Abraham Lincoln is credited with establishing Thanksgiving in 1863, but the 16th president only set the last Thursday of November for the annual observance. The first official recognition of Thanksgiving came from George Washington in 1789. He implored Americans to give thanks to God for “the happy conclusion to the country’s war of independence.”
But this wasn’t Washington’s idea. The man behind our national day of thanks is Elias Boudinot, a forgotten Founding Father who lived in Burlington City.
Boudinot is largely overlooked in history textbooks. Teaching about him would be dicey in secular public schools, since his deep Christianity came before everything else in his life. Despite the many impressive public offices he held, including delegate to the Continental Congress and director of the U.S. Mint, Boudinot said his greatest honor was serving as president of the American Bible Society.
He began the tradition of Congress opening each session with a prayer. He saw America’s founding as world-shaking. He wrote “Age of Revelation” as a response to Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason.”
“Let us enter on this important business under the idea that we are Christians on whom the eyes of the world are now turned,” he wrote in 1775.
Boudinot’s Christianity informed his booming arguments in Congress against the slave trade. He condemned the cruelty and swindling suffered by America’s native Indian tribes. He demanded that slaves and Indians have equal rights under the Constitution. He paid to have young Native Americans educated. One of them, Gallegian Watie, a Cherokee, boarded with Boudinot at his home in Burlington City. Watie was so deeply moved by Boudinot’s character that he changed his name to Elias Boudinot and used it as his byline when he launched and edited the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, the first ever published in English and Cherokee.
But Boudinot was no religious scold. Although a serious Presbyterian, he had an ecumenical view of Christianity.
He wrote to his daughter, Charity, in 1778: “As you advance in life, you will find the Christian world unhappily split into a multitude of denominations, professions and names. Each will tell you that his is the only right way, as those mentioned in Scripture who tell you, lo! here is Christ, or there is Christ; but believe them not. The true catholicism of the Scriptures will tell you to take them all into the arms of your love, Charity, and to look upon all as the servants of the same master, as far as they follow his example.”
Boudinot was born in Philadelphia in 1740. He was a lawyer by age 20 and spent a decade building his law practice in Elizabeth, Union County.
He became a patriot, serving in the New Jersey Assembly and in Congress. He spent nearly $40,000 of his own money to assure that Americans captured by the Brits were properly fed and clothed. He was Washington’s go-to man on secret intelligence; Boudinot was the main contact for spies serving the American cause. He moved to Burlington City in 1803 and had a house built at 207 W. Broad St. He died there in 1821.
On Sept. 25, 1789, Boudinot introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives imploring both houses of Congress to prevail upon President Washington to recommend to all Americans a national day of thanksgiving. His request to Washington came one day after Congress had approved the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause.
Boudinot wrote: “(I) could not think of letting the session pass over without offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining with one voice in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings he had poured down upon them.”
Washington approved it. He issued a proclamation from New York to all the country’s governors, setting aside Nov. 26, 1789, as a day of giving thanks: “To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease (increase) of science among them and us — and generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.”
J.D. Mullane can be reached at 215-949-5745 or email@example.com. Twitter: @jdmullane