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Thanksgiving didn't become an official holiday until Northerners dominated the federal government. While sectional tensions prevailed in the mid-19th century,
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On October 3, 1863, during the Civil War, Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving to be celebrated on Thursday, November 26.
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Thanksgiving was officially proclaimed by President Lincoln in 1863, to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. In 1941, Thanksgiving Day was officially declared by the Congress of the United States a holiday, to be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the month of November.
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The men fired guns, ran races and drank liquor, struggling to speak in broken English and wampanoag. This was a pretty messy affair, but it sealed a treaty between the two groups that lasted until King Philip's War (1675–76), in which hundreds of settlers and thousands of Native Americans lost their lives.
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New England settlers were used to regularly celebrating "Thanksgiving," days of prayer thanking God for blessings such as military victory or the end of a drought. The Continental Congress of the USA proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day after the enactment of the Constitution, for example. However, after 1798, the new United States Congress left Thanksgiving declarations to the states.
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This Thursday, November 26, Thanksgiving is celebrated in the United States, as a souvenir of the dinner that the English settlers of Plymouth and the Native Americans of the Wampanoag tribe had (after the autumn harvest).
