Gettysburg College and a renowned Lincoln scholar, said at the Heritage Foundation that Americans typically remember the address for its brevity orphrases like “four score and seven years ago” and “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Lincoln delivered the remarks—comprising just 272 words in 10 sentences—on Nov. 19, 1863, four-and-a-half months after the pivotal battle of Gettysburg left more than 50,000 soldiers dead or wounded. Only a third of the expected bodies had been buried at the cemetery at the time.

Guelzo said Lincoln was “a man of no verbal wastage,” providing the thousands gathered at the dedication with a past, present, and future vision of America. The Founding Fathers “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty” in 1776; the present crowd assembled to honor those “who here gave their lives that that nation might live”; and Lincoln urged the attendees to “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

The last part, given the historical context of the speech, is the most important, Guelzo said.

“We do not see Lincoln’s subject, the survival of democracy, as Lincoln saw it,” he said. “For Lincoln, democracy was an isolated and beleaguered island in a world dominated by monarchies and tyrants.”

Lincoln studied the terror of the French Revolution and the military dictatorship of Napoleon, followed by the 19th century revolutions across Europe that were “crushed and subverted by nascent monarchies and romantic philosophers,” Guelzo said. Democratic government “lay discredited and disgraced,” he added.

Via: WFB

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