A Civil War Thanksgiving.

• Author: KELLEY, TIMOTHY

In the cause of unity, President Lincoln makes the holiday official

The newsboys on the street cried out the news: General Grant's Union troops had won a smashing victory in Tennessee, and the Rebels were in full retreat! To thankful Northerners, the timing seemed too good to be true. It was November 26, 1863, the day Thanksgiving made its debut as a legal U.S. holiday.

There were no pro football games that day. Americans' attention, North and South, was on the field of battle of the Civil War (1861-1865). But in other ways--turkey and all the trimmings, for example--it was a Thanks giving we could recognize today.

Every schoolchild learns that Thanksgiving dates to the harvest feast Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, had shared with Native Americans in 1621. But few know that it took the Civil War, and a long crusade by a magazine editor named Sarah Josepha Hale, to make the holiday truly national.

Born in New Hampshire in 1788, Hale became a prominent journalist at a time when rigid custom kept most women at home. Widowed at an early age, she turned to writing to support her five children. She wrote the famous nursery rhyme that begins, "Mary had a little lamb ..."

Hale loved Thanksgiving, already a tradition in New England. Her 1827 novel Northwood has a Thanksgiving dinner description you probably shouldn't read if you're hungry:

The roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the head of the table; and well did it become its lordly station, sending forth the rich odor of its savory stuffing, and finely covered with the frost of the basting. At the foot of the board a surloin [sirloin] of beef, flanked on either side by a leg of pork and a joint of mutton, seemed placed as a bastion to defend innumerable bowls of gravy and plates of vegetables disposed in that quarter. A goose and a pair of ducklings occupied side stations on the table.... There was a huge plumb [plum] pudding, custards, and pies of every name and description ever known in Yankee land; yet the pumpkin pie occupied the most distinguished niche.

But however sumptuous, Thanksgiving in the early 19th century wasn't a legal holiday, was still held on different dates in different places, and was ignored altogether in much of the nation. Hale favored adoption of a uniform national holiday, and saw Thanksgiving not only as a day to be grateful for divine blessings, but also as a way to unite the country and promote pride in its freedom, She...