Each time I serve pumpkin pie, I get to share a little known slice of American history. Although meant to unify people, the 19th-century campaign to make Thanksgiving a permanent holiday was seen by prominent Southerners as a culture war. They considered it a Northern holiday intended to force New England values on the rest of the country. To them, pumpkin pie, a Yankee food, was a deviously sweet symbol of anti-slavery sentiment.
The first account of American Thanksgiving is a letter written about the Pilgrim’s meal in 1621. The holiday evolved from a traditional harvest supper to a Puritan day of gratitude to God in colonial New England. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it further changed into a more secular celebration as the feasting portion overtook prayer. Northern governors often declared state-wide thanksgiving days. They were usually in late November or early December, but there was no unified national holiday.
Thanksgiving may have remained a regional, ad-hoc holiday if not for the efforts of Sarah Josepha Hale, a Northern writer who is often considered the “Godmother” of American Thanksgiving. In 1825, she initiated annual letter-writing campaigns to governors asking that they collectively declare the final Thursday of November a celebration of thanksgiving. As the editor of Godey’s Lady Book, the most widely read magazine of the 19th century, she devoted pages of editorial space to pitching the national holiday as a unifying force in a young and diverse nation. Her 1827 novel, Northwood: A Tale of New England, gives the first detailed account of the Puritan Thanksgiving feast. She dedicates an entire chapter to the meal, in which she describes the “celebrated pumpkin pie” as “an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.”
Hale was not the only one to associate pumpkin pie with Thanksgiving and Northern tradition. Two pumpkin pie recipes appear in American Cookery, alongside other Thanksgiving favorites such as cranberry sauce and turkey. Considered the first “American” cookbook, American Cookery is known as an example of traditional New England fare. Plus, pumpkin pie calls for Northern ingredients such as squash and molasses. As more states—mainly in the North—recognized Thanksgiving, the pie became closely associated with Northern tradition.
Hale’s cheerful, relentless, and decades-long campaign spread Thanksgiving to 29 states by the early 1850s. But simultaneously, tension was growing over the strengthening abolitionist sentiment in the North. Soon enough, this ignited Hale’s goal of a nationwide (or even trans-national) Thanksgiving.