But now to my dinner . . .”
Or so began Hale’s extravagant description of the kind of celebration she hoped would soon be a national pastime. She knew exactly how to lay out an “excessive table.” Hale had, in fact, described in spectacular detail that very species of table seven years earlier in her novel Northwood; or, A Tale of New England, in which the better part of an entire chapter is devoted to a thanksgiving dinner.
First, she delves into decadent detail about the table in the parlor: “A long table, formed by placing two of the ordinary size together . . . covered with a damask cloth.” She extols the whiteness and texture of the cloth, noting that everyone in the family would get to enjoy the fine linen: “every child having a seat on this occasion; and the more the better, it being considered an honor for a man to sit down to his Thanksgiving supper surrounded by a large family.”
Despite the fact that earlier in the chapter Hale claims that “the description of a feast is a kind of literary treat, which I never much relished,” she makes an exception “as this was a Thanksgiving entertainment, one which was never before, I believe, served up in style to novel epicures, I may venture to mention some of the peculiarities of the festival.”
She then launches into descriptions of the food that were beyond indulgent:
“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 sirloin of beef, flanked on either side by a leg of pork and loin of mutton, seemed placed as a bastion to defend innumerable bowls of gravy and plates of vegetables disposed in that quarter. A goose and pair of ducklings occupied side stations on the table; the middle being graced, as it always is on such occasions, by that rich burgomaster of the provisions, called a chicken pie.” She describes that pie as “wholly formed of the choicest parts of the fowls, enriched and seasoned with a profusion of butter and pepper, and covered with an excellent puff paste, is, like the celebrated pumpkin pie, an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.”
Hale did not stop there. There were “plates of pickles, preserves, and butter,” as well as seasonings, wine, a “huge plum pudding, custards and pies of every name and description ever known in Yankee land. . . . [S]everal kinds of rich cake, and a variety of sweetmeats and fruits.” Currant wine. Ginger beer. Tumblers and sideboards and conversation and thanks.
The four food pillars of Thanksgiving—turkey, cranberries, stuffing, and pumpkin pie—already had a foothold in American cuisine. Native Americans had long eaten cranberries, fresh and dried. In addition to their vitamin C, they contain benzoic acid, a natural preservative, making them ideal for storage. Stuffing, or “forcemeat” (from the French farce), was an established culinary practice in England and continental Europe that had made its way to the tables of settlers on this continent. Eating fowl had a long tradition in many parts of the world, from the finest of tables—sixty-six were served up to Catherine de Medici in 1549—to the simplest of settlements, eaten wild or domesticated. And pie from pumpkin also had a history in England. In North America the gourds grow well and are harvested in late summer or early fall—making them ripe for the holiday. A recipe for the treat can be found in America’s earliest known cookbook, American Cookery, published by Amelia Simmons in 1796.
But until Hale put pen to paper in 1827, no American writer had ever deigned to describe in such deliciously effusive detail the components of a Yankee thanksgiving.
Her characters sat around a table to delight in the kind of over-the-top and magnificent feast that would eventually grace tables across the United States each November. However, despite the various proclamations to date, both state and national, there was still no nationally established thanksgiving holiday in November. And Hale’s book was utter fiction.
Whether she realized it or not, Hale was positioning herself as a domestic arts goddess, an arbiter of not just manners but, she hoped, traditions that transcended differences. The foods eaten, the setting, and the decor of the table were critical, as was the idea of giving thanks together, as a nation. She wanted to take what had been an ad hoc, regionally malleable event and transform it into a national holiday.
She would need to petition those in a position to help her. People in power. Elected officials. In the meantime, the “editress,” as she often called herself, would continue to preach to her readership in the pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book. The magazine made a fine pulpit, its circulation increasing by the thousands each year under Hale’s editorship. Magazines were precious commodities and often shared by and among friends. Considering that a subscriber might share their “book” with five neighbors, Hale could easily have been preaching her thanksgiving gospel to an audience of hundreds of thousands of readers, in a time when the country’s population totaled just over seventeen million.
Her personal life in the early days after moving to Philadelphia—even in the wake of her son David’s death—was fruitful. Her family had suffered a loss but was growing as well. Her daughter Frances Ann married Philadelphia physician and naval surgeon Dr. Lewis Boudinot Hunter, grandson of Declaration of Independence signer Richard Stockton. This aspect of her son-in-law’s lineage must have surely pleased Hale, to whom the Union meant so much. “Mary’s Lamb” appeared in print yet again, this time in My Little Song Book, and its popularity continued to grow. The seeds of a former crusade—her desire to see the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument—came to fruition. Though her initial outreach to readers raised only $3,000, Hale had not been deterred. She had organized a fair at Quincy Hall that lasted seven days, where women sold crafts, jams, baked goods, and more. Hale created a special publication for the fair—aptly titled “The Monument”—full of short poems and anecdotes, which raised more than $500 on its own. By the end of the fair, not only had Hale’s venture raised $30,000 in sales, but its success inspired other deep-pocketed donors, bringing the total raised to well over $50,000. Those who had initially scoffed at the idea that women could raise the required sum where men had failed were suitably chastened. Hale attended the monument’s dedication—thirteen years after she first began raising awareness and money for it.
The middle of the century brought a profusion of activism around the area of women’s rights. The Woman’s Rights Convention—the first of its kind—was held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. This was driven by the efforts of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Quaker preacher Lucretia Coffin Mott, Mary M’Clintock (who along with Mott organized the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society), Martha Coffin Wright (who also ran a station on the Underground Railroad), and Quaker activist Jane Hunt. The overlap between the abolitionist movement and the women’s rights movement was significant, with abolitionist, statesman, and author Frederick Douglass speaking at Seneca Falls as well. Hale did not attend or cover the event.
“We have said little of the ‘Rights of Woman,’” Hale wrote sometime after the convention. “Her first right is to education in its widest sense—to such education as will give her the full development of all her personal, mental, and moral qualities. Having that, there will be no longer any questions about her rights; and rights are liable to be perverted to wrongs when we are incapable of rightly exercising them. . . . The Lady’s Book . . . was the first avowed advocate of the holy cause of women’s intellectual progress; it has been the pioneer in the wonderful change of public sentiment respecting female education, and the employment of female talent in educating the young. We intend to go on, sustained and accelerated by this universal encouragement, till our grand aim is accomplished, till female education shall receive the same careful attention and liberal support from public legislation as are bestowed on that of the other sex.”
As tirelessly as Hale may have advocated, in action and voice, for women’s education and marital rights, she stopped far short of being a suffragette. Hale would never lobby for the blanket rights of women. Not long after the Seneca convention, she wrote a column titled “How American Women Should Vote.” In it, Hale describes a woman—unnamed, and quite possibly fictional—with a husband and six sons. The woman explains, “I control seven votes; why should I desire to cast one myself?” Hale concludes, “This is the way American women should vote, namely, by influencing rightly the votes of men.”
In the pages of her magazine, she not only supported education for women but also pressed for the advancement of women in fields where they were still unwelcome, such as medicine. She mocked reports of male students complaining about feeling uncomfortable studying alongside women, and that women could not always be relied upon to be available due to their responsibilities at home. Hale heralded Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, when she graduated in 1849.
Hale in theory and in practice might seem rather contrarian. In appearance, she was ever the Victorian: her side curls, bustles, crinoline, and pantalets. And yet in her pages, alongside elaborate instructions for broiling meat or using dress patterns, she would protest inequities against women in the fields of education and property rights. She was, in her way, almost subtle—and perhaps more subversive. She used her fictional writings and her ladies’ publication to rally for change, and supported other women as a growing force in the media.
Heading into 1850, a year that would see Godey’s circulation hit sixty thousand subscribers, Louis Godey knew on whose shoulders his magazine’s success rested. “This department is under the control of Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale,” he wrote, “whose name alone is a sufficient guarantee for the propriety of the Lady’s Book.” Never short on bombast, however, Godey had on a separate occasion declared the magazine and its growing circulation as the “most extraordinary instance of success that has ever been recorded!” and “Nearly double that of any other magazine.” True or not, it was a good time to publish a periodical. Following the Panic of 1837, which saw the downfall of many book publishing outfits, magazines came into their own. Godey’s, Graham’s, Peterson’s . . . magazines, especially those for women, were becoming a force in American culture.
This was the beginning of the era of the professional writer, ones who were paid for their work and supported themselves largely on their earnings, and Hale continued her relationship with both burgeoning and established writers. In one five-year stretch in the 1840s, she published “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne; three poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson; and works by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and John Quincy Adams. Hale’s son Horatio was acquainted with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Hale included his poem “The Twilight” in The Opal: A Pure Gift for the Holy Days, a Christmas annual she owned and edited. Later, she included more of Longfellow’s poems in the magazine as well.
Hale also remained close with and regularly published Edgar Allan Poe. Poe would occasionally fire off a missive to the mother of his former classmate David Hale, at times taking inflammatory aim at other writers. For a time Poe had the brilliant idea of writing a monthly column for the Lady’s Book titled “The Literati of New York City: Some Honest Opinions at Random Respecting Their Authorial Merits, with Occasional Words of Personality,” under the byline Edgar A. Poe. His gossipy barbs soon elicited complaints from readers, publishers, and the maligned authors themselves, and Louis Godey—who wanted to sell magazines, not ruffle feathers—felt compelled to tell subscribers that Mr. Poe’s views were entirely his own. Godey’s column on the matter was, in essence, a nineteenth-century version of the still-oft-cited disclaimer: “The views and opinions presented are solely those of the author.”
Despite such controversy, nothing could dislodge Poe’s fictional work from Hale’s publication. Over the years Hale would review his works and publish many of Poe’s short stories and poems. Her January 1840 review of his two-volume work Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in such short order that she must have had access to something akin to an advance proof. The review in Lady’s Book—valuable for any writer—said, “Mr. Poe is a writer of rare and various abilities. . . . The volumes now published, contain favorable specimens of Mr. Poe’s powers, and cannot fail to impress all who read them, with a conviction of his genius.” Possibly the most famous of his works to appear in the pages of Lady’s Book was the first-ever printing of “The Cask of Amontillado.” One can only imagine how the magazine’s feminine readership took to the story of a vengeful nobleman who entombed his still-breathing rival in the subterranean alcove of a crypt. The last of his stories to appear in the Lady’s Book was “Mellonta Tauta,” issued in 1849, the year Poe died.
Godey and Hale were quite well suited, and Godey eventually began advertising some of her books for sale in his column, “Godey’s Arm Chair.” Subscribers could, if they so chose, buy mail-order copies of books, including Mrs. Hale’s Cook-Book and Mrs. Hale’s Household Receipt-Book, which Godey described as “absolutely necessary for every housekeeper.” If one wanted instruction on carving meat and fowl and “arranging the table for parties,” then Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book was a better option. Of course Mrs. Hale’s Receipts for the Million offered “useful, ornamental, and domestic arts.” Price for each: one dollar. “Remember,” Godey wrote his readers, “the Lady’s book is not a mere luxury; it is a necessity.” He offered her literary works for sale as well, with prices ranging from seventy-five cents to five dollars.
Over the years it hadn’t all been perfect between the partners, but disagreements tended to resolve themselves. Hale fought against, for example, the inclusion of the increasingly popular tinted fashion plates in their publication. (This, perhaps, was little surprise given Hale’s own all-black attire.) These hand-colored etchings and lithographs depicted the latest styles of dress. “Dress and personal appearance,” Hale wrote her readers, “these, in a Lady’s Book, as well as in real life, are important things. Character is displayed, yes! [M]oral taste and goodness, or their perversion, are indicated in dress.” Finally she capitulated, and Godey’s became one of the first and best publications to share these often French-inspired depictions of couture. (However, the publication advised against blindly chasing Parisian fashion trends.) More fashion-forward columns included those penned by one “Florence Fashionhunter.”
As for hygiene, the magazine said a bath once a week was advisable, perhaps on Saturday, and it was arguably the first to advocate exercise for women, extolling the virtues of maintaining a healthy woman’s figure—tight corsets to be eschewed. Hale’s own ablutions were at once quite simple and strangely particular. Before going to bed, she soaked brown butcher’s paper in apple vinegar and laid the wet strips near the corners of her eyes to ward off crow’s-feet. She also made her own moisturizer from coconut milk, lard, and rose water.
The magazine’s topics continued to run the gamut and notch notable publishing firsts. It featured stories on the skull-reading “science” of phrenology. It presented the audacious concept of wearing white on one’s wedding day—as Queen Victoria had when marrying Prince Albert. It also included some of the earliest, and certainly most widely visible, illustrations of a Christmas tree in any American publication. Hale was also was credited with coining the phrase “domestic science.”
And as Hale’s influence grew over the years, she had yet to realize what she referred to as “one of the strongest wishes of my heart.”
Beyond Northwood, Hale had written about the idea of a national thanksgiving either directly as editor or indirectly via the dialogue of fictional characters that appeared in the pages of the magazine. She offered her magazine subscribers countless hostess suggestions and “receipts” (recipes), with dishes ranging from soodjee, a fish dish, to cider-soaked ham and “Lafayette Ducks with Snow-Balls” (a sweet-starchy mix of boiled rice, raisins, sugar, and coffee).
Her fellow editor and New Englander, Massachusetts-raised Lydia Maria Child, shared Hale’s love of the holiday and had published her own ode to the day, titled “The New-England Boy’s Song About Thanksgiving Day.” The poem first appeared in Flowers for Children, II. Though her prior publications attracted attention for their abolitionist stances, Flowers took a rather less controversial approach, and this poem’s popularity would carry over decades and across the country, and the original verses would speak to Hale’s heart:
Over the river, and through the wood,
To grandfather’s house we go;
The horse knows the way,
To carry the sleigh,
Through the white and drifted snow.
Over the river, and through the wood,
To grandfather’s house away!
We would not stop
For doll or top,
For ’t is Thanksgiving day.
Over the river, and through the wood,
Oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes,
And bites the nose,
As over the ground we go.
Over the river, and through the wood,
With a clear blue winter sky,
The dogs do bark,
And children hark,
As we go jingling by.
Over the river, and through the wood,
To have a first-rate play—
Hear the bells ring
Ting a ling ding,
Hurra for Thanksgiving day!
Over the river, and through the wood—
No matter for winds that blow;
Or if we get
The sleigh upset,
Into a bank of snow.
Over the river, and through the wood,
To see little John and Ann;
We will kiss them all,
And play snow-ball,
And stay as long as we can.
Over the river, and through the wood,
Trot fast, my dapple grey!
Spring over the ground,
Like a hunting hound!
For ’t is Thanksgiving day!
Over the river, and through the wood,
And straight through the barn-yard gate;
We seem to go
Extremely slow,
It is so hard to wait.
Over the river, and through the wood—
Old Jowler hears our bells;
He shakes his pow,
With a loud bow wow,
And thus the news he tells.
Over the river, and through the wood—
When grandmother sees us come,
She will say, Oh dear,
The children are here,
Bring a pie for every one.
Over the river, and through the wood—
Now grandmother’s cap I spy!
Hurra for the fun!
Is the pudding done?
Hurra for the pumpkin pie!
Hale began her letter-writing campaign to convince U.S. presidents of the merits of her cause with Virginian Zachary Taylor.
The twelfth president—“Old Rough and Ready,” as the general of both the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War was known—had taken office in 1849 after his predecessor, James K. Polk, had added substantially to the territories of the United States. Polk had done this in part by waging war with Mexico, and those territories gained—including what is now California, New Mexico, and Utah—were at the center of a growing and increasingly incendiary debate over whether slavery should be allowed to spread to the newly acquired lands.
Taylor, though a slaveholder himself, did not think slavery should be allowed in the new territories. As a military man, he may have been more likely to put down whispers of secession efforts with force rather than diplomacy. Taylor desired the growing Union to remain intact, making him the kind of president Hale must have thought would understand her desire for a unifying holiday. He did not. Taylor’s term would be a short-lived one—a mere sixteen months. On July 9, 1850, he fell ill after taking a long walk on July 4 and eating a big bowl of cherries on a hot day. He died from cholera morbus, shocking the country, and Taylor’s vice president, Millard Fillmore, ascended to the presidency.
Hale’s efforts fared no better with Fillmore. Fillmore’s term in office saw him strongly support the Compromise of 1850, but he also aligned himself with the proslavery camp in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. He soon joined up with the Know-Nothing Party, or American Party, an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic party that promoted “native-born” rule. The Know Nothings ran Fillmore as their nominee for his reelection bid in 1856. He was unsuccessful. If the Compromise of 1850 staved off war for the time being, the existence of parties like the Know Nothings stood as evidence of increased nationalism and tensions over slavery, bellwethers that the Union Hale so loved was fracturing even further. The debate impacted her own publication as well. In 1850, Louis Godey fired writer and editor Grace Greenwood—also known as Sarah Jane Clarke—from her editorial position at the magazine after she published work in the abolitionist newspaper the National Era.
In 1852, during Fillmore’s largely forgettable term, Hale reissued Northwood with a new title—Northwood; or, Life North and South: Showing the True Character of Each. Her favorite holiday remained on fine display in the new edition, and she took advantage of the reissue to amplify her campaign—via her characters, of course.
“Is Thanksgiving Day universally observed in America?” asks a visiting Englishman. “Not yet,” his host replies, “but I trust it will become so. We have too few holidays. Thanksgiving like the Fourth of July should be considered a national festival and observed by all our people. . . . When it shall be observed, on the same day, throughout all the states and territories, it will be a grand spectacle of moral power and human happiness, such as the world has never witnessed.”
Hale also added a new preface to Northwood, in which she referred to the novel as “an era in my life.” She noted her own reliance on fiction to share some of her personal views. “Northwood was written when what is now known as ‘Abolitionism’ first began seriously to disturb the harmony between the South and the North,” she wrote. She praised the importance of the Constitution and, above all else, that the Union remain intact. “The great error of those who would sever the Union rather than see a slave within its borders, is, that they forget the master is their brother, as well as the servant; and that the spirit which seeks to do good to all and evil to none is the only true Christian philanthropy.” As before, her characters shared disparate views on the institution, from abhorrence to tolerance. “Slavery is, no doubt, a great evil,” one of her characters writes in a journal, “so is despotic power; yet anarchy is worse than despotism; and to kill prisoners of war, or allow the poor to perish of hunger, is worse than servitude.”
Hale seemed to hope that the slavery issue could be resolved without dividing the country in war. “Fiction derives its chief worth from the truths it teaches,” she wrote in the preface. “I have aimed to set forth some important truths—their worth I leave to be estimated by the Reader.”
Hale’s reissuing of Northwood would eventually be seen as a response to another book published that year: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling book captivated the nation and brought the horrors of slavery in America into countless parlors and sitting rooms. Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which would go on to be the bestselling novel of the nineteenth century—was quite different in tone from Northwood but had something in common with Hale’s revised edition: Both discussed colonization.
“Never will the negro stand among men as a man, till he has earned for himself that title in his own country—magnificent Africa—which God has given him as a rich inheritance,” Northwood states. Some supporters of the controversial idea of colonization—considered at the time to be a more moderate stance than abolition—believed that emancipated slaves and freeborn persons of color would fare better if voluntarily relocated to a place where they could live as free citizens. One such location was Liberia, a settlement of the American Colonization Society (ACS). Founded in 1816, the ACS promoted raising funds in order to support this emigration to Africa. Toward the end of Hale’s revised Northwood, one of her characters announces he intends “to help colonize Liberia. What a glorious prospect is there opened before the freed slave from America! . . . And if there is a country on earth where some future hero, greater even than our Washington, may arise, it is Africa.”
Colonization had advocates and detractors from many different corners of the political landscape, from Quakers to slaveholders; and early supporters of the movement included former presidents and slaveholders Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe.
The same year that Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the revised Northwood were published, Frederick Douglass shared his objections to this philosophy in a piece titled “The Colonization Scheme” in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, stating, “There is no sentiment more universally entertained, nor more firmly held by the free colored people of the United States, than that this is their ‘own, their native land,’ and that here, (for good or for evil) their destiny is to be wrought out.”
The following year, in 1853, Hale would publish Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments, a fictional, book-length exploration of colonization. For those who opposed slavery but still could not envision a world in which white and Black people lived alongside one another peacefully and prosperously, separation seemed a solution, though a contentious one. Despite their prior editor-writer relationship, Hale did not write a review or notice for Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—or any other antislavery works—in Lady’s Book, though the magazine did review other anti-abolition books.
A year after Liberia’s publication, a man seeking to revive his political career would directly address this conflict during a speech delivered in Peoria, Illinois, stating: “If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” In the same speech, he also said, “If all earthly power were given to me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land.”
This soon-to-be presidential candidate would grapple with slavery for the rest of his life, and the emancipation of enslaved people would become his political legacy.
The success of my literary life has enabled me to educate my children liberally, as their father would have done,” Hale wrote in the preface to the revised edition of Northwood, “and I hope the influence of the various productions I have sent forth has been in some degree beneficial to my own sex, and to the cause of sound literature and of pure morality.”
To that end, a year later Hale published a collection of women’s writings titled Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from “The Beginning” till A.D. 1850. “The ninth wave of the nineteenth century,” she wrote in the introduction, “is the Destiny of Woman.”
Not to shirk her other editorial responsibilities, the same year Northwood was reissued Hale went so far as to introduce an exotic new word to her readers: “The word ‘lingerie,’ which heads our article, will doubtless be unfamiliar to many of our readers, even though conversant with the French language.” The magazine was less than enthusiastic about another new trend: bloomers. Amelia Bloomer’s blousy pantaloons, or “freedom dresses,” were becoming all the rage—both inciting debate and garnering negative attention from those who held fast to the idea of a corseted lady. Choosing to keep initially mum on the topic, the magazine eventually had no choice but to acknowledge the enduring trend. Reversing course years after bloomers burst on the scene, the Lady’s Book would feature what it called the “Metropolitan Gymnastic Costume,” designed for exercise and outdoor activity.
As her readership indulged in the delights and subtleties of lacy undergarments, Hale remained steadfast in her thanksgiving quest. Decades had passed since she had penned her ode to the day in the pages of Northwood, and though no president so far had acquiesced to her plea, Hale continued imploring them, along with ambassadors, governors, and readers, to join her in establishing the national holiday. She always lobbied for the same day that George Washington had chosen back in 1789—the last Thursday of November.
She often shared notes of support that she had received from enthusiastic thanksgiving bandwagon jumpers in the magazine. Notes from dignitaries and ordinary citizens often described how they had observed the holiday at her suggestion. “Last year, twenty-nine States and all the Territories united in the festival,” she wrote in 1852. “This year, we trust that Virginia and Vermont will come into this arrangement, and the Governors of each and all the States will appoint Thursday, the 25th of November, as the Day of Thanksgiving.” Later in the issue she heralded the possibility of “Nearly twenty-five millions of people sitting down, as it were, together to a feast of joy and thankfulness.”
In the 1852 election, Franklin Pierce emerged as victor, and perhaps Hale would have better luck with the fourteenth president of the United States, who happened to be a fellow New Hampshire native. She was proud that the Granite State was standing by the Union. “One cheering proof of the world’s progress is the earnestness of those who are now working in the cause of humanity,” Hale had written in the preface to the revised Northwood. Considered by many to be ineffectual, President Pierce backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed residents of those territories to decide whether to allow slavery within their geographic boundaries. The fate of the Union seemed even more dismal.
However, as the fraying fabric holding the Union together began to tear, Hale was silent in her own magazine. This may not have been a choice. Louis Godey had a stated aversion to including politics in his publication. So any of Hale’s thoughts and opinions of even the slightest political bent were left to the pages of her novels—which may have been where she preferred they reside. If there was a topic she was outspoken about, it was her desire for the Union to remain intact.
In an earlier series in the magazine, “Heroic Women of the Revolution,” Hale managed to have some of her interviewees—whether they realized it or not—express her own stance in favor of keeping the nation together. When “A Carolina Woman of the Revolution” was interviewed in Lady’s Book in 1856, it included emphasis on that subject’s roots in the North. She said that during the American Revolution, “An attack on the liberties of Massachusetts was viewed as an attack upon Carolina.”
Unable to project leadership in trying times, Pierce became yet another one-term president. He was gone by 1857, along with Hale’s hopes of a presidential thanksgiving proclamation.
In 1857, James Buchanan entered a difficult presidency as the slavery debate consumed America. He himself despised abolitionists. Though from the North, he often took a southern view of things, siding with his political allies. During Buchanan’s presidency, Hale’s editorials took a stronger stance. In 1859, one year before South Carolina’s secession, she wrote an editorial titled “Our Thanksgiving Union”:
“Seventy years ago the political union of the United States was consummated; in 1789, the thirteen original States, then forming the American Confederacy, became by the ratification of the Constitution, . . . the United American Nation. The flag of our country now numbers thirty-two stars. . . . God save the United States!” She then implored, “If every State should join in a union thanks-giving on the 24th of this month, would it not be a renewed pledge of love and loyalty to the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees peace, prosperity, progress, and perpetuity to our great Republic?”
If citizens were looking to James Buchanan to be the president who could pull the country together, “Old Buck” did not come through.
“Thanksgiving, like the Fourth of July, should be considered a national festival and observed by all our people,” Hale wrote in the Lady’s Book during Buchanan’s term. “Let the last Thursday in November be agreed upon as the Day of American Thanksgiving in all the States of our Union, and the world would have a new epoch of hope, a new pledge of peace, and a new and brighter ray from the torch of Liberty than our Independence can furnish them, because our Union Thanksgiving would signify the moral unity of the American people.”
Strong national leadership eluded the bachelor president. He had been reluctant to take the highest post in the land, writing before his campaign: “I had hoped for the nomination in 1844, again in 1848, and even in 1852, but now I would hesitate to take it. Before many years the abolitionists will bring war upon this land. It may come during the next presidential term.”