[Editor’s note: This article is excerpted from Leggett’s article “Thanksgiving Day,” first published in 1836. Leggett was one of America’s leading Jacksonian free-market journalists in the mid-nineteenth century, and was a committed opponent of central banks, slavery, and corporatism. “The separation of bank and state” was a part of his political creed. In this article, Leggett, true to form, reminds his readers that they do not need either the federal government or the state governments to tell us on what days to be thankful. For Leggett, this was especially true of the federal government which is to have no place at all in meddling in the local culture, religions, or politics of the many states of the American confederation. Leggett was a true decentralist who favored the dissolution of the federal union if that proved beneficial to the freedom of the American people. With Leggett, freedom, not national unity always came first.]