Morning Bell: President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation
Mike Brownfield /
We hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving yesterday and continue to enjoy spending time with friends and family today. While we at The Heritage Foundation enjoy our holiday, we invite you to read 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.
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields 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 as the iron and coal as of our precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. 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 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 imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.
Quick Hits:
- Occupy Wall Street protesters are planning to occupy stores today in protest of Black Friday and “the business that are in the pockets of Wall Street,” according to CNBC.
- The Obama Administration is ramping up its campaign against an al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia by increasing proxy forces and drone operations, according to The Washington Post.
- A Republican member of the National Labor Relations Board has threatened to resign because of a proposed rule that would speed up union elections. If he did, he would effectively shut down the NLRB and prevent the rule from being adopted.
- As massive protests continue in Egypt, the country’s military has appointed Kamal Ganzouri to serve as prime minister at least until parliamentary elections are finalized in early January.
- The Obama Administration is approving just 35 percent of the oil drilling plans for the Gulf of Mexico so far this year, a sharp contrast to previous years.