CHAPTER 11

MY HEARTFELT PRAYER

There is a difference between a proclamation and an act of Congress and the long march to ratification. Both Lincoln and Hale understood this in different ways. For Lincoln’s part, he saw the Thirteenth Amendment passed but did not live to see its final ratification, solidifying it as law.

Hale had witnessed three consecutive presidents help to keep her thanksgiving tradition alive. But she had not yet lived to see it enacted as an official holiday. As it already had in decades prior, thanksgiving would continue to go through many transformations. It would be a reflection of sorts, in the years to come, of the country as it did—and in some cases, did not—evolve.

Grant, in his farewell address to Congress in 1876, said, “It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of Chief Executive without any previous political training.” His presidency had been plagued by scandal, economic crisis, and corruption, yet it also saw the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and suffrage for Black men. That same year Grant left office, 1876, Frederick Douglass wrote the editor of the National Republican after attending the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, DC, an event at which Douglass also spoke and at which Grant, too, was present. “[T]he act by which the negro was made a citizen of the United States and invested with the elective franchise was pre-eminently the act of President U.S. Grant,” Douglass wrote, “and this is nowhere seen in the Lincoln monument.”

Grant, in his last speech as president, spoke openly of his errors of judgment and mistakes. “I leave comparisons to history,” he stated, “claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.”

Following in Grant’s muddied footsteps came Rutherford B. Hayes. The new president entered office with a good reputation and was considered a man of integrity. Mark Twain predicted great things for the president, who during his term would have to grapple with mounting tensions surrounding Chinese immigration, continued animosity and turmoil with regard to the Native communities and Indian Territories, the ongoing Reconstruction, and a struggle to bolster the nation’s depressed economy by returning it to the gold standard.

On what must have appeared a much lighter note, the president also had dealings with Sarah Josepha Hale, who was in her eighty-ninth year when Hayes took office.

Hale had moved to the home of her daughter Frances and Frances’s husband, Dr. Lewis Boudinot Hunter, on 1413 Locust Street in Philadelphia, more than a decade earlier. Hale had a large room on the second floor, nearly thirty feet long, where she worked, lived, relaxed, and, of course, read.

The quaint abode had a sleeping alcove, and as it was an upstairs room, its many windows offered sunlight throughout the day. There was a chintz lounge for entertaining, a Franklin stove to keep her warm, a rocking chair for repose and reading, and plenty of room for her collection of books. Hale entertained what appeared to her grandchildren’s eyes to be an unending stream of visitors. At other times she kept quiet company with the four pairs of canaries who resided with her, two to a cage, four cages scattered about the room.

There was an amply proportioned desk from which she had continued to edit the Lady’s Book well into her eighties, as well as to keep up with her legion of correspondents, among them Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Dickens.

“Believe me,” Dickens wrote Hale from England, “you will never find me departing from those sympathies which we cherish in common and which have won me your esteem and approval.” Other correspondents over the years had included writers who were fairly unknown when she had first published them but who had morphed into established literary powerhouses, including Washington Irving, Henry Clay, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And in addition to these was Hale’s final presidential correspondent, Rutherford B. Hayes.

When Hale had written the president, she also sent him an autographed copy of one of her books. President Hayes, in turn, wrote Hale a personal note of thanks, saying that the book was “prized especially as the gift of a lady who has accomplished so much for the peace and happiness of the American people as yourself.”

In his first year in office, Rutherford B. Hayes had become the fourth consecutive president to issue the now familiar annual proclamation, setting aside “Thursday, the 29th of November,” 1877, as a day of national thanksgiving. “In all the blessings which depend upon benignant seasons,” he wrote, “this has indeed been a memorable year.”

And it had been a memorable few years for Hale as well. Unstoppable, in 1874 she had issued yet another edition of Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from the Creation to A.D. 1868, notching thirty-six volumes of profiles of women through history—a remarkable feat she had begun with her first volumes in 1853. The front matter included a dedication of sorts: “Inscribed to the Men of America; Who Show, in Their Laws and Customs, Respecting Women, Ideas More Just and Feelings More Noble Than Were Ever Evinced by Men of Any Other Nation: May ‘Woman’s Record’ Meet the Approval of the Sons of Our Great Republic; The World Will Then Know The Daughters are Worthy of Honour.” Though vibrant, Hale was less active than in years past. She would often dispatch her grandchildren on errands to the Godey offices in downtown Philadelphia when necessary. Meanwhile, she quite contentedly kept occupied as she sat reading, editing, eating her grapes, and treating her wrinkles, as always, with brown paper and vinegar.

In 1877, Hale sat in her sunny room and wrote what would be her final editorial to the devoted readers of the Lady’s Book. She reflected not so much on what she had accomplished but focused more on leaving readers with an air of hope and optimism for what the future might hold—for women especially—in years to come.

“And now, having reached my ninetieth year,” her swan song editorial began, “I must bid farewell to my countrywomen, with the hope that this work of half a century may be blessed to the furtherance of their happiness and usefulness in their Divinely-appointed sphere. New avenues for higher culture and for good works are opening before them, which fifty years ago were unknown. That they may improve these opportunities, and be faithful to their high vocation, is my heartfelt prayer.”

In 1877, Hale’s longtime publishing partner and friend, Louis A. Godey, had sold the popular magazine to John Hill Seyes Haulenbeek. After retiring initially to Florida, Godey soon returned to Philadelphia. But his retirement was short-lived. In the year following Hale’s farewell article, on November 29, 1878, Louis Godey died unexpectedly. Though he had been ill off and on for several years, and for a time confined to his bed at his home on Chestnut Street, he had recovered. Then, after another sudden onset of illness, he succumbed to what the newspapers described as gout, along with other complications. He was seventy-four years old.

Hale had been born shortly after the founding of the new nation, had witnessed and endured its near destruction, and was now on the other side of the highly contested era of Reconstruction. The woman denied proper schooling in her youth had gone on to become one of the most powerful editors in the country and an advocate for the education of other women like herself. A young widow who had once been faced with raising five children alone was spending the end of her life surrounded by those who loved her. On April 30, 1879, five months after the death of her friend Louis Godey, Sarah Josepha Hale, the “editress,” the domestic science maven, the nineteenth-century tastemaker and champion of thanksgiving, died at the age of ninety.

Hale had written her will—“My Last Wishes”—on May 30, 1865, shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s death.

The bulk of Hale’s will, not surprisingly, described what to do with her vast assortment of books, periodicals, anthologies, and literary ephemera. Aside from those titles already bequeathed to friends and others, the rest were distributed primarily among her surviving children and their respective families. The variation and volume of the collection she was leaving behind was remarkable, a reflection of her life’s passion. The works included, in her own shorthand: Allibone’s Dictionary of Authors (in which Hale’s own Woman’s Record is listed); The Gallery of American Poetesses; a collection of poetry penned by English poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans; The Poems of the Hon. Mrs. Norton; bound and unbound volumes of the third series of Littell’s Living Age, a general magazine comprising selections from both English and American publications; Webster’s Dictionary Unabridged, latest pictorial edition; Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature; the voyages of early American Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane; John R. Macduff’s The Bow in the Cloud; and Hale’s Bible and prayer book. To her daughters-in-law, in particular, Hale left a copy of The Female Prose Writers of America. (Hale, still abhorring the word female, was compelled to insert the word women in parentheses in the title.) She left them a selection of Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie, John Fleetwood’s Life of Christ, T. B. Read’s The Female Poets of America (which Hale of course described as “poetesses” of America), Enoch Arden’s Illustrated Works of the Revolution, and Hale’s mourning book (a Victorian guide to grieving etiquette). There was also a gold card case and a Japanese fan. To her grandchildren went, among others, seven volumes of Translations from Greek and Roman Literature and a French dictionary. She was sure to include women writers as well, including Midsummer Eve: A Fairy Tale of Loving and Being Loved, by Mrs. S. C. Hall, and Mrs. Browning’s Poems, a collection of the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She also left her grandchildren a selection of annuals and periodicals, and of course, Hale’s own copy of her treasured John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. To the smaller grandchildren, she added, “a share in all the little books suitable for them.”

Hale left instructions that should the family find any of her finished, unpublished works and manuscripts, they could be forwarded to Francis De Haes Janvier. Janvier was a Philadelphia businessman and fellow poet who was known for writing patriotic works, among them “The Sleeping Sentinel,” which he once had the opportunity to read, in a private audience, to President and Mrs. Lincoln. Hale said Janvier would know her wishes regarding her work.

Though most of her works were out of print by the time of her death, Hale nevertheless remained optimistic about the work she was leaving behind.

“My manuscripts will, I trust, bring a small income annually,” she wrote, “this income to be divided equally between my three children. Should it be found best to dispose the copyrights, the money received to be also equally divided.”

Finally, in the same document, Hale felt compelled to comment, albeit briefly, on her life’s work. “I commenced my Editorial life in January, 1828,” she began, “and have steadily pursued it to this day. I leave a large mass of Editorials, Sketches, [manuscripts], and papers; in the care of my son Horatio and wish that he and William would consult with Dr. and Mrs. Hunter and if they find any of these writings worth republishing or any [manuscripts] worth bringing out, I wish them to prepare a series of my works. I have written with an earnest desire to do good.”

She had words for her friend Louis Godey as well, who Hale likely assumed would outlive her: “I have no debts save those of love and gratitude to my many kind friends. I wish to thank Mr. Godey, particularly, for his uniform kindness to me during the long time—twenty-seven years—since I have been Editress of the ‘Lady’s Book’: we have never had a difficulty; not a doubt has ever disturbed our friendship.”

As for instructions regarding her burial, Hale wrote, “I would be buried in a quiet, private manner in my lot, at the Laurel Hill Cemetery, by the side of my late beloved daughter Josepha.”

And so she was. Hale’s final resting place was a pine coffin with black cloth, five feet, three and a half inches long, fourteen inches wide, and twelve deep. Ten carriages transported the mourners to a service presided over by Bishop Stevens, the details of which were not advertised to the public. Her coffin’s plate read simply:

Sarah Josepha Hale

Born Oct. 24, 1788

Died April 30, 1879

Obituaries were widespread, lengthy, and laudatory for both Godey and Hale. Regarding Godey, one biographer said of Lady’s Book: “Not an immoral thought or profane word can be found in his magazine during the whole five hundred and seventy-one months of its publication.”

Hale was repeatedly dubbed the “eminent authoress,” a phrase that clearly caught on in the newspapers. “It is but a short time since L. A. Godey, with whom she was so long connected in the editorial work of the Ladies’ Book, passed over the river, and now she goes to meet him on the other shore.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer paid tribute to one of its better-known residents, calling Hale a “venerable authoress and editress” whose “pen was always used to elevate and ennoble, as well as to charm, delight and instruct women, and, by the force of her writings, aided by her own bright example, she did much to dignify women’s work. . . . In her death the community loses one who was a bright ornament of it.”