Thanksgiving holiday traced back to ‘inexorable’ women

Priscilla Mullins Alden and Sarah Josepha Buell Hale wrote separate but highly important chapters in America’s Thanksgiving history books, according to Peggy M. Baker, Director & Librarian of the Pilgrim Society & Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Mass.

Baker said Alden and Hale both qualify as “inexorable” New England women – defined as being “unbending, obdurate, determined, unshakeable and relentless” in their pursuits to survive and to change the world.

Priscilla Mullins was 18 when she accompanied her parents, William and Alice Mullins, from Dorking, Surrey, England, to journey across the Atlantic Ocean in 1620 in search of a new life in the New World. A younger brother, Joseph, 15, was also onboard.

Unfortunately, Priscilla was the only member of the Mullins family to survive the first frigid winter at the New Plymouth colony. She had become acquainted with bachelor John Alden, 21, who was a member of the Mayflower crew.

Alden had signed on with the Mayflower to be the ship’s cooper, or barrel maker. After his contract was up, he chose to remain with the Pilgrims at the new colony instead of returning to England. John Alden and Priscilla Mullins became sweethearts and were married in 1622 or 1623.

The fantasy associated with their relationship – “the Mayflower love story” – was fueled years later by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem of 1858, which focused on the courtship that Myles Standish “intended to have with the fair Mullins maiden.”

Standish, an officer in the Queen’s Army, had been hired in 1620 to accompany the Pilgrims from England and be the colonists’ military commander. His wife, Rose, sailed with him on the Mayflower, but she, too, perished during that first brutally cold winter.

Longfellow painted the picture: Now, as a widower, Standish set his sights on Priscilla Mullins. However, Standish was considerably older than she. He was, apparently, too shy and uncomfortable to express his affection toward her. So, Standish employed John Alden to speak on his behalf. And then…Priscilla asked (dagnabbitly, of course): “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” Cupid shot his arrow.

Myles Standish recovered from the rejection, and he did remarry fairly quickly. His second wife, Barbara, believed to be a sister or cousin of Rose’s, arrived at the new colony on the ship Anne in 1623. Myles and Barbara Standish had nine children. John and Priscilla Alden gave birth to 10.

Although Sarah Buell Hale was not among the first colonists, she is considered to be the “Godmother of Thanksgiving.”  

Sarah Buell was born in Newport, N.H., in 1788, and she was “home-schooled,” because women’s educational opportunities at that time were “slim to none.” Sarah married attorney David Hale in 1813. He died unexpectedly from pneumonia in 1822, while she was pregnant with the couple’s fifth child. Sarah Hale launched a literary career as a poet and writer in order to generate income to support her family.

In her first novel, Northwood: A Tale of New England, published in 1827, Hale introduced the American public to what would become one of her lifelong obsessions: the promotion of the holiday of Thanksgiving.

Hale wrote: “Our good ancestors were wise…they chose for the celebration of our annual festival, the Thanksgiving” to occur in “the funeral-faced month of November…and make it wear a garland of joy.”

Northwood caught the attention of Rev. John Lauris Blake, a Congregationalist minister. He recruited Hale in 1928 to become the editor of his new magazine for women in Boston called Ladies’ Magazine. She went on to become the most prominent and influential magazine editor of the 19th century, retiring in 1877 at age 89.

Hale began campaigning to have Thanksgiving designated as a national holiday in 1846. In Hale’s letter to President Lincoln, dated Sept. 28, 1863, she suggested that Thanksgiving, as a “new holiday, would unify the bitterly divided country.” He responded within days, issuing a proclamation on Oct. 3, 1863, that expressed his total agreement.

Lincoln wrote that Thanksgiving 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…as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”