For decades, Northern antislavery clergy—especially New England’s evangelical Protestant ministers—had already been using Thanksgiving to deliver their most impassioned antislavery denunciations. On January 1, 1808, Black abolitionist and Episcopal priest Absalom Jones preached “A Thanksgiving Sermon,” recognizing the first day of the federal ban on transatlantic trafficking of Africans into America to be enslaved. The Rev. Jones suggested that January 1 should be annually observed as a “day of publick thanksgiving” to “remember the history of the sufferings of our brethren” and to commemorate the end of “the trade which dragged your fathers from their native country, and sold them as bondmen in the United States of America.”
In fact, the date did become an annual day of Thanksgiving for Northern Black communities, at least until the Civil War and emancipation, particularly in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Historian David Waldstreicher writes that celebrations included a street parade to the church, followed by “a reading of Congress’s act abolishing the slave trade, much as white celebrants read the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s inaugural address, or other texts.”
The second national day of Thanksgiving declared by President Washington, February 19, 1795, saw Boston preacher Thomas Baldwin issue a plea that “the day soon arrive when not difference of climate or features nor the color of the skin—when nothing but crimes shall consign any of the human race to slavery.” In his Nov. 26, 1835, Thanksgiving sermon, New Hampshire’s Rev. Calvin Cutler called slavery “a standing memorial of our shame and hypocrisy,” labeling the institution a betrayal of the country’s professed ideals and a threat to freedom of all. “When the nation hold as self-evident truths, ‘that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights’… [yet] one sixth of this very nation have these inalienable rights wrested from them by violence…. Is there no danger that our liberties will be infringed and destroyed, when the nation by their practice give the lie to their profession?” Cutler’s sermon text reads.
Thirteen years later, on the Thanksgiving just weeks after the election which gave Zachary Taylor the presidency, Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson—radical abolitionist, mentor of Emily Dickinson, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and later, a supporter of John Brown’s 1859 armed rebellion—bemoaned the fact that there would be “another slaveholding President at the head of this nominally free Republic,” and warned the time had arrived when the North “could go no farther in its subserviency to the Slave Power.”