Source: Abraham 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.
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 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.
A. Lincoln, October 3, 1863.