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Sarah Josepha Hale

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The Woman Who Gave America Thanksgiving

In 1877, Thomas Edison spoke into his newly invented phonograph, creating the first recording of human speech in history. The words he chose? "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow." At that moment, the eighty-nine-year-old woman who had written those lines was still alive, having just retired from a career that had shaped American culture for half a century.

Sarah Josepha Hale wrote that nursery rhyme. But that's the least interesting thing about her.

She spent seventeen years writing letters to five consecutive presidents, campaigning for a single cause. She raised thirty thousand dollars to complete a stalled national monument. She edited the most influential magazine in pre-Civil War America, becoming what one historian later called "Oprah and Martha Stewart combined." And more than any other individual, she is responsible for the fact that Americans sit down to turkey and stuffing on the fourth Thursday of November.

A Widow in Black

Sarah Josepha Buell was born in 1788 in Newport, New Hampshire, to parents with an unusual belief for their era: that girls deserved the same education as boys. Her father had fought in the Revolutionary War. Her mother and older brother Horatio, a Dartmouth graduate, taught her at home. Beyond that, she taught herself.

She became a local schoolteacher. In 1811, her father opened a tavern called The Rising Sun, and there she met a young lawyer named David Hale. They married in 1813 and had five children in quick succession.

Then David died in 1822, leaving Sarah a widow at thirty-four with five children under the age of eight.

She wore black for the rest of her life. Fifty-seven years of perpetual mourning.

But mourning did not mean retreat. It meant reinvention.

The Freemasons and the Novelist

David Hale had been a Freemason, and his lodge stepped forward to support his widow financially. With their backing, Sarah published her first book in 1823, a collection of poems with the wonderfully gloomy title The Genius of Oblivion.

Four years later came something more ambitious: a novel called Northwood: Life North and South. This made her one of the first American women to publish a novel, and one of the first novelists of any gender to tackle the subject of slavery.

Her position on slavery was complicated by modern standards, typical of many abolition-minded Northerners of her era. She opposed the institution but advocated for relocating freed slaves to Liberia rather than integrating them into American society. In her introduction to the second edition, she wrote that those who would "sever the Union rather than see a slave within its borders" forgot that "the master is their brother, as well as the servant."

What made the book remarkable was its analysis of how slavery damaged everyone it touched. She argued that the institution didn't just dehumanize the enslaved—it also corrupted the slaveholders themselves, stunting their moral, psychological, and even technological development. The South, she suggested, was falling behind not despite slavery but because of it.

The book was an immediate success. And it caught the attention of a minister in Boston named John Blake.

The Editress

Blake was launching a new publication called the Ladies' Magazine, and he wanted Hale to run it. She agreed, moving to Boston in 1828, though she insisted on the title "editress" rather than editor.

A contemporary critic named John Neal celebrated the appointment with words that now seem remarkably prescient: "We hope to see the day when she-editors will be as common as he-editors; and when our women of all ages will be able to maintain herself, without being obliged to marry for bread."

Hale's vision for the magazine was specific. She wanted to educate women—"not that they may usurp the situation, or encroach on the prerogatives of man; but that each individual may lend her aid to the intellectual and moral character of those within her sphere."

This philosophy sounds conservative to modern ears, and in many ways it was. Hale opposed women's suffrage. She believed in what she called "the secret, silent influence of women" to shape male voters rather than casting ballots themselves. She reinforced the idea that women belonged in domestic roles.

But within those constraints, she pushed relentlessly to expand what women could do. She advocated for women's education, for women entering the workforce, for women being paid for their writing. She believed women should write novels—specifically, morally uplifting ones that would improve society. It was a peculiar combination: accepting traditional gender roles while systematically enlarging what those roles could contain.

Godey's and the Power of the Magazine

In 1837, a Philadelphia publisher named Louis Antoine Godey bought Hale's magazine and merged it with his own publication, Godey's Lady's Book. He wanted Hale as editor. She agreed, but with a condition: she would edit from Boston until her youngest son William finished Harvard.

She remained editor for forty years, finally retiring in 1877 at the age of eighty-nine.

It's difficult to convey how influential Godey's Lady's Book was in nineteenth-century America. With no significant competitors, it reached over one hundred fifty thousand subscribers across both the North and South. In an era before radio, television, or internet, a single magazine could shape national taste in ways that seem impossible today.

And Godey's shaped everything. Fashion, certainly—but also domestic architecture. The magazine published house plans that builders across the country copied directly. Recipes from its pages became standard American fare. Its literary standards influenced what Americans read and what American writers wrote.

Hale published the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. She also championed women writers: Lydia Sigourney, Caroline Lee Hentz, Elizabeth Ellet, and Frances Sargent Osgood, among others. In an era when most American magazines simply reprinted articles from British publications, Hale insisted on publishing American writers on American themes—frontier stories, historical fiction set during the Revolution. When she couldn't find enough American content, she wrote it herself, sometimes producing half the material in an issue.

She published nearly fifty books over her lifetime, including multiple editions of Woman's Record: Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from the Creation to A.D. 1854, an encyclopedia of twenty-five hundred entries attempting to put women at the center of world history.

Building Monuments

The Bunker Hill Monument had a problem. Construction had begun in 1825 to commemorate the famous Revolutionary War battle, but by the 1840s, the project had stalled. The money had run out. The two-hundred-twenty-one-foot granite obelisk stood unfinished, an embarrassment to Boston and the nation.

Hale decided to fix it.

She asked her readers to each donate a dollar. Then she organized something far more ambitious: a week-long craft fair at Quincy Market. The event sold handmade jewelry, quilts, baskets, jams, jellies, cakes, pies, and autographed letters from George Washington, James Madison, and the Marquis de Lafayette.

She raised thirty thousand dollars. The monument was completed.

This was Hale's method: identify something that needed doing, rally public support through her magazine, and make it happen. She founded the Seaman's Aid Society to help families of sailors who died at sea. She campaigned to preserve George Washington's Mount Vernon plantation as a symbol that both North and South could rally around. She helped found Vassar College, advocating not just for women's higher education but for the college to hire women as instructors and administrators.

But her longest campaign, the one that took seventeen years and five presidents, was for a national day of thanksgiving.

The Thanksgiving Campaign

In the 1840s, Thanksgiving was not a national holiday. It was a regional New England tradition, observed on different dates in different states—some as early as October, others as late as January. In the American South, it was largely unknown.

The United States had only two national holidays: Washington's Birthday and Independence Day. That was it.

Hale believed a shared day of thanksgiving could unite the country. She began her campaign in 1846, writing to President Zachary Taylor. He declined. She wrote to Millard Fillmore. Another refusal. Franklin Pierce. James Buchanan. No, no, no.

Seventeen years of letters. Seventeen years of editorials in Godey's. Seventeen years of making the case that America needed a day when North and South, East and West, could all pause together to give thanks.

Then came 1863. The Civil War was tearing the nation apart. And Hale wrote to Abraham Lincoln.

This time, the answer was yes.

Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving holiday, to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. It was seen as a unifying gesture during the bloodiest conflict in American history—a moment when even a divided nation could share something.

Hale had devoted an entire chapter of her novel Northwood to describing the Thanksgiving feast: roasted turkey with gravy and savory stuffing, chicken pie, pumpkin pie, pickles, cakes and preserves, ginger beer, currant wine, and cider. These were New England traditions. Now, thanks to her decades of campaigning, they would become national ones.

A curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History later credited Hale as "key in bringing together and popularizing the Thanksgiving holiday with the menu featuring turkey and stuffing."

The woman who wrote "Mary Had a Little Lamb" gave America its Thanksgiving dinner.

The Paradox of Sarah Hale

How should we understand Sarah Josepha Hale? She opposed women's suffrage but dedicated her life to expanding women's opportunities. She reinforced traditional gender roles but became one of the most powerful editors in America. She wrote about the evils of slavery but advocated for colonization rather than integration.

Historians have noted that contemporary intellectuals considered her "well within the bounds of propriety and certainly not a troublemaker." She appeared conservative, emphasizing convention and separate spheres for men and women. Her opposition to voting rights alienated the active feminists of her day.

Yet her accomplishments were radical by any measure. She ran the most influential magazine in the country for four decades. She published works by hundreds of women writers, enhancing their visibility and legitimacy. She championed women's education from the 1820s until her retirement in the 1870s. She helped build institutions—Vassar College, the Seaman's Aid Society—that outlasted her.

Perhaps the paradox resolves if we understand that Hale was playing a long game within the constraints of her era. By never appearing to threaten the established order, she accumulated influence. By framing women's advancement as complementary to men's rather than competitive with it, she made that advancement palatable to a society that would have rejected more radical claims. She believed in "the secret, silent influence of women," and she wielded that influence more effectively than almost anyone of her generation.

Or perhaps there is no resolution. Perhaps she was simply a person of her time, with all the contradictions that implies—someone who could see clearly in some directions and remained blind in others.

The Final Years

Hale retired from Godey's Lady's Book in 1877, the same year Edison recorded her nursery rhyme. She was eighty-nine years old. She had been editing magazines for nearly half a century, widowed for fifty-five years, wearing black the entire time.

She died two years later at her home in Philadelphia, at the age of ninety.

Her legacy is scattered across American life in ways most people never notice. A literary prize bears her name—the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, whose winners include Robert Frost, Arthur Miller, and Julia Alvarez. A Liberty Ship was named for her during World War II. A historical marker stands along a New Hampshire highway near her birthplace. She is commemorated on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.

But her most enduring monument requires no plaque. It happens every fourth Thursday of November, when Americans gather around tables laden with turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie, giving thanks together as a nation.

That was her gift. Seventeen years of letters to five presidents, and she gave America a holiday.