Michael J. Connolly
The creation of Thanksgiving was no uncontested process but a fight emerging from antebellum crises over slavery and American nationalism.

In November 1859, a Washington, DC alderman from Capitol Hill violently opposed the mayor’s request to declare a Thanksgiving public holiday. By this point, annual celebrations had become traditional and twenty-five governors already proclaimed the holiday for their states. The DC Board of Aldermen, however, hesitated over Thanksgiving’s perceived connection to public disorder, its quasi-religious status, its origins in New England, and its link to abolitionism. Their skepticism came at a time when Southerners searched for alternative historical narratives of the American founding against the rising popularity of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony tale. Alderman Charles W. C. Dunnington and six colleagues fought Thanksgiving and, to the shock of the city, thwarted the mayor.
Charles William Colquhoun Dunnington grew up in Dumfries, Virginia, just down river from Washington. A printer by trade, he worked as a young man for veteran Democrat Thomas Ritchie at the Washington Globe, the city’s premier Jacksonian newspaper, and the two became fast friends exchanging political gossip. He also contributed to the Democratic Party’s cause by penning an oft-caustic twice-weekly partisan column for the Alexandria Sentinel under the pseudonym “Quantico.” Dunnington’s Globe connections burnished his reputation among city Democrats and in recognition Presidents Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan all appointed him Chief of the Capitol Police. His politics were pure orthodox Jacksonianism of the Southern persuasion. When the trans-Atlantic telegraph neared completion, for example, the Anglophobe Dunnington notoriously opposed electronic connections between America and the United Kingdom. The entire enterprise was a British plot to overturn the American Revolution. “He cared not how many English, or Irish, or Germans, came to our country, to make it their home,” the National Era ridiculed. “[H]e had a hearty welcome for all;  » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/11/year-washington-almost-canceled-thanksgiving-michael-j-connolly.html