Thanksgiving: The Proposed Cure for a Nation With Really, Really Bad PTSD
Lincoln was like "so that war is bad. You can have a little holiday as a treat"
By this, the Year of Our Wow I Miss Precedented Times 2023, most of us are well aware of the shameful, gross history of Thanksgiving. It’s a day that celebrates colonizers and praises white supremacy, and one that highlights (some of) the myriad ways that Christianity has been weaponized for centuries.
But! Did you know that it was also meant to make the country feel better about being in the midst of a war fought on our/stolen soil, which ultimately claimed the lives of about 2% of the still-young nation?
Yes, today many of us are breaking bread with our Horrible Facebook Uncles and gritting our teeth through our in-laws pathological fear of flavorful spices because Abraham Lincoln got a letter from an anti-suffrage magazine editor who wanted everyone to celebrate on the same day.
“This subject is to have the day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival.”
Sarah J. Hale was essentially a post-colonial busybody. She was very invested in historic preservation, befriending powerful men, and prescribing how she thought women should comport themselves. She wrote poems, sent a lot of letters to various elected officials, and edited and wrote for Godey’s Lady’s Book, the first stateside women’s magazine.
At the time, Thanksgiving was celebrated on a state-by-state basis and wasn’t a national holiday. And after trying to petition her local leaders, Hale decided that the only way to get the holiday fully enshrined was to go straight to the President.
From her 1863 letter to Lincoln:
You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution.
Hale’s letter is pretty straightforward — it included letters from other leaders to demonstrate the popularity of the idea and stated that making it a “Fixed Union Festival” would be a “fitting and patriotic” way to give thanks to members of the armed services and other people of the United States. I also suspect she wanted the holiday to be celebrated on the same day across the states because it would be beneficial to the sale of magazines.
Presidential Thanksgiving proclamations weren’t novel; Washington and other presidents before Lincoln had signed intents of giving thanks in prior years, and had declared single-day commemorations. But Hale was looking for something else - she wanted a whole new holiday, one which people could reliably celebrate every year on the last Thursday in November.
Lincoln received the letter and was moved. He also saw an opportunity to shore up some of the massive tensions between the North and South, and to use this holiday as a way to make people happy in the middle of, you know, a war wherein so many people had been and were continuing to be eviscerated on the battlefield. He agreed with Hale (and the governors and other elected officials she’d petitioned) and decided to solidify Thanksgiving as an American holiday.
Here’s part of his proclamation:
Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.
They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they 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 next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.
So basically, “yes, we’re currently engaged in an astoundingly awful war for the humanity of some people and the future of our country, but why not take some time today to be glad that you’re not dead.”
But why would a whole-ass nation need such a big gesture? Why did an entire country, less than a century old, need to be reminded to be thankful for life?
Thanksgiving: A Cure for “Soldier’s Heart”
Post-traumatic stress disorder was not, unsurprisingly, diagnosed among the soldiers, nurses, and civilians who survived the Civil War. But this bloody, gory affair — we, in modern America, probably cannot even begin to fathom the smells, let alone the other horrors — obviously left tens of thousands of people feeling all kinds of bad things.
How bad, you might ask?
Here’s an excerpt from a Civil War solider’s letter home about the experience on the battlefield:
Our under-clothes were foul and hanging in strips, our socks worn out, and half of the men were bare-footed, many were lame and were sent to the rear; others, of sterner stuff, hobbled along and managed to keep up, while gangs from every company went off in the surrounding country looking for food. . . Many became ill from exposure and starvation, and were left on the road.
So yeah. You’d have complicated emotions, too.
And we have to remember that the year Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to be a national holiday, this war was still fully in gear. It had been going on for several years already and there was no end in sight. Men were away at war, explosions were audible from miles away, and no one knew what was going to happen next. When soldiers returned home, either due to injury or madness or a need to take care of their families, they were not in good condition.
“Soldier’s heart” was the shorthand given to what we’d think of today as PTSD-like symptoms. Jacob Mendes Da Costa, a doctor and researcher, coined the term “irritable heart” syndrome and linked it to “hard service” in the war.
“To this day,” wrote Da Costa, “nowhere, whether as the result of the ordinary duties of the soldier or of actual war, has the subject, so far as I can find, been made one of careful clinical investigation.”
Quantifying the symptoms — pain, fatigue, heart palpitations, gut stuff - of each solider he saw, Da Costa noted that the common factor was almost always military service.
“Occupation appears without influence on the production of the malady,” he wrote. “Painter, butcher, blacksmith, carpenter, the city-bred man who had left his desk in the counting-house, the farmer fresh from tilling the fields, were all fully represented in the long list of sufferers.”
Which means that all of those men - printers, painters, bakers, builders, shopkeepers - who were out seeing terrible things and fighting for the future of their infantile nation and survived were now back at home, in their communities, trying to readjust to life.
And even without the term “PTSD” clanging around in his mind, Lincoln was like “hmm, yeah, this country needs something nice.”
So, in the middle of the war, the United States got a holiday. And also a little finger-wag on behalf of Jesus, who was actually the main subject of the first official Thanksgiving (which is ironic because a lot of fundamentalists actually don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, even though Lincoln’s proclamation was basically one long government-funded prayer). Here’s the last bit of the proc (emphasis mine):
I recommend…that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.
And there you have it. The first Thanksgiving — the first official one, anyway — was basically an olive branch/bit of propaganda/public relations move by Lincoln to make people less miserable. Incidentally, it also cured PTSD!
JK JK obviously it did not.
In the closing remarks of his paper on “irritable heart,” Da Costa admonished the armed forces for over-exerting the soldiers.
“Every commander should be made aware that in so using his men he is rendering some unfit for further duty, impairing others,” he wrote.
Unfortunately, this specific piece of advice — that soldiers were humans with finite physical and emotional resources — seems to have gone unheeded in the following years. But like, at least white-collar workers get the day off today, right?
Thankful for all of you, readers.
xoxo HBO