Magazine editor Sarah Hale wrote a letter
to President Abraham Lincoln encouraging him to proclaim a national
Thanksgiving Day. This was part of Hale's seventeen-year campaign
to establish Thanksgiving Day as a national holiday.
Hale included an editorial she wrote for her Lady's Book
magazine and explained that a "national feeling of Thanksgiving"
would benefit the country in the midst of the Civil War:
The influence of these state seasons of sacred remembrances,
high aspirations, and tender . . . rejoicings would not only
be salutary on the character of our own citizens, but the world
would be made better . . . . If the germ of good feeling be
ever so deeply buried under 'the cares, and riches, and pleasures
of this life,' it may be brought out by sympathy and vivified
by culture and effort.
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