Turkey Day

In between the Emancipation Proclamation issued on January 1st and the Gettysburg Address issued on November 19th, Abraham Lincoln issued an October 3rd, 1863 proclamation that established our national day of Thanksgiving to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. Eventually, Thanksgiving was established as a national holiday on the fourth Thursday of November.

Thanksgiving postcard dated 1909 showing the American Turkey and Bald Eagle shaking feet. The United Stated Flag Shield is in the background.

Thanksgiving Proclamation

Artist Anatole Kovarsky’s image from the cover from the November 24, 1962 issue of The New Yorker (image: Anatole Kovarsky via New Yorker cover archive)

As the story goes, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, an American writer and author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb" lobied for a unified national holiday for decades before writing President Lincoln on Sept. 28, 1863, urging him to establish the day. At that time states scheduled Thanksgiving holiday on different dates.

Hale actually wrote the letter to Secretary of State William Seward and Lincoln. Seward drafted the proclamation and agreed. The proclamation cites the "gracious gifts of the Most High God" that "should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People."

"I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens," the president declared.

Happy Thanksgiving