No occasion is more closely associated with pie in North America than Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pie is perhaps the most famous Thanksgiving pie, but tables could be laden with apple pies, sweet potato pies or mango pie, depending on the family’s own traditions.

And, while it now seems like a timeless American tradition, Thanksgiving’s current status as a national holiday is mostly the result of the endless campaigning of one woman – and the futile attempt of a president to unite his country.

The mythology surrounding modern Thanksgiving is very well-known, even outside of the USA: it is a day to commemorate a meal shared between pilgrims and the Wampanoag people, and to give thanks for the autumn bounty. However, the real origins of Thanksgiving are slightly different.

The tradition of having a Thanksgiving feast in autumn was a popular one in New England by the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, it was not particularly associated with the pilgrims or the so-called ‘first Thanksgiving’. Instead it was essentially a harvest festival, and also a day of giving thanks to God.

It was not until during Lincoln’s presidency in 1863 that Thanksgiving became a national holiday. But, the idea to consecrate Thanksgiving as a national holiday didn’t come from Lincoln. Instead, it was the single-minded obsession of an abolitionist and magazine editor from New Hampshire named Sarah Josepha Hale, who campaigned for nearly forty years for Thanksgiving to become a national holiday.

Hale was obsessed with Thanksgiving. She wrote hundreds of letters to politicians, including five different presidents. She always specified that Thanksgiving should be the last Thursday in November and that it should be a day to ‘offer to God our tribute of joy and gratitude for the blessings of the year’. And while in some ways it may seem incredible that she got her wish, in others it’s more surprising that it took as long as it did.

Hale was incredibly influential. Her magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book was the most popular women’s magazine at the time with a circulation of 150,000 in the 1860s. A craft fair she organised in the early 1800s raised $30,000 dollars (just under $1,000,000 in today’s money) for the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument. Hale wrote poetry about Thanksgiving and even slipped pro-Thanksgiving propaganda into her books. Her 1827 book Northwood: A Tale of New England has an extensive description of an idyllic traditional New England Thanksgiving dinner.

The feast bears a remarkable resemblance to the one still eaten in America today. Hale wrote that ‘the roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the head of the table’. She also called pie ‘an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving’ and detailed that ‘there was a huge plum pudding, custards and pies of every name and description ever known in Yankee land; yet the pumpkin pie occupied the most distinguished niche.’

When Lincoln was eventually persuaded to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, his motivations were somewhat more political than Hale’s. His ‘Proclamation of Thanksgiving’ almost exclusively focuses on the American Civil War, and he asked ‘the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.’ Thanksgiving, he seemed to hope, would help bring the nation together.

However, Thanksgiving’s New England (and therefore Unionist and abolitionist) associations meant that it was a highly controversial idea. Even before Lincoln’s calls for a national Thanksgiving, Hale’s campaign received pushback from confederates. The holiday had been ridiculed as 'theatrical national claptrap' by Governor Wise of Virginia. Texan Governor Oran Milo Roberts, a former Confederate Army officer, refused to acknowledge the holiday until the 1880s.

Pumpkin pie became a particular sticking point, as an iconic New England dish. In its place, southern states baked sweet potato pie. Although also eaten in the northern states, sweet potato pie was – and still is – seen as an iconic southern dessert. The divide between pumpkin in the north and potato in the south has never truly healed, and both pies remain traditional today.

Pies of all sorts became increasingly popular in the USA, despite their perceived unhealthiness. In pumpkin pie-loving Hale’s own cookbook from 1839, she prefaces her very pie comprehensive chapter with a lengthy warning that eating pie can be more ‘injurious to persons of delicate constitutions than puddings; because of the indigestible nature of the pastry.’

By the 1870s the tension between pie lovers and pie haters seems to have reached a fever pitch. While pie had always been seen as fairly unhealthy, tirades against pie began to be regularly published in newspapers. The 1875 cookbook Breakfast, Luncheon, Tea by Marion Harland contains a 764 word essay warning readers against pies. It begins ‘And, entre nous, I for one, and my John for two, are getting so tired of the inevitable pie!’ and cites a newspaper article that said ‘the weakness for pie was a national vice’. This hatred was satirised in a comical essay in the New York Times from 1876 which painted pie as a sort of drug, and claimed pie’s ‘terrible influence’ upon children was ‘the chief evil’ of Thanksgiving. It warned that mothers ‘will deal out the deadly compound to her children without a thought that she is awakening in them a depraved hunger that will ultimately lead them straight to the pie shop.’

But amid all the pie mania, and pumpkin pie’s steady spread across the USA, one sort of pie quietly went out of fashion: mince pies. Although they are now seen as a purely British tradition, in the 1800s mince pies (which at the time still contained actual meat) were almost as popular in the US as pumpkin pie.

While more closely associated with Christmas than Thanksgiving, cookbooks generally offered recipes for both. Another comical piece on pie in the New York Times from 1873 shows that the two were both widely available. It notes that ‘the open-work pumpkin pie, which, being devoid of an upper crust, contains only half the poison that is found in the double-crusted mince pie’ but adds that ‘the person who acquires a taste for pumpkin pie, sinks surely and rapidly into the grave of the confirmed mince-pie debauchee.’

Indeed, savoury pies in general have gradually became less and less popular in the USA. The same, famous description by Sara Josepha Hale in Northwood that enshrined pumpkin pie as a Thanksgiving staple said that chicken pie ‘wholly formed of the choicest parts of fowls, enriched and seasoned with a profusion of butter and pepper’ was just as ‘indispensable’ as its sweet cousin.

It’s not clear why savoury pies and mince pies became an almost exclusively British habit, and disappeared from Thanksgiving tables. It could have simply been a result of the abundance of fruit and sugar in the USA, or the anti-pie brigade’s view that their double crust made them unhealthier. Either way, one of the only holdouts of savoury Thanksgiving pies is in Quebec, where the tourtière, a French Canadian meat pie, is still very popular.

There are still a great number of Thanksgiving pie mysteries to unravel. However, whether you prefer your pies sweet or savoury, modern or traditional, Thanksgiving remains a wonderful excuse to get out the rolling pin and indulge in America’s delightful ‘national vice’.