Abraham Lincoln: Quibbling Thanksgiving

In 1863 Thanksgiving Day had been a local or regional holiday for more than two centuries.

Quibbling The Day

Massachusetts has long maintained that a day of Thanksgiving was celebrated a year after the devout Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620. Even today, Thanksgiving celebrations are filled with decorations of Pilgrims and Indians, corn/maize, and of course, turkey.

Virginia, however, midway down the Tidewater peninsula between Richmond and Williamsburg, insists that the first inhabitants of Berkeley Plantation beat the Pilgrims to the punch a whole year prior. And those first inhabitants were not Pilgrims, but people of property, albeit just as devout.

Giving thanks for one’s blessings is a fine thing, but starting dates are a silly quibble.

And if that quibble wasn’t enough, our Founders quibbled as well. Nobody was against giving thanks of course, but they quibbled about making it a federal holiday, rather than a state