What is the so called lincoln s thanksgiving proclamation?”
his year, your humble correspondent is giving thanks that our second president, John Adams, didn’t set the tone by which our nation celebrates Thanksgiving. In 1798, Adams declared “a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer” and to his fellow citizens recommended “abstaining on that day from their customary worldly occupations.” There was no mention of turkeys, candied yams, pilgrims, football or even heading to grandma’s house. Adams’ proclamation was one of a few issued by three of the first four presidents that might be recognized as the forerunner of the modern call to feasting and thankfulness. But after James Madison called on Americans to offer “to their Heavenly Benefactor of their homage of thanksgiving and of their songs of praise” in 1815, the tradition of national Thanksgiving faded from practice for a couple of generations. Thank goodness. The Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Mass., has catalogued all the presidential Thanksgiving proclamations made since George Was
Lincoln proclaims Thanksgiving November 26, 2009 It was a son of Kentucky, leading the nation through the worst crisis of its life, who set aside an official day of Thanksgiving for America’s people. Perhaps he had learned the leavening benefits of counting one’s blessings, of stopping to note what gladdened the heart, when he and his family were carving an existence out of a veritable wilderness. A tough life can teach lessons of unlikely transformation. How else to explain the impulse to proclaim an official day of thanks for a suffering land, in the middle of a Civil War? That’s what Abraham Lincoln did. Spurred by magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale to make an annually observed day of thanksgiving “a National and fixed Union festival,” President Lincoln did what he could in a few sentences to bring people together. Just several months after the battle of Gettysburg, and just one month after Chickamauga claimed his own brother-in-law, Lincoln on Oct. 3, 1863, issued a Proclamation of
