Thanksgiving November 24, 1864
- Oliver Groom
- Aug 24
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Abstract: How Thanksgiving festivities on November 24, 1864, were celebrated after Lincoln made a proclamation to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday.
Original written by siblings George & Deb McGraw, November 2023. Revised and edited by Erika Newcombe, Deb Hall, and Oliver Groom, August 2026.
Sarah Josepha Hale was a renowned 19th-Century editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, for which she wrote the famous nursery rhyme, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She also campaigned for seventeen years for a National Day of Thanksgiving. She has been dubbed the “Godmother of Thanksgiving Day.”
President George Washington had issued a one-time Thanksgiving proclamation on October 3, 1789, but it was only after Hale had written to four presidents and countless other officials that President Lincoln, after reading her letter, issued his own proclamation on October 3, 1863, three score and fourteen years to the day from Washington’s designating the fourth Thursday of November as a National Day of Thanksgiving.
The closing of his proclamation reads, “I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and 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. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverance 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 suffers 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 purpose to full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”
During the Civil War, the Union League Club of New York was determined to provide, from solicited donations, a Thanksgiving dinner to every soldier and sailor in the Union Army and Navy. It was estimated that at least 373,586 lbs. of poultry was provided, in addition to “an enormous quantity of cakes, doughnuts, gingerbreads, pickles, preserved fruits, apples, vegetables, and all other things which go to make up a Northern Thanksgiving Dinner.” The organizers declared the effort a “grand success.”
Sgt. Thomas Geer on November 23 wrote, “There is nothing new going on here. Cannonading and picket firing is kept up as usual. It rained steadily for three days and four nights. I begin to think we should be drowned out. We expect to get a Thanksgiving dinner, but I am afraid it will not get here so we can have it tomorrow … I hope this cursed war will come to a close between this and spring … I like Capt. [Lafayette] Mumford better than any officer we have had in Company A before. Anything he can do for the boys he always seems to be willing to do.”
Mumford enlisted as a private on September 7, 1864, and was promoted to captain later that month on September 20. He goes on in the letter to describe his three tent mates, Pvt. Gardener Chase, Cpl. Thaddeus Phillips, and Sgt. Ross Parshall—all recent enlistees to the regiment. Geer, his tent mates, and Mumford would all survive the war and make it home in 1865. The men of Company A did get their Thanksgiving dinner: three turkeys and six chickens to feed 65 men. Geer wrote that there were only three men from the original company at the dinner.
Recently promoted 2nd Lt. Esek Hoff of Co. K wrote home from near Petersburg, “The firing on the picket here is quite heavy in the first line and I guess we will have to turn out unless they quit. The big guns have commenced which will dry up the little ones. Well I guess the mess is over and I will write a little more … Well our Thanksgiving dinner did not come today but will tomorrow. This will be a thanksgiving letter for you.”
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant continued his nine-month siege of Petersburg and, by proxy, Richmond, putting pressure on the Confederate forces in Virginia while Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman cut across Georgia on his way to the Atlantic coast. Both of these actions helped bring an end to the war but at the same time made life more difficult for the Union POWs as food became scarcer. Records are few but it is reasonable to assume that there were over 125 men from the 111th in POW camps in November 1864 with little reason to be thankful.
Sgt. Daniel Hutchins of Co. D wrote in his diary on the 25th at the Florence POW camp in South Carolina: “We are not getting enough rations to keep soul & body together. We drew 1 pint of rice today & nothing else, no salt.”
On the 26th, he wrote, “Great excitement about parole & exchange That sick at the hospital are being paroled now Oh, God grant that it may extend to the awful camp & deliver the starving prisoners from bondage. We drew 5 gills [4 ounces] of meal & nothing more.” The Confederacy had decided to parole the sickest men who would not be capable of serving in the army. This placed more logistical strains on the Union while alleviating the Confederacy’s efforts to care and feed their prisoners.
The 87 men of the 111th who were captured on October 30 were at the overcrowded Salisbury POW camp in South Carolina without tents or barracks; most slept on the ground or in holes they dug. Food, when issued, was raw corn and, on the more rare occasions, meat or offal (i.e., the heart, liver, lungs, and intestines).
Conditions somewhat improved in December when an oven was constructed and they were issued some wood and canvas to build shelters for some, but not all the men. There are no records but it is unlikely there was any special food for a Thanksgiving dinner for the men at Salisbury, Florence, Andersonville, or the other POW camps scattered throughout the South.
The Wayne County Historical Society encourages anyone with family members who served and lived in Wayne or Cayuga Counties during the 1860s to contact the Wayne County Historical Society at info@waynehistory.org or (315) 946-4943. If you are not sure about your Civil War ancestry, you can follow up with the link below:
Photos:
Sarah Josepha Hale, 1831, by James Lambdin
Distributing Union League Food for Thanksgiving dinner
Civil War soldiers celebrating Thanksgiving in the field
Daniel B. Hutchins on Registers of the One Hundred and Eleventh Infantry report
Sources:
New York State Division of Military and Naval Affairs, One Hundred and Eleventh Infantry, in Annual Report of the Adjutant-General of the State of New York for the Year 1900: Registers of the One Hundred and Eleventh Infantry, accessed July 2, 2026, “111th Infantry Civil War Roster”
Wayne Historians Organization. Wayne County Civil War Soldiers. Accessed July 2, 2026. “Wayne County Civil War Soldiers”
Comments