Connections:

The Creation of Thanksgiving Day and the Unified Efforts of Local Abolitionists

As we approach the fall and winter holidays, giving thanks for our bounty, however small, and seeking the comfort of loved ones seems to drive the season. Thanksgiving may be the preeminent example of these sentiments. For many, Thanksgiving represents the epitome of sharing, for others, it shines a light on our national hypocrisy about the treatment of indigenous people. In well-worn Thanksgiving imagery, it is rarely shown that the Pilgrims, by force of arms, were occupying Wampanoag land. Instead, what is depicted is a time of friendly Wampanoag sitting down with their neighbors, the Pilgrims, to share the bounty of the harvest in 1623. In recent years, to bridge the competing perspectives, Tisquantum (aka Squanto), perhaps the last surviving member of the European plagues that decimated his Patuxet band of the Wampanoag, has been featured prominently. It is Tisquantum who has come to be credited with helping the newcomers survive on the inhospitable shores of Cape Cod Bay. This is the peaceful moment we commemorate between the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag. We have brushed away the reality of the violent, existential conflict that left virtually all of New England’s indigenous nations in economic disarray for centuries in our penchant for creating a mythological national history.

It is no coincidence that the official national designation of Thanksgiving occurred during another of our highly conflicted times 240 years later. The day was created after nearly two decades of public crusading by writer and publisher, Sarah Josepha Hale, who hoped a national day of gratitude would bring a divided nation closer together. In 1863, her efforts prevailed when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last day in November as a National Day of Thanksgiving. To Hale, it must have been a sweet blessing in violent times. Two months later, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln officially freed all slaves in the Confederacy while exempting the four slave states that had stayed in the Union.  By the time Lincoln gave his famous address, tens of thousands of soldiers had spilled their blood in the Civil War and hundreds of Abolitionists had spread their activist goal throughout the country. This context for the creation of Thanksgiving Day has been lost in the process, but given our current state of national discord, looking at the context can be one of those moments that factual history can help explain the current moment.

By the time Lincoln embraced the first Thanksgiving Day, our region of Western New York had been an internationally recognized hot bed of abolitionism for decades. Speakers, writers and publishers of all colors, sexes and religious backgrounds worked from the turn of the 19th century until the outbreak of the Civil War to end slavery. By the completion of the Erie Canal, Upstate New York abolitionists were traveling to England to join in solidarity with their compatriots. They could be heard, seen and read about along every crossroad and byway and in countless population centers as they sought to build public sentiment against slavery. Frederick Douglas published The North Star in Rochester and took copies with him for an extended fund-raising tour of England. Wealthy Abolitionist landowner, Garret Smith who lived in Peterboro (Madison County) used his considerable sums to buy property where both freedom seekers and free persons of color could then become property owners that qualified them to vote in New York State. Social activists Amy Post and Isaac Post strategized with Douglass and other abolitionists in Rochester. Douglass returned the favor by joining ardent Upstate New York abolitionists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Staton and Lucretia Mott to advance women’s suffrage. Douglas was not the only man in solidarity. Thirty-two of the one hundred signatories of the Declaration of Sentiments at the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls were men.

Other Abolitionists like Samuel Ringgold Ward made their contributions to racial justice in other ways. Early in his career, Ward became the first ordained Black minister to lead a white congregation in Wayne County in Butler. Soon he was applying his skills to further the movement Ward assisted a faction of white members of the Sodus Presbyterian Church who had failed to convince the church to denounce slavery. Together, they formed the anti-slavery Free Congregational Church.  As his renown grew, he gained a reputation as a superior orator for ending slavery. He was not above entering the more physical parts of the fray and participated in the famous Jerry Rescue in Syracuse. It was there that he joined a group of Quaker Abolitionists and other opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to break Jerry (aka William Henry) from jail and spirit him to protection from capture in Canada. This encouraged his own flight to Canada several years later.

United, spirited, committed efforts conducted across the world have protected all of our rights. Social and racial justice activism in our area of Upstate New York is no exception. Americans of African, European, Asian and Indigenous descent have always united to make the nation a more humanistic, civil and judicious country for all people to thrive. The work has not always been easy. It has been filled with tension and conflict. When I gather with friends and family this Thanksgiving, it will be this legacy of unified struggle that I will most cherish.

Jim Wood

Black History Month in a Year (BHMY)

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