Mental Floss has an article about why we eat pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. While the history of pumpkin pie is interesting, it also led me to something not quite so wholesome. The Thanksgiving holiday was a sticking point in the schism between the North and the South that developed leading up to the Civil War.
“Thanksgiving was, above all, a New England holiday, and New England was abolitionist territory,” as Diana Karter Appelbaum put it in her book “Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, an American History.”
Those who urged their fellow Americans to celebrate Thanksgiving as a national ritual were Northern evangelical Protestants who were strongly linked to the abolitionist movement. As anti-slavery sentiment swelled in the 1840s, many Northern ministers took the opportunity of Thanksgiving to rail against the moral wrongs of slavery.
Southerners, in turn, pushed back against the idea of Thanksgiving. Resistance to the holiday was particularly strong in Virginia, where local leaders viewed their state, not New England, as the cradle of the new American nation.
The acceptance of Thanksgiving in the South came about gradually, with sweet potato pie being served as an alternative to pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving is celebrated across the United States these days, only now it is a time where families traditionally come together to argue about their political differences.
(Image credit: TheCulinaryGeek)
