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Thanksgiving 1863

www.sonofthesouth.net

Originally aired on November 24, 1995 - In part 65 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson traces our modern-day observation of Thanksgiving to an 1863 presidential proclamation.

#65 – Thanksgiving 1863

The Civil War touches our lives in more ways than any other event or factor in the national experience. A peculiarly American holiday in late November is but another example.

Religious observances of thanksgiving for the harvests of autumn and other blessings went back to colonial days. In the early years of the Republic, the thanksgiving custom became established with special importance in New England. Nineteenth Century state governors sometimes issued proclamations for days to be marked by thanksgiving.

From the beginning of the Southern Confederacy, President Jefferson Davis ordered days set aside here and there for giving thanks over military successes and for beseeching divine blessing for the future. Yet no regularity existed in the practice.

Back in the 1840s, an energetic woman named Sarah Hale had urged various state governors to agree on a uniform date for a thanksgiving observance; and she suggested the last Thursday in November. Nothing came of this for almost twenty years. Then, in September, 1861, Ms. Hale pled with President Lincoln to set aside a national day for giving thanks.

Lincoln saw the wisdom of the suggestion, and he acted eloquently upon it. The next month, he made this announcement: “The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies…In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity,… peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been…obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict…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…hath remembered mercy.”

Lincoln continued: These blessings “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…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…commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife…and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation…”

The next year, Lincoln issued a similar proclamation of Thanksgiving. He asked Americans in 1864 to give “fervent prayers” to God for “inestimable blessings” and he again set aside the last Thursday in November as a special day. With that, the tradition of Thanksgiving was established. It was done in a way so characteristic of Abraham Lincoln.

No statute was enacted, no official document was fed to the Congress for endless debate. Lincoln simply invited his fellow Americans to join in a common observance of Thanksgiving to the One from whom life and life’s blessings came. In issuing his proclamation, Lincoln did not act in terms of any duty or appointed function, but rather as a focus of national thought. He acted as the spokesman of the nation, and the nation should be eternally grateful.

  Shamefully, Thanksgiving has come to be for untold Americans nothing more than the kickoff for the commercial frenzy we call “Christmas shopping”. That November holiday deserves better. Still, it is fitting that the nationalizing of Thanksgiving should be associated with the man who led the country through what has been called the “Ordeal of the Union”. It is equally fitting that Thanksgiving should be a legacy of the Civil War. After all, from that vast cataclysm came nationhood – the thing for which we ought to be giving thanks on Thanksgiving Day.

Dr. James I. "Bud" Robertson, Jr., is a noted scholar on the American Civil War and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech.