Opinion: Thanksgiving, Nevada tied together by threads of war

The arid high desert topography of Nevada is perhaps the most unlikely image of Thanksgiving.

Popularly, Americans associate Thanksgiving with Plymouth Colony on Massachusetts Bay — site of the first harvest feast in the New World held October 1621 — along with a fleet of merchant sailing ships led by The Mayflower.

We don't think of hearty miners crawling out from a hole in the earth when Thanksgiving comes to mind.

We see Puritan Pilgrims in drab black, white and grey sporting huge buckled hats and wielding blunderbusses.

We see friendly Indians bringing their bounty to a feast; also teaching the Pilgrims how to grow food and survive in the harsh elements.

But interestingly enough, Nevada is linked to the modern day Thanksgiving holiday in a way New England is not.

Both were established during the most tumultuous period in American history, a bloody and devastating civil war that threatened to destroy the republic.

Both were also considered significant issues to the Sixteenth President of the United States at a time when hope was desperately sought by a nation suffering through a fiery crucible.

Abraham Lincoln was at the lowest point of his presidency in 1863. Following consecutive military debacles at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, Virginia, the Union Army of the Potomac was a disorganized and deflated mess.

There was talk of a cease-fire between the United States and the Confederate States of America.

Public opinion of the war had plummeted to all-time lows. So, too, had Lincoln's popularity.

Then two things happened all at once that changed the Union's fortunes, and those of the United States forever.

The Confederate river port of Vicksburg, Mississippi, fell to a siege launched nearly two months earlier by Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Simultaneously, an ambitious invasion of the United States by Confederate Army of Northern Virginia commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee, came to a violent end at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

These two Union victories together delivered a double-blow to the Confederacy, which had reached its high water mark in early July 1863 and began a slow, gradual slide downward en route to surrender less than two years later.

The military victories bolstered Union confidence. Even though the war would wear on for about another 21 months, momentum shifted in the United States' favor.

If Lincoln had been searching for some silver lining to life around him, he had just found it.

He had good reason to feel thankful and grateful, because the republic still stood; and there was now a light which had appeared, ever so small, at the end of the long, dark tunnel of war.

The idea of proclaiming a national day of thanksgiving, though, wasn't Lincoln's alone. The concept had been proposed by others before him, including first U.S. President George Washington in 1789.

In fact, much of the country was already commemorating the very first Thanksgiving with annual feasts in their homes and communities.

But there was no such thing as an official national observance of it. Like Christmas and Easter, Thanksgiving had been an informal holiday that people practiced and observed on their own.

Then along came a letter addressed to President Lincoln dated Sept. 28, 1863. It was written by a well-known American writer named Sarah Josepha Hale, who had gained notoriety for penning the original “Mary Had a Little Lamb” children's poem in 1830.

Hale had lobbied for more than three decades to establish a national day of thanksgiving. But her zeal took on a whole new sense of urgency with the eruption of civil war.

Hale concerned herself with finding ways of trying to heal the deep wounds inflicted by the savage conflict.

She felt strongly that a national day of thanksgiving would help bridge the gaps left by violent sectionalism, and had persisted in writing editorials on the subject of thanksgiving for years.

Promptly and within a week of receiving Hale's letter to Lincoln, the White House had drafted an official proclamation — courtesy of U.S. Secretary of State William Seward — establishing a national observation of Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November.

Lincoln made the proclamation public a short time later.

But the Illinois frontier lawyer and former Kentucky back woodsman still faced a more personal challenge ahead of him.

Re-election loomed in the next 12 months. Public opinion of the war and of him remained on shaky ground despite recent military victories by Union forces.

One of the answers to his problem lay out west in the territory of Nevada, whose gold and silver ore production — namely Virginia City's Comstock Lode — was helping to fund a very costly war.

Although statehood had been on the minds of Nevadans for some time, President Lincoln's re-election dilemma had hastened the process.

Nearing zero hour on Oct. 31, 1864, the Nevada state constitution — received in its entirety by telegram from Carson City to Washington, D.C. — was read before Congress, which ratified the bid for statehood just one week before the general election.

Incidentally, Lincoln benefited from Nevada's electoral votes, which helped secure a second term for him.

Both Nevada and our national day of Thanksgiving are battle born. Both emerged and were put forth during the perils of war. Both were embraced as important by Lincoln.

And both have withstood the tests of time for more than 150 years.

Their endurance, their perseverance should be a testament to us all during a time of significant political angst and social turmoil across the country.

If Lincoln, Hale and an entire nation of people could find that silver lining to be thankful for in the face of monumental suffering and loss, then so can we.

Nevadans here in the Silver State and Americans nationwide still have much to be thankful and grateful for: Our families and friends, neighborhoods and communities, our freedom and liberty, our faiths, our opportunities, our abundance and bounty, so on and so forth.

Thanksgiving is about being humble enough to recognize what we still have and appreciating it all the more.

May we all cherish one another more than we have of late.

A blessed Thanksgiving to you and yours.