A Day of Public Thanksgiving and Praise

How Americans Around 1776 Actually Celebrated Thanksgiving

When Americans sat down to give thanks in the years around 1776, there was no fixed “fourth Thursday in November,” no football on in the background, and in many cases…not much food to go around at all.

Yet the people who were fighting for independence—and the families holding things together at home—still paused for days of thanksgiving that look both strangely familiar and deeply foreign to us today.

This is a look at how the states and the Continental Army marked Thanksgiving in the Revolutionary years, built from original proclamations, diaries, and journals from the era.

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Thanksgiving Before It Was a “Holiday”

Long before the Revolution, New Englanders were already used to special days set aside as either:

• Days of humiliation/fasting – for repentance in hard times, and
• Days of thanksgiving – when God’s favor seemed especially visible (good harvests, recovery from illness, military deliverance, etc.).

Puritan communities had largely rejected the old European church calendar of saints’ days and Christmas, but they did embrace these special, one-off days. Civil leaders or church elders would proclaim them, and people treated them like an extra Sabbath during the week: worship, no “servile labor,” sober conduct—and, on thanksgiving days, a substantial meal afterward. (Wikipedia)

By the mid-1600s, most New England colonies were holding an annual autumn thanksgiving, usually in November. (Wikipedia) Other colonies (especially Anglican Virginia) also declared occasional days of fasting or thanksgiving, but the yearly late-fall thanksgiving was very much a Yankee tradition.

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War Changes the Meaning: Congress Steps In

When the colonies rebelled, these old habits didn’t disappear—they intensified.

Historian William DeLoss Love, who studied early New England proclamations, found that public fast days jumped dramatically during the first years of the Revolution, as communities interpreted the war as a spiritual crisis as well as a political one. (OpenBU Repository)

At the national level, the Continental Congress began using thanksgiving proclamations as a way to rally the new “United States” around shared victories and shared faith:

• March 1776 – Boston
  After the British evacuated Boston, Washington asked Rev. Andrew Eliot to preach a special thanksgiving sermon for the “joyful occasion,” marking the liberation of the city. (AmericanRevolution.org)
• November 1, 1777 – The First “National” Thanksgiving
  After the American victory over General Burgoyne at Saratoga, Congress issued a proclamation recommending that Thursday, December 18, 1777 be set apart as a day of “solemn thanksgiving and praise.” (George Washington’s Mount Vernon) The broadside, printed in places like Boston and New Hampshire, is strikingly explicit. Congress calls on Americans to thank God not only for “innumerable bounties” of ordinary life, but for prospering “a just and necessary war for the defence and establishment of our unalienable rights and liberties” and for crowning American arms “with most signal success.” (Library of Congress Tiles) The proclamation urges people to consecrate themselves to God’s service, confess national sins, and pray that He will bless the new governments, inspire commanders by land and sea, and secure the “greatest of all human blessings, INDEPENDENCE and PEACE.” (Library of Congress Tiles)

Between 1777 and 1784, Congress would recommend several more such days, weaving thanksgiving observances into the life of the new nation. (George Washington’s Mount Vernon)

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How the Army Kept Thanksgiving: Valley Forge, 1777

Once Congress set a date, it fell to George Washington to tell the army what to do with it.

On December 17, 1777, as the Continental Army camped in freezing conditions at the Gulph Mills area near Valley Forge, Washington issued general orders:

• He thanked the officers and soldiers for their “fortitude and patience” in the campaign.
• He reminded them that “Heaven hath smiled on our Arms and crowned them with signal success” and urged them to persevere until they gained “Independence—Liberty and Peace.” (Founders Online)
• And he directed that the next day, set apart by Congress, be observed as a day of public thanksgiving and praise, with chaplains holding divine services for the brigades and officers and men urged to attend “with reverence.” (Founders Online)

On paper, it sounds like a day of triumph.

The diaries tell a different, more human story.

“We Have Very Little to Keep It With”

Lieutenant Colonel Henry Dearborn wrote on December 18 that it was “Thanksgiving Day thro the whole Continent of America,” but noted grimly that his men had been days without flour or bread, living on a bleak hill in huts and tents. For breakfast, he recorded that they ate exceedingly poor beef, reheated in an old frying pan because they had no platter. (Founders Online)

Surgeon Albigence Waldo of Connecticut managed something better, jotting down that it was “Universal Thanksgiving – a roasted pig at night,” though he added that the army was badly supplied and blamed negligence in the commissary. (Internet Archive)

Sergeant Ebenezer Wild of the 1st Massachusetts Regiment wrote that “we had but a poor Thanksgiving, nothing but fresh beef and flour to eat, without any salt,” and not much even of that. (boston1775.blogspot.com)

Private Joseph Plumb Martin, serving in the ranks, later remembered the “sumptuous thanksgiving” Congress had promised with bitter humor: each man received only “half a gill of rice and a tablespoonful of vinegar.” (Journal of the American Revolution)

Another diary, that of Lt. Samuel Armstrong, describes the men finally getting a little fresh beef near nightfall and sending out a “scout” to acquire some fowls and potatoes so they could cobble together a meager feast, still without bread or anything stronger than water to drink. (Founders Online)

So for soldiers, Thanksgiving 1777 was a day of worship, yes—but also hunger, cold, and dark humor. The proclamations speak of “independence and peace”; the diaries talk about poor beef, rice and vinegar, and gratitude mostly for the simple fact of being alive.

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Thanksgiving Back Home: Meetinghouse and Dinner Table

While the army shivered in Pennsylvania, civilians in the states followed their own local proclamations.

State Proclamations

• In Massachusetts, the General Court issued a proclamation on November 4 setting November 23 as a public thanksgiving, much like the old colonial days—only now in the midst of war. (National Park Service)
• Other New England states, such as Connecticut and New Hampshire, issued similar proclamations, often echoing Congress’s language about unalienable rights, victories in the field, and the need for repentance and virtue. (Library of Congress Tiles)

Governors and councils typically ordered that servile labor be suspended and that ministers of “every denomination” hold services, echoing Congress’s request that even innocent recreations be set aside on such a solemn day. (Library of Congress Tiles)

Worship First, Feast Second

For a typical New England family in the 1770s, a thanksgiving day would start at the meetinghouse:

• Morning (and sometimes afternoon) services with long sermons thanking God for specific blessings.
• Psalms and hymns chosen for themes like deliverance, providence, or the “righteous cause” of liberty.
• Prayers not just for victory, but for moral reform and forgiveness of national sins.

Contemporary accounts and later summaries describe thanksgiving days as essentially an extra Sabbath: serious worship, with a big meal afterward in the home. (Encyclopedia.com)

What Was on the Table?

The exact menu varied by region and wealth, but by the late 18th century, New England thanksgivings were already building toward what we’d recognize today:

• Roast fowl – usually turkey, but also goose, duck, or chicken.
• Chicken pie – a rich poultry pie that became, in the words of one 19th-century New England writer, an “indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving,” rooted in earlier colonial practice. (Wikipedia)
• Pies and puddings – pumpkin (often called “pompkin pudding”), apple, mince, and sometimes Marlborough or apple custard pies, along with plum pudding. Early American cookbooks like Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796) include recipes for pumpkin custard baked in a crust, a forerunner of the classic pumpkin pie. (Wikipedia)
• Vegetables and sides – boiled or mashed potatoes, squash, onions, and what we’d now call cranberry sauce, all in simple preparations that reflected local harvests. (Food Timeline)

One later description of a traditional New England Thanksgiving dinner (built on earlier 18th-century patterns) has guests begin with chicken pie and roast turkey, then move on to mince, squash, pumpkin pies, cranberry tarts, and plum pudding—an all-day, two-hour meal that left everyone in a “drowsy dullness” afterward. (mastatelibrary.blogspot.com)

We should remember, though, that such feasts represented the ideal—the kind of table more likely found in established towns and prosperous farm families. For poorer households, for enslaved people, and for frontier families, the meal could be far simpler, even in peacetime.

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Outside New England: Not Yet “America’s Holiday”

In 1776 the idea of a set, yearly Thanksgiving was still largely a New England habit. (Serious Eats)

• In the mid-Atlantic (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey), thanksgiving days were proclaimed more occasionally, often tied to wartime victories or calls for special prayer.
• In the South, Anglican authorities preferred traditional church feast days, but revolutionary assemblies did sometimes declare fasts or thanksgivings. For example, the Virginia House of Burgesses called for a colony-wide fast in 1774 in response to the Boston Port Bill—part of the same culture of public religious observances that would later shape national thanksgivings. (AmericanMinute.com-William J. Federer)

Only later, after Washington’s 1789 presidential proclamation and the 19th-century campaign of writer Sarah Josepha Hale, would Thanksgiving become something like a truly national, uniform holiday. (George Washington’s Mount Vernon)

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What Thanksgiving Meant in a Time of Revolution

For people living through the Revolution, Thanksgiving was not just a cozy harvest ritual. It was a theological and political statement:

• That God was active in history, blessing or chastening peoples and nations.
• That the struggle for independence was, many believed, a “just and necessary war” tied to unalienable rights and liberties. (Library of Congress Tiles)
• That the new states had a duty to respond with public gratitude, moral reform, and care for neighbors in need.

Those themes show up in the soaring language of the 1777 congressional proclamation—and in the blunt lines of soldiers who, on that same day, were thankful mainly for a little beef, a roasted pig, or a spoonful of rice and vinegar.

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Bringing It Forward to Our Tables

For families today—from Utah’s Cedar Valley to the old New England towns where many of these customs started—it’s easy to think of Thanksgiving mostly in terms of recipes and travel plans.

The sources from around 1776 remind us that for the people who fought and sacrificed at the founding of the United States, thanksgiving days were:

• Communal – proclaimed by assemblies, observed in churches and homes, meant to bind a scattered people together.
• Serious – about gratitude, yes, but also confession, repentance, and renewed commitment.
• Fragile – sometimes marked with abundant tables, sometimes with almost nothing but thin rations and stubborn hope.

Whether your table looks more like a Pinterest board or more like a soldier’s tin plate, those early Americans would probably say the same thing they wrote in 1777: the greatest blessings worth giving thanks for are still “Independence and Peace” and the ties of community and family that survive hard times. (Library of Congress Tiles)