Morning Bell: Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

Conn Carroll / November 26, 2010

We hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving Holiday yesterday and continue to enjoy spending time with friends and family today. The Heritage Foundation will be posting on The Foundry throughout this Friday so please check back frequently. Till then, do enjoy President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation below.

The year that is drawing toward 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 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. (more…)