Americans celebrate Thanksgiving today, and along with Canadians in October, are the only people on earth who have such a national day dedicated to thanking God for our blessings. But do you know why this national day is celebrated now, from Maine to Guam?
George Washington actually was the first president to call for a national day of Thanksgiving to God, on October 3, 1789, exactly 74 years before Lincoln’s.
For years in our nation’s infancy, many states—especially in the North—scheduled their own dates for a Thanksgiving holiday.
But for over a decade, Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor, had tried to persuade various presidents to set oneconsistent date for the whole country to mark the holiday. Administrations came and went, and all ignored her…until at age 74, she finally met success.
In September 1863, just two months after the horrific slaughter at Gettysburg and in the middle of the Civil War, she got Lincoln’s attention with a letter. Hale explained the need for a “day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival.” She added, “You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritative fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution.”
A few things to note about the proclamation:
- The elevated language. The sophisticated vocabulary speaks not only to the highly educated residents in the White House, but also to the average citizen who could understand a declaration with words like “habitually insensible,” “augmented,” and “ascriptions.”
- The religious language. For a people who have been misguided into believing “the separation of church and state” means “no role of religion in public or governmental life,” the document is a howling rebuke for its open religiosity. Not only does it call on all Americans to thank God and pray, but also to repent for our “national perverseness.” Can you imagine any president today, for example, President Trump, Biden, or Obama, making a public call stating, “We Americans really need to get on our knees and repent for our perversion and twistedness”?
- The threat of foreign intervention. Regarding the reference “seemed to foreign states to invite and provoke their aggressions,” when the Civil War began in 1861, the possibility of Britain and/or France joining to aid the Confederacy was real. The South relied on “King Cotton” as an export, and European textile mills needed the fibers. Without French aid during the American Revolution, we would not have won our independence (see: Battle of Yorktown). Had the Brits or French helped the South during the Civil War, the Confederacy probably would have triumphed, and no one knew that better than Lincoln or his Secretary of State, William Seward.
- Speaking of Seward: Lincoln wrote most of his presidential declarations, but Seward wrote this proclamation. Still, he represented the Lincoln Administration, and it had the president’s blessing. Seward later became famous two years after the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination when, as Andrew Johnson’s Secretary of State, he arranged the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million.
By the President of the United States
A Proclamation
The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and provoke their aggressions, 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 iron and coal, as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, not withstanding 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 at sea and those who are sojourning 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 interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, 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 third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.
By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward, Secretary of State
