Hey everyone, welcome to a short bonus episode of our Civil War podcast, My Name is Rich.

And I'm Tracy. Hello y'all. Thanks for tuning into this special show, which is about the Thanksgiving holidays ties to the Civil War.

Yes, so tomorrow is the celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States.

And Tracy and I just wanted to do a short show to remind you guys of how it was Abraham Lincoln, who established Thanksgiving Day as a formal and regular holiday here in the US of A.

As most American school children learn, we can trace the first Thanksgiving celebrations here to the festivities that were held in 1619 in Virginia and in 1621 at Plymouth in Massachusetts.

The Pilgrim celebrated Plymouth for three days after their first harvest in 1621. And although the exact date is unknown, it was probably around September 29th.

Those celebrations in Virginia and at Plymouth were harvest feasts. And it was only later that the colonists began celebrating Thanksgiving with a small tea Thanksgiving days, which were more days set aside for prayer to give thanks to God for blessings like a military victory or the end of a drought or whatnot.

President George Washington and James Madison both issued Thanksgiving with a small tea Thanksgiving proclamations, but it was left to Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to establish Thanksgiving Day with a capital T as an official and recurring holiday.

Most people think that Lincoln was influenced by a woman named Sarah Joseph a Hale who had spent years campaigning for a national Thanksgiving holiday.

After her husband died in 1822, Sarah was left to provide for their five children and she eventually became a novelist and a poet.

In 1827, she published a novel that included an entire chapter of picturing a Thanksgiving meal celebrated by a farming family in New England.

The main dish at the meal was a roasted turkey and the menu also included several of the side dishes we've now come to associate with the traditional Thanksgiving feast.

In 1837, Sarah Hale became editor of an influential magazine whose target audience was women and with her at its helm, subscriptions increased from 10,000 to 150,000 by 1860.

In 1846, Sarah began to campaign for a national Thanksgiving holiday and her position as editor of that popular ladies journal was the perfect platform to spread the word of this new holiday that would be celebrated the last Thursday of November.

And so she featured stories of family gatherings and recipes that promoted the New England style of celebrating an autumn or early winter harvest feast.

In the years before the Civil War began, Sarah wrote numerous letters to politicians advocating the adoption of a national Thanksgiving holiday, but the holiday wasn't adopted before the start of the war in 1861.

The Civil War however only caused Sarah to increase her efforts.

It's interesting that both the Union and Confederacy proclaimed days of Thanksgiving, small tea, days of Thanksgiving during the war.

For example, after the Confederate victory at First Manassas, Jefferson Davis called for a day of Thanksgiving to be observed on Sunday, July 28, 1861.

And Abraham Lincoln declared a day of Thanksgiving in April 1862 to honor the Union victories at Fort Henry and Donaldson and at Shiloh.

In 1863, Lincoln declared not one but two separate Thanksgiving celebrations.

The first was on Thursday, August 6th, following the victory at the Battle of Gettysburg.

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