The First Thanksgiving (and the Second, and the Third…)

by AC Benus

 

 

What Thanksgiving is Not

 

An amazing holiday like Thanksgiving must have an amazing history, and it does, but it's probably not the history you think.

 

I've seen them. We've all seen them: the articles that spring up this time of year as abundantly as roast turkey recipes. They are usually titled with holier-than-thou disdain: "First Thanksgiving had No Cranberry Sauce!" or "First Thanksgiving had No Roast Turkey!!" Well, we Americans as a whole are far from traditionalists, but the one undeniable exception is what we sit down to eat on the 4th Thursday of every November. Across the land – and in remotely tucked corners of the globe – we have roast turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie; and in the south, ambrosia and apple pie too. From the first Thanksgiving to now, it, the meal, links us. But how could it? – only through the crucible of our Civil War. Yes, the first Thanksgiving had it all; everything we would want, and it was held on November 26th, 1863.

 

 

Thomas Nast and the Ghosts of Thanksgivings Past

 

Like you, I too grew up happily with cardboard cutouts of pilgrims and Squanto, and drew finger turkeys on paper plates when I was a kid, and I thought I knew most of what there was to tell of the Thanksgiving story. After all, it is told and retold perennially. But a few years ago, I chanced to buy an issue of Harper's Weekly online, and my curiosity was guided in a new direction. The 16"x23" centerfold of this issue from the first week of December is a Thomas Nast engraving. Here "Thanksgiving-Day 1863" was memorialized with a central figure a woman – the nation personified – kneeling with hopeful and upraised eyes to a bright future filtering down on her (and us) as broken beams of sunlight. This roundel is flanked by vignettes of various kinds of people taking a moment to remember those already lost to the war, and a group of African Americans raising up arms in new found freedom over fetters broken on the ground before them. There are no pictures of Miles Standish; there is no Mayflower at anchor in the background; no Plymouth Rock for anyone to step upon. This heartfelt engraving, now a centerpiece in my Thanksgiving Day décor, got me to wondering and doing a little research. I asked, what was special about Turkey Day 1863? Everything, I learned.

 

Fortunately for us, the Plymouth Colony's harvest festival of 1621 is beyond dispute, due to a brilliant first-hand description by Edward Winslow. In the Time-Life Foods of the World, American Cooking: New England, Jonathan Norton Leonard gives us Winslow's account: "Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men fowling, that we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. The four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help besides, served the Company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our [fire]arms, many of the Indians coming among us, and amongst the rest their greatest king, Massasoit with some 90 men, whom for three days we…feasted. And they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our Governor and upon the Captain and others."
 

Well, I'll leave it to the passionate naysayer that Winslow's 'fowl' did not somehow include the abundant, and easy to kill, wild turkey. But the popularity of this account furthered an annual harvest feast. Throughout the 17th, 18th and first half of the 19th century, to North Easterners and the Westerners from New England stock, November became a time to relax after the manic drives to bring in the crops and store provisions for winter. This time of plenty meant community efforts and shared labors: neighbors pooled their swine, and in a single day's hard work, divided portions of bacon, ham, lard and sausage; women on the same day, and on the same farm, would take turns stirring the hours needed to turn chopped apples into smoky rivers of golden apple butter. This was also the time of the year for endless canning; everything had to be saved. In the warmer South, these same efforts came later and were rolled effortlessly into the festive preparations for Christmas.

 

The centerpiece of these 19th century celebratory meals was a chicken pie. Not a puny pot pie, mind you, but a huge raised pie laced with rice or macaroni, and the meat of a couple of whole chickens. Of course, roast beef, turkey, lobster and all would also groan the table, but to a certain someone, the chicken pie was the emblem of the feast itself. Sarah Josepha Hale associated the pie with powerful nostalgia for the harvest feasts of her childhood, and wrote eloquently about it. Her 1841 novel Northwood provides us with the following picture of a table laid and waiting. While roasts of turkey and beef sirloin anchor the ends of the spread "the middle [is] graced by that rich burgomaster of the provisions, called a chicken pie. This pie, which is 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 was a remarkable person – creator of the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb, author, editor, advocate for women's rights and for the abolition of slavery – her voice was one of the strongest in the center of a difficult century. She rightly deserves the credit as the visionary who saw our Thanksgiving for what we think of it today. From the 1840's onward, she wanted a national and permanent holiday to lessen the growing slave-state, free-state schism of the country.

 

By the election of 1860, when this schism opened up into a gulf, the South's economy was unready for war. In the newly formed Confederate States (or, the CS for short) almost all arable land was planted with cash crops, and plantation owners relied on cheap foodstuffs from non-slave states. As secession spread, this farm system became a vicious cycle. The CS needed cotton and tobacco to obtain hard cash from England and France for the war effort, but a Union blockade of Southern ports meant meaningful imports of foreign food were a near impossibility.

 

Meanwhile, improved farm machinery, and the abundance of US Government contracts pushed small farms to unheard of levels of productivity in the North. Such contracts also ushered local, small, mom-and-pop enterprises onto the stage as national brands: Gail Borden's condensed milk, for one; Proctor and Gamble's bars of soap, for another.

 

 

Where Hale and Bumper Crops and Gettysburg Collide

 

In the fall of 1863, odd and sundry things occurred to create the holiday we know and love today. The war was far from over, but casting back over that momentous year, things had changed.

 

Lincoln had signed the emancipation proclamation in January, and Gettysburg had been fought in July. In this battle, the US had routed a bold CS invasion by Lee, who was trying to turn Northern public opinion to peace talks. In the end, it was Lee's tide that was turned. Lincoln knew this, and said as much in the few words of his Gettysburg Address.

 

Bumper crops rolled in all across the North, and in September, Hale from Philadelphia, decided to turn her seventeen-year public campaign private, and wrote a simple letter directly to the president. The time, she said, was right for a unifying holiday, and Lincoln agreed. He picked her recommended fourth Thursday of November, and November the 26th, 1863, became our first National Thanksgiving Day.

 

The Nast illustration shows the timbre of the event – solemn – as prosperous families back home sat down to tables with empty chairs for those at the front. One in four of all bright-faced new recruits never saw home again.

 

Thanksgiving had an uncertain future. There was no assurance November 1864 would provide a second National Holiday, but guilt over the abundance of food at home produced an almost unbelievable charitable drive to make sure every soldier, sailor and marine got in '64 what the folks back home enjoyed in '63. The second Thanksgiving turned out to be a much bigger – a much more meaningful – affair than the first.

 

George W. Blunt, a wealthy New Yorker, seems to have personally come up with the idea, and his call to action had startling effect. "The undersigned, […] appeal to the people of the North to join them in an effort to furnish to our gallant soldiers and sailors, a good Thanksgiving dinner. We desire that on the twenty-fourth day of November there shall be no soldiers in the Army of the Potomac, [the Army of] the James, or [the Army of] the Shenandoah; and no sailor in the North Atlantic Squadron who does not receive tangible evidence that those for whom he is periling his life, remember him." This was published in the New York Times, on November 8th, 1864, and soon similar appeals appeared in dailies all across the United States. Instructions were given to provide roast turkeys, or chickens, or fruit, or preserves, or whatever could be offered to the 'boys.' If nothing else, then chip in a dollar or two.

 

In the end, the drive was so successful in organizing land and sea food chains that a ship was waiting in Savannah's harbor on December 10th with roast Turkeys, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pies when Sherman's men arrived. They had outpaced their dinners coming from Atlanta, but they were not to miss the second Thanksgiving, not if the volunteers had anything to say about it.

 

In northern Virginia, Grant apparently personally insisted that his massive army get cranberry sauce. Tables were laid out. The CS officers across the trenches honored a ceasefire, and Grant in turn fed thousands of captured and hungry Confederate soldiers. At Grant's table, these boys first tasted, and never forgot, the cranberry sauce. They took a liking for it with them back home.

 

Along the thinly stretched western lines, Union officers themselves chipped in to ensure that all the enlisted men had a feast, and this was appropriate, as the Lincoln family had personally shouldered the financial burden of buying six thousand turkeys to feed the men on the fields of battle.

 

James Robbins, in his article Giving Thanks in Wartime, relays how the Reverend George F. Noyes, delivering meals to the troops of the Shenandoah, was personally thanked: "One soldier said to me, 'It isn't the turkey, but the idea that we are cared for.'"

 

 

A Turkey Wins the War

 

Southern pride was ruffled by the glowing press accounts and first-hand reports about 'the boys' – all the boys, including many of their own! – getting a turkey dinner.

 

An effort was launched to achieve the same goal for CS soldiers on Christmas Day, 1864. But, everybody in the South was hungry, and corruption was rife. The food donations trickled in slowly, and the date of the feast had to be delayed to New Years Day. The adamant statements running through the Confederate papers about how Southern boys were to be better fed and treated than their Northern adversaries, buoyed the weary fighting men in gray. The date was pushed back to January 2nd, 1865, but, on that date, only a handful of the food in transit made it to the soldiers; every hand along the supply line had taken for itself in the base effort to simply survive.

 

Put yourself in the soldiers' mindset, to know that US advances in CS territory were continuing unchecked, and you see how this bitter disappointment over a Christmas meal that never arrived, turned emblematic. Letters from home asked – some demanded – that the men return to protect them, and yet the boys in gray were expected to uphold a system where the rich in the South only grew richer and the poor died so the haves could continue to own other human beings as property. The situation was untenable.

 

Ella Lonn in her seminal work, Desertion During the Civil War, noted: "Late in the war, it wasn't the shirkers and weak-hearted who were leaving the South's ranks; it was the veterans, as Grant and Sherman both noted. 'Soldiers, faced with the choice of serving the State or their families, when famine was stalking the land, obeyed the stronger of the two obligations.'"

 

Southern desertions after January 2nd became an unstoppable tide. They, like their Russian counterparts in the spring of 1917, simply laid down their arms, and began the arduous walk home through the mud.

 

After April and Lee's surrender at Appomattox, he postulated that it was "the communications received by the men from their homes, urging their return and the abandonment of the field" that crippled him, but he omitted to acknowledge that the lack of a promised turkey really lost him the war.

 

For those of Lee's army who stayed around until April 1865, they were fed by Grant, and his steady food supplies, until they too began the long walk home to an uncertain future.

 

 

Third Time's the Charm

 

The third Thanksgiving looked like it would never happen. What was there to be thankful for? Lincoln was murdered. The North, led by a strong Republican Congress, wanted retribution on the South. And the bold 'unity ticket' that saw a southern Democrat, Andrew Johnson, as Lincoln's running mate, was now the reunified nation's leader. Beset by a middle-of-the-road policy approach on reconstruction, Congress wanted Johnson removed from office. But Johnson survived, and Johnson used Thanksgiving as a means of healing. Because of his personal advocacy, the third Thanksgiving was celebrated in the South, not as the formerly vague Yankee Day, but now the holiday was, for the first time ever, American.

 

Finally, the boys on both sides of the newly erased lines got their turkey dinners. African Americans in the South were proudly in the vanguard of celebrating Thanksgiving with food. Cooks there established the ultimate menu we know and love today: yams candied with molasses or brown sugar, hominy, cornbread stuffing, macaroni and cheese, and – last but not least –sweet potato pie. All palates were swayed and satisfied that this formally regional day was good enough to eat. Yes, the third occurrence made all the difference – what was eaten then has been passed on to us. And this third Thanksgiving saw in Springfield, the Lincoln family, like almost every family across the land, honor the empty chair of a national hero.

 

New challenges awaited the country. Thomas Nast's 1869 Harper's Weekly illustration intoned the melting-pot benefit of Turkey Day. Uncle Sam and Columbia, the happy couple, play host to the peoples of the land who all gather as equals at the American table of plenty. This engraving promoted the value – the necessity – of passing the 15th Amendment and finally excising the "original sin" of our constitution. From then on, "all men are created equal" would have value in practice, as well as in principle.
 

By the time the nation celebrated its Centennial in 1876, no house in the land, North or South, could resist the temptations of Thanksgiving. With this yearlong party, the country was fully healed and it was time to rediscover/reinforce the significance of Winslow's 1621 account: a tale of races coming together to share what they have in common, which is quite a lot, especially when it comes to good food.

 

The twenty-four years from the Centennial to about 1900 saw these efforts move fully to schools and the teaching of the roots of the holiday. Thus enter the age of construction paper centerpieces, horns of plenty, scattered acorns, partially unhusked ears of Indian corn, and – last but not least – finger turkeys.

 

 

Never Look Back

 

Truth to tell, we often speak and think in superlatives, the first, the best, the last, the worst, and as a people, it seems our national motto is "Never Look Back." But for things that matter, it is usually a slow and progressive entrenching that achieves what we come to treasure as tradition. For Thanksgiving, the second, and the third celebrations had as much power, if not more, than the first to turn a presidential proclamation – really just a piece of paper – into a heartfelt expression of healing and remembrance that family matters most of all.

 

Thanksgiving Day links us, one by one, back to our relations and our forebearers long past; back to their tables, to their empty chairs; and it does so through a shared and meaningful meal. This day allows us, for at least a moment, to stop, and simply be American.

 

 

 

 

Thomas Nast's envisioning of the first Thanksgiving, November 26th, 1863. From Haper's Weekly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sarah Josepha Hale's Chicken Pie
SERVES 8-10

 

This classic centerpiece of Thanksgiving tables from before the Civil War is adapted from page 86 of the 1841 edition of The Good Housekeeper. Rich with variety meats and cooked chicken, it deserves a revival because it can be served hot or cold, and is perfect for a buffet.

 

FOR THE TOP AND BOTTOM CRUSTS:

 

1 sheet of ready made puff paste, thawed to room temperature
1 egg, beaten with
1 tablespoon half and half
2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons lard
3 tablespoons half and half
2 tablespoons water

 

1) For the top crust, gently unfold the puff paste, and make sure the seams are strong. Gently push them together if they have separated. Use a 9-inch spring-form pan as a template and cut a neat circle out of the puff paste with a 1 1/2 to 2-inch extra all around. Put the cut top crust on plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator. Beat the egg and half and half in a small bowl, and chill.

 

2) For the hot-water pastry bottom crust, measure and sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl. Heat the butter, lard, half and half, and water in a saucepan over low heat until all is melted and smooth. Pour half of the liquid over the flour, and mix hard with a wooden spoon. Repeat until all is used, and the stiff dough can be gathered together. Turn out onto a floured board, and knead gently until it just comes together, about 30 seconds. Place the dough back in the bowl, drape with a towel, and chill for 20 mins. Ready your spring-form pan, and roll the rested hot-water pastry to about a 15-inch round. Drape the pastry in the bottom and sides of the spring-form pan, and leave about a 1-inch overhand over the top rim. Chill in the refrigerator while you prepare the filling.

 

 

 

FOR THE FILLING:

 

1 3-4lb. whole chicken
1lb. elbow macaroni
3 hardboiled eggs, coarsely chopped
1/2lb. fresh chicken livers, chopped, plus one from the chicken
1 large white onion, chopped
1lb. porcini mushrooms, sliced
2 tablespoons peanut oil
2 tablespoons butter
1/4lb. fresh chicken gizzards, chopped, plus one from the chicken
1/4lb. fresh chicken hearts, chopped, plus one from the chicken
A beurre manié made of 4 tablespoons each of flour and butter at room
temperature and rubbed together into a paste
3 cups chicken or turkey stock, heated
sea salt to taste, approximately 1 teaspoon
1/2 teaspoon freshly cracked white pepper
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon mace
zest and juice of 1/2 a lemon
3 or 4 rolled and cut fresh sage leaves
about 1 tablespoon chopped fresh marjoram, or flat leaf parsley
3 tablespoons chilled butter, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
sprigs of watercress for garnish

 

1) To cook the chicken, remove the neck and discard. Chop the liver, heart and gizzard and place with the others. Wash the chicken well and place in a stockpot. Cover with cool water to 2-inches or more over the chicken. Put the pot uncovered on a medium-high heat and bring to a rolling simmer. Cover, let simmer 5 minutes more, then turn off the heat. Let the chicken cook undisturbed for 25 mins.

 

2) Meanwhile, heat four quarts of water in another pan to a strong boil over high heat. Pour in the macaroni, stir and cook until al dente, about 10 mins. Drain well, and put in the bottom of a large mixing bowl. Toss the hardboiled eggs, and liver over the macaroni.

 

3) Make a sauté by heating a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. When the pan is hot, add the peanut oil and butter. Fry the onion until golden, about 10 mins, adjusting the heat if necessary so the onion does not burn. Add the mushrooms, and sauté another 5 mins. Lower the heat to medium, and toss in the gizzards and heats. Let the meat cook for 25 mins. with occasional stirring. Meanwhile, drain the cooked chicken and let cool. After the gizzards and hearts have cooked, deglaze the skillet with the hot chicken or turkey stock, and stir well to get every brown bit from the bottom of the pan. Add the beurre manié and stir and simmer until nicely thickened. Pour this in the bowl with the macaroni and other ingredients. Hand shred the chicken meat into the bowl, discarding the skin and bones. Give a good stir, and add the rest of the seasonings, except the butter cubes and watercress.

 

4) For the final assembly and baking, preheat the oven to 375°F and fill the lined spring-form pan, molding the filling in a dome near the center. Push in the butter cubes evenly around the top of the filling. When cooking, the butter will melt and baste the filling. Brush the overhanging bottom crust with some of the egg and half and half mixture, and carefully lay the top crust over. Seal the edges together by gently pressing, and trim off any extra so you have a consistent 1-inch all the way around. Fold and tuck the crust edge underneath, and with thumb and forefinger, crimp the edge attractively. Use a small sharp knife to cut a 1/2-inch vent in the center of the pie. Use the back of this knife to score decorative lines from the vent to the outer rim. Brush the exposed areas with the remainder of the egg and half and half mixture. Bake for 1 hour. Let the pie cool on a rack in its pan for at least 20 mins. before you unmold it. If you are serving it chilled, let it cool to room temperature and refrigerate the pie in its pan. Unmold the chilled pie only at the last minute.

 

Serve on a platter with watercress.

 

 

 

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Further Reading:

 

– Harper's Weekly, a Journal of Civilization, Harper Brothers New York 1863. Issue of Saturday, December 5 has the Thomas Nast Thanksgiving engraving
– Foods of the World – American Cooking: New England, TIME-LIFE Books New York 1970. By Jonathan Norton Leonard
– Northwood; or Life North and South: Showing the True Character of Both, H. Long and Brother New York 1841. By Sarah Josepha Hale
– Giving Thanks, Article in The History Channel Magazine. November-December 2011. By Dr. Libby O'Connell
– Giving Thanks in Wartime, Article in National Review. November 2004. By James S. Robbins
– Desertion During the Civil War, American Historical Association Gloucester Massachusetts 1928. By Ella Lonn (1998 reprint by Bison Books)
– The Confederate War, Harvard University Press Boston Massachusetts 1997. By Gary W. Gallagher
– The Vacant Chair: the Northern Soldier Leaves Home, Oxford University Press New York 1993. By Mitchell Reid
– The Good Housekeeper, Weeks Jordan and Company Boston Massachusetts 1841. By Sarah Josepha Hale (1996 facsimile reprint by Dover Press New York as Early American Cooking)