Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll prepare for tomorrow by looking at the first Thanksgiving proclamation issued in the United States. We’ll also get details on a proposal to build new single-room-occupancy apartments as small as 100 square feet each.
Stowed away carefully at a Manhattan auction house is a yellowed page in an ornate wooden frame. It is a thanksgiving proclamation — the first issued by Congress, which approved it two weeks before it adopted the Articles of Confederation in 1777. The Constitution was 12 years in the future.
“It was the first time that a day of thanksgiving had ever been done on a national basis,” said Peter Klarnet, a senior specialist for manuscripts and Americana at Christie’s, which plans to sell the document next year. “Before, it would have been colonial governors who issued proclamations. They might have done so in concert with each other. But they were British.”
It was signed by Henry Laurens, a plantation owner from South Carolina who had replaced John Hancock as the president of the Continental Congress. Laurens, like Hancock, had an impressive signature, but he was in Europe in 1776 and did not sign the Declaration of Independence.
Words by Samuel Adams
But Laurens apparently did not write the thanksgiving proclamation. The author is usually said to have been Samuel Adams, who, as his biographer Stacy Schiff argued, was behind the transformation of public opinion that turned colonists who had been loyal British subjects into rebels. Adams’s role in drafting the thanksgiving proclamation was even cited by President Jimmy Carter in his Thanksgiving proclamation in 1977.
It was the first in the still-new United States, but not the first in the colonies. As Klarnet noted, colonial governors had issued proclamations for days of thanksgiving — the Manuscript and Archives Division of the New York Public Library has one issued in Virginia in 1619.
But Adams’s proclamation could only have been written by a rebel as the Revolutionary War was grinding on. It asked God “to smile upon us” in “a just and necessary war, for the defence and establishment of our unalienable rights and liberties.”
Adams wrote it at what Klarnet called “an extraordinarily critical juncture in the struggle for independence,” soon after the British general John Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga, That proved to be a moment of deliverance for the colonists, who had lost New York the year before. When Louis XVI heard about Burgoyne’s defeat, he authorized negotiations for an alliance with the Americans, the first step toward French diplomatic and financial support and, ultimately, independence for the new nation.
The parades came later
But when to celebrate? Adams’s proclamation called for thanksgiving on a Thursday — in December, a week before Christmas — and did not say that the holiday would recur. President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation in 1863 that Thanksgiving would be celebrated that Nov. 26, the last Thursday of the month. The presidents who followed Lincoln generally followed his lead, issuing annual proclamations for the holiday to be observed on the fourth Thursday of November. During the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved it to the third Thursday for a couple of years, only to move it back after Congress passed a joint resolution in 1941.
Klarnet said that colonial-era thanksgivings were “solemn religious observances.” Gen. George Washington notified his starving troops about the holiday and directed the chaplains to hold services and urged officers and soldiers “whose absence is not indispensably necessary to attend with reverence the solemnities of the day.”
The parades came later. Catherine Clinton, a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast who specializes in American history, wrote in an essay for New York Historical that “neighborhood revelry, which began in New York City in the 1840s, transformed the holiday into an elaborate commercial gala.”
The copy of the 1777 proclamation at Christie’s is one of four known to exist. This one had been owned by Jim Irsay, the hard-driving owner of the Indianapolis Colts, who died in May. “It started out as basically a handout at a conference,” Klarnet said, “and then took on additional meaning as the years went by.”
Weather
There’s a chance of rain early this morning and a chance of showers in the early evening. In between, the sky will be mostly cloudy with a high near 63. Tonight, the low will be around 39.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Thursday (Thanksgiving).
The latest New York news
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A new trial in the Etan Patz case: The Manhattan district attorney’s office said it was ready to retry Pedro Hernandez, whose conviction in the decades-old murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz in SoHo was overturned earlier this year.
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New York pushes to stop Trump’s housing plan: The state attorney general, Letitia James, joined officials from 20 other states in an effort to stop new federal rules that could jeopardize housing for 170,000 people across the United States. The administration favors shelters and rehabilitation centers over long-term housing.
Mamdani and Israel
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Mayor-elect’s response to a protest heightens tensions: Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani chastised a synagogue that hosted an event promoting migration to Israel and settlements in occupied territories. He said through a spokeswoman that “these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law,” a comment that alarmed some Jewish leaders.
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Challengers target House Democrats’ support for Israel: Several Democratic incumbents — including Representative Adriano Espaillat, whose district includes Upper Manhattan and part of the Bronx, and Representative Daniel Goldman, who represents parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn — are facing primary battles after Zohran Mamdani’s win suggested that being pro-Israel was no longer a political imperative.
Other news
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An influencer who didn’t pick up the check: Since Oct. 22, the police have arrested Pei-Yun Chung seven times on charges of misdemeanor theft of services after she refused to pay for meals at six restaurants in Brooklyn.
A ‘new’ solution to the housing crisis
There is a push to revive single-room-occupancy housing, where kitchens and bathrooms are shared among apartments as small as 100 square feet each.
Councilman Erik Bottcher, a Democrat who represents parts of Manhattan, introduced a bill on Tuesday that would allow the construction of new single-room-occupancy apartments for the first time in decades. The legislation, backed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, would make it easier to convert office buildings into these types of homes, also known as S.R.O.s.
“We’re trying to make housing more affordable and create more supply,” said Ahmed Tigani, the acting commissioner of the housing department.
My colleague Mihir Zaveri writes that single-room apartments once symbolized everything wrong with New York City. They were seen as cheap places where crime festered, drugs flourished and the poor suffered daily indignities.
Now city officials say that the obvious benefit is that S.R.O.s and other shared housing would be cheap. But they might also match the city’s changing demographics.
The number of single-person households grew almost 9 percent between 2018 and 2023, city officials said. The number of households with people living together who are not a family — for example, roommates — grew more than 11 percent over that same time period.
METROPOLITAN diary
Carnegie Deli
Dear Diary:
I took my first business trip to New York City in the 1980s. My list of must-do experiences while I was in town included having a pastrami sandwich at the Carnegie Deli.
Walking in for a late lunch, I was in an almost altered state of consciousness as I absorbed the sights, sounds and smells of my long-desired destination.
I watched the heaping mounds of meat being sliced and served and I knew I had choices to make.
Half a pastrami sandwich, a bowl of matzo ball soup and a cup of black coffee. It was magnificent.
When I took my bill to the cashier, I noticed the total was $17.76. I handed him the check and a $20 bill.
“1776 is a significant number,” I joked. “Do I win anything?
“Yeah,” he said without looking up. “You win your freedom. If you pay your bill, I don’t call the cops.” Then, under his breath, he added: “That was not too bad.”
— Bill Coy
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Lauren Hard and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post The First Thanksgiving Proclamation, 12 Years Before the Constitution appeared first on New York Times.
