Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

The idea of setting aside times for National Thanksgiving is part of our heritage since the founding of our Republic. But in October 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for a National Day of Thanksgiving to be Celebrated every November. After three years of agonizing national civil war, hope had shown over the horizon with crucial military victories on July 4 at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. In little over a month the president would be traveling to the battlefield at Gettysburg to consecrate the nation’s first national military cemetery – where his 2 minute address to the crowd would echo into history as perhaps the defining expression of what it cost to build this country.

But in his Thanksgiving Proclamation, Lincoln simply wanted to lift his people’s eyes from the travail around them to see the sustaining hand of God. His opening words could easily be spoken to us today:

"The year that is drawing towards 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 soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God."

In this proclamation Lincoln goes on to implore all people to conscious and vocal thanksgiving for both the blessings they enjoy, but also for the mercy that does not treat them as their sins deserve. And he ends by calling then to prayer for the great moral struggle in the land – foreshadowing the words he would speak on November 19, 144 years ago today in his Gettysburg Address:

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

Let us remember the cost of freedom still being paid. And let us thank Almighty God for our freedom in Christ, purchased for us by the shed blood of the Savior.

Here is the full text of Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, Delivered October 3, 1863.

Here is the full text of the Gettysburg Address, delivered November 19, 1863.