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Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation
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 our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation
as a whole people? We have been the recipients of the choisest 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.
A. Lincoln October 3, 1863
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