Thanksgiving Proclamations of 1789 and 1863, Read as Lessons in Gratitude

Picture the most miserable moment in the history of the American Union and ask what the President did. Not what he said about the enemy, or about the economy, or about how much he planned to fix. What he did was sit down and write a proclamation inviting the whole country to say thank you.

That happened. It happened in the autumn of 1863, with the dead of Gettysburg barely buried and the war nowhere near over. It had happened before, in 1789, when a brand-new government with no money, no precedent and plenty of enemies decided that its first act of national feeling should be gratitude. Two proclamations, seventy-four years apart, from the first President and the sixteenth, both public-domain, both short enough to read at the table before the turkey gets cold.

I want to read them with you, passage by passage, the way you would read a letter from a relative you have not met. There is a lesson in them, and it is a lesson our own age, which has a flourishing trade in grievance, could use. Gratitude is not a mood. It is a civic habit, and like every habit it is made by practice.

The first Thanksgivings were not national

Some background first, because we tend to flatten the history. The harvest feast of the Plymouth colonists in 1621 is the story every schoolchild hears, and it is a real one, but it was not a national holiday and it was not an annual institution. Days of thanksgiving and days of fasting were proclaimed by colonial governors, by town meetings and by the Continental Congress during the Revolution, each for a particular occasion: a victory, a harvest, a deliverance. There was no fixed national day and no national tradition.

That began to change when the first Congress met under the new Constitution. The new government held its first sessions in New York in the spring and summer of 1789. In the same weeks, on September 25, 1789, Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey moved that a joint committee ask the President to recommend a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.

The motion was not without opposition. Some members objected that Congress had no business telling the people to give thanks, and one, Thomas Tudor Tucker of South Carolina, argued that the House had no business meddling in a matter that did not concern it. Others spoke in its favour, Roger Sherman among them, who called it a laudable thing in itself. The motion carried, and a committee waited on the President.

Washington's proclamation, October 3, 1789

On October 3, 1789, George Washington issued the proclamation. It is worth quoting at some length. It begins:

"Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor."

Look at the structure. The first duty named is not asking, it is acknowledging. The nation's first obligation is to recognise that it has received something it did not make. And note the word nations. Washington says it is the duty of all nations, not just the United States, not just Christians, not just believers of one denomination. It is a generalisation about what a people owes the source of its blessings.

The proclamation then recites that both Houses of Congress have requested him to "recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."

Pause on the last clause, which is the one Congress asked him to stress. The Americans are asked to be thankful, among other things, for the opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government. The proclamation itself goes on to list more: the conclusion of the late war, the tranquillity, union and plenty since, and the peaceable and rational manner in which constitutions of government had been established. In 1789 that was an astonishing fact. The history of the world is mostly the history of governments established by force, inheritance or conquest. Here a people had written a constitution, argued about it in public, ratified it in conventions and installed a government without a coup. That was a gift. The thanks were for the peaceful making of a free government.

Then comes the appointment of the day:

"Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be."

Notice the verb: recommend. Washington does not command. A President of a free country is not in a position to order a day of thanks, and he knew it. He recommends and assigns, and the people are free to heed or not. The day was Thursday, November 26, 1789. It was a recommendation, a courtesy of the highest office to a free people.

The text then goes on to list what the people should be thankful for and what they should ask: that they may "unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations," and that God would pardon "our national and other trangressions." There is humility in this. A nation that has just founded itself says, in the same breath, that it has sins to be forgiven. The Americans are not asked to think that they are perfect. They are asked to thank Providence for what they have been given and to confess that they have not always deserved it.

Further down the text asks for "civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed," and for the knowledge and practice of "true religion and virtue." This is the Washington who, in the Farewell Address of 1796, called religion and morality indispensable supports of political prosperity. Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable reads that passage, and Washington's 1789 and Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving proclamations side by side sets the two proclamations side by side.

One more point belongs here, because it is the kind of thing that makes the first President more interesting than the statues. A year later, in August 1790, Washington wrote a letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, saying that the government of the United States "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." The same man who called the nation to thanksgiving wrote that. He did not see a contradiction, and I think he was right. To bigotry no sanction, Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport tells that story. A grateful people can be a free one.

The holiday that went away and came back

The 1789 day was kept in many places and then the national practice faded. Thanksgiving proclamations by later Presidents came irregularly, and some, such as Thomas Jefferson, declined to issue them on the ground that it was not the federal government's business to prescribe religious observance. States kept the custom alive, and by the 1840s and 1850s a number of them proclaimed a day in the autumn, on different dates, so that the holiday was a patchwork.

The person who did most to change that was not a politician. She was Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey's Lady's Book, a widely read women's magazine of the era. Starting in the 1840s she campaigned for a national Thanksgiving to be held on a single day, and she was still at it on September 28, 1863, when she wrote to Abraham Lincoln.

Hale is a model of what a private citizen can do. She had no office and no army. She had a pen, a readership and years of persistence. When the President finally issued a proclamation, it was in a real sense her victory. If you want to know what "citizen participation" looks like, there it is: a magazine editor sending letters until a country changed.

Lincoln's proclamation, October 3, 1863

On October 3, 1863, Lincoln issued a proclamation setting the last Thursday of November as a day of national thanksgiving. The text is credited to his Secretary of State, William Seward, on the strength of a letter from a Lincoln aide, and Lincoln issued it over both their names. Consider the circumstances. The war was in its third year. In July the Union had won at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and a lot of Americans on both sides were in mourning. The Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect on January 1. The Union's survival was still in doubt.

And what did the President write? It begins:

"The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies."

A war President opens with fields and skies. He begins with the ordinary goods that the war had not destroyed: the harvest came in. Then comes a paragraph that should be read aloud:

"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."

It is a sweeping claim, and the lesson in it is more subtle than it looks. The country was in the worst crisis of its existence, and the proclamation tells it to count what has not gone wrong: no foreign intervention, no collapse of order, the laws still obeyed. That is not denial. The war is named, twice. It is perspective. It is the discipline of looking at your situation and noticing the parts that are not on fire.

Then comes the theological turn:

"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."

Notice the same pairing we saw in Washington: thanks together with an admission of fault. Dealing with us in anger for our sins. The author of the proclamation does not suppose that the nation deserves its good fortune. He suggests that the war itself might be a judgment, and that mercy has come anyway. It is a posture of humility from a man who held more power than any American before him.

The proclamation then invites the people to set apart the last Thursday of November "as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens." And it goes on to a request for the grieving:

"…to 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."

Read that again. In a document of thanksgiving, in the middle of a war, the President asks the country to remember the widows, the orphans and the mourners. Gratitude, in his hands, is not cheerfulness. It is a form of attention that includes the people who are suffering. And he closes with the hope that God would "heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union."

Seven weeks later, on November 19, 1863, Lincoln was at Gettysburg to speak at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery. The proclamation and the address are companion pieces. Both say that the nation's survival is a gift and a duty. For a closely related text, see Lincoln's Apple of Gold Fragment Explains the Declaration and Constitution.

Why 1789 and 1863 belong together

Here is an argument, in numbers, for reading the two together.

1. Both came at a moment of fragility. The country in 1789 had no settled government and a large war debt. The country in 1863 was tearing itself apart. A leader at a moment of fear has a choice between feeding the fear and calling for gratitude, and both Washington and Lincoln called for gratitude.
2. Both name the source of the blessing and admit the nation's faults. Neither text is triumphalist. Each asks the people to give thanks and, in the same document, to confess and to repent. That balance is the opposite of complacency.
3. Both are recommendations to a free people. Neither President commanded. They invited. The invitations worked because they were addressed to people who could say no.
4. Both turn private virtue into public habit. A day of thanks is the nation teaching itself a virtue. Habits taught at the scale of a country do not appear by accident.

Congress fixed the holiday on the fourth Thursday of November by a joint resolution signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on December 26, 1941, which ended a decades-long dispute over whether the last Thursday or the fourth was the right one in months that have five Thursdays. The substance of the holiday was fixed in 1863.

Gratitude against grievance

Now I will be a host for a minute and say the thing I think the proclamations are really about. There are two kinds of national culture. One begins with what is owed. The other begins with what has been given. The first produces complaint, an endless audit of the ways the world has failed you. The second produces gratitude, and, interestingly, much more generosity.

Grievance is not always wrong. Some grievances are just, and the country has a long record of correcting them: slavery ended, segregation outlawed, rights extended. Lincoln himself was no stranger to indignation. But a culture that has only grievance has nothing to build on. Complaint is a way of spending an inheritance without acknowledging that it was left to you. Gratitude is the habit of noticing the inheritance. For a fuller treatment of that thought, see Gratitude Is a Conservative Virtue, and Ingratitude Fuels Every Revolution.

This is a conservative idea in the deepest sense. Burke taught that a society is a partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born. If that is true, then the first duty of the living is thanks to the dead who built what we use, and the second is care for those who come after. A people that has stopped being thankful has stopped being an heir and become a customer.

The family table

How does a proclamation reach a family? Through practice, and the practice is easy. Here is a way to try it. This is a hypothetical, labelled as such: picture a family in Ohio around a table on the fourth Thursday of November. Before the meal, someone reads a short passage from Washington's proclamation or Lincoln's, ten lines at most. Then each person, from the youngest who can talk to the oldest, says one thing he is grateful for that cannot be bought. The answers will be surprising. Children say things like a dog, or a grandfather's stories. Adults, if the room is good, say harder things.

That small ritual does more than any lecture. It teaches children that the good things in life are received before they are earned, that other people made them possible, and that thanks is an act, not a feeling. It also gives the family a shared story: this holiday began with a President writing to a divided country, and every year we write ourselves back into that letter. For a child who is growing up in a culture of constant complaint, the habit may be the most valuable thing a home can teach.

The case in brief

1. Washington's proclamation of October 3, 1789, set Thursday, November 26, as a day to thank Providence for the peaceful establishment of a free government, and it recommended rather than commanded.
2. Lincoln's proclamation of October 3, 1863, drafted by Seward, asked a country at war to count its surviving blessings, to confess its faults and to remember the widows and orphans.
3. Sarah Josepha Hale's years of letters turned a patchwork of state days into a national holiday, and Congress fixed its date in 1941.
4. Both texts pair gratitude with humility, and both address a free people by invitation. Gratitude is a civic habit, the opposite of a culture of grievance.
5. A family can keep the habit at its own table with one short reading and one thing each person is thankful for.

What you can do: read both proclamations aloud at your next Thanksgiving table, using the texts in the National Archives or the Library of Congress, and let each person name one thing he is thankful for.