How Thanksgiving got started

[rebocardo]

How Thanksgiving got started as a (Federal) holiday after it had been neglected by the nation for about "40" years ...

How Thanksgiving Day got started

Lincoln's Declaration of Thanksgiving
as a National Holiday, 1863

It is the duty of nations as well as of men to owe 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.

We 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 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.

(signed) A. Lincoln
October3, 1863

[DanG]

Thanks, Rebo! I think I'll print that out and read it aloud before our dinner tomorrow.  

[fencerowphil (Phil L.)]

My sentiments, exactly,  Dan!

Lincoln wrote, at one point during the war,   that, if the burdens he felt were distributed among the people,  there would not be a happy face upon the earth.  That's a lot of pressure - yet, he thanked his Maker!
Phil L.

[rebocardo]

Yes, we read it before eating on Thanksgiving and I gave copies last year to my neighbors. I was 35+ years old before I knew why it was a holiday and the history behind Thanksgiving for the past 400 years.

I am not making the same mistake with my children  :-[

[Furby]

We read it before eating as well.

[Percy]

Im a Canadian of course, but I gotta say, That Lincoln fella was  quite the statesman. He had it figured out pretty good. The whole world could used a bunch more of him these days. Hope y'all enjoyed your Thanksgiving Day. We(Canada) had ours in October.