Thanksgiving Proclamation
1863
by President Abraham Lincoln
It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence
upon
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 inflicted upon us for presumptuous sins, to the needful end of
our national reformation as a whole people?
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.
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