Thanksgiving Proclamation
"It is the duty of nations as well as
of men to show their dependence on the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow
– yet, with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth announced
in the Holy Scriptures, and proven by all history that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.
We know that by His divine law, nations,
like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity
of civil war, which now desolates the land may be a punishment to our national reformation as a whole?
We have been the recipients of
the choicest bounties of heaven.
We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity.
We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever
grown. But, we have forgotten God.
We have forgotten the gracious Hand which preserved us in peace and
multiplied and enriched and strengthened us. And, we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these
blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own! Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too
self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace; too proud to pray to the God that made us.
It has seemed to me, fit and proper that God 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 at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday
of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father, who dwelleth in the heavens.”
Abraham Lincoln
3 October 1863
