Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation
In 1863 Lincoln Restores Presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations. America forgot national prayer during 45 years of peace and prosperity. Then in 1863 Abraham Lincoln thundered, "We have been recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven ... we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown, but we have forgotten God." Lincoln restored the neglected presidential proclamations of prayer and thanksgiving during the tragic years of the Civil War. "Intoxicated with unbroken success," he wrote, "we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and reserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us." Lincoln issued the first Thanksgiving Proclamation in many years; since then every president has issued at least one per year. No president since Lincoln has forgotten Thanksgiving to God each year, weaving a picture of our most beloved tradition. Around the globe for more than 200 years, Americans have invited friends of every nation to their Thanksgiving table
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as the iron and coal as of our precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.
No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.
In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the city of Washington, this 3d day of October, A. D. 1863, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.
Abraham Lincoln
By the President
William H. Seward, Secretary of State
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