Thanksgiving Proclamation

as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people

 President Abraham Lincoln

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful years 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 can not fail to penetrate and soften even 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 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 field 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 of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than theretofore. 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 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 wherof I have herunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

President Abraham Lincoln, 1863

 Proclamation for a National Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer

to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it,
to the full enjoyment of
peace, harmony, tranquility, and union

 President Abraham Lincoln

 “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 behooves us,
then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national
sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”