Abe Lincoln Address
Abraham Lincoln
Proclamations of Thanksgiving
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 just-
ly fear that awful calamity of civil war which now
desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted
upon us for our presumptious 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 decietfulness of our
hearts, that all these blessings were produced by
some superior wisdom and virtue of ou rown.
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. A. Lincold March 1863
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 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 beneficient Father who
dwelleth in the Heavens. A. Lincoln Oct. 1863