Washington's 1789 and Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving proclamations side by side

Every November, somewhere in America, a grade-school teacher assigns a paper-bag turkey and a short, sanitized story about pilgrims, and a few weeks later the nation sits down to a meal whose reason, on the official record, was a request to thank God. Somewhere between the first and the second, the reason got lost, and the gravy took over.

I like the gravy. I have no quarrel with the football, either. But the holiday has a paper trail, two paper trails in fact, and both are short enough to read over a second cup of coffee. One was signed by George Washington. The other was signed by Abraham Lincoln. They are seventy-four years apart, one from the dawn of the republic and one from the middle of its worst crisis, and when you read them side by side, they say a remarkable thing: that a free people owes thanks, and that it owes them out loud.

This post reads both proclamations passage by passage, what each meant then, and what each asks now. The quotations are from the public record, and I am quoting only where I am sure of the words.

Step one: Congress asks

The story of the first national proclamation begins in Congress, in September 1789. The new government was months old. The First Congress had just finished one of its great jobs, sending the proposed Bill of Rights to the states, and on September 25 the House took up a motion from Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey. He proposed that a joint committee wait on the President to request that he recommend to the people a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.

The debate is worth knowing, because it was not unanimous. Some members objected. Aedanus Burke of South Carolina and Thomas Tucker, also of South Carolina, argued that the Congress should not be borrowing from European habits, and Tucker questioned whether the national government had any business in such a matter at all. Roger Sherman of Connecticut answered by appeal to Scripture. The resolution passed. The Senate agreed, and the joint committee called on the President.

That matters for two reasons. First, the request came from the legislature, which is where it belonged under the Constitution; the President was asked to recommend, not command. Second, the objection was a constitutional one, that the federal government had no enumerated power over religious observance, and it was answered in the way the founders answered most things: by drawing a line between recommending and compelling. A proclamation is not a statute. It cannot require anyone to do anything. Keep that distinction in mind, because it recurs in 1863.

Step two: Washington's proclamation, October 3, 1789

The President issued his proclamation on October 3, 1789, from New York, then the seat of the government. It sets the date, Thursday, November 26, and it states the reasons. It begins by saying that 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.

The opening paragraph is the claim. Notice what it does not say: it does not say this is the duty of Christians, or of the Church, or of the members of any denomination. It says it is the duty of all nations. It is a statement about civic life, about what a political community owes, as a community, to the source of its blessings. That was a commonplace for the generation that wrote it. They saw independence, victory and a workable Constitution as things that could not be credited to planning alone. The phrasing is closer to the Declaration, with its appeal to "the Supreme Judge of the world" and its "firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence," than to any sermon.

The proclamation then recites the Congressional request, asking the people to acknowledge "with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness." Read that clause twice. The first reason for thanks is the Constitution: not a harvest, not a battle, but the peaceful founding of a government. They were thanking God for the chance to write a constitution without bloodshed, and it had not been guaranteed.

Then the President sets the day. He recommends that it be devoted "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." Then he lists what the people should do: render thanks for protection through the war, for the peaceable establishment of the government, for the civil and religious liberty enjoyed, for useful knowledge. And he adds something that every cynic of the holiday should notice. He asks the people to join in humbly offering prayers "to pardon our national and other transgressions," and to "render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a government of wise, just and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed."

That is a long way from a parade. Gratitude, in Washington's hands, comes paired with penitence and with a civics lesson. A free people thanks God for its government, confesses its failings, and prays that the government will stay lawful. In one paragraph you get the whole conservative understanding of ordered liberty: thanks, humility and the rule of law, in that order. For more on how Washington tied religion to the habits of freedom, see Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable. The founders' own words are collected on the Founders page.

Step three: the long gap, and Sarah Josepha Hale

Here is a fact that surprises people: after 1789, there was no annual national Thanksgiving. Presidents issued occasional proclamations. John Adams called days of fasting and prayer. Many states observed their own days, typically in the autumn, but the dates varied. Thomas Jefferson, as I understand the record, declined to issue such proclamations, on his reading of the church-state boundary. So the national holiday as we know it was not a continuous tradition from 1789. It was revived.

The reviver was a woman, and her story is one of the great campaigns of American civic life. Sarah Josepha Hale, a New Hampshire-born writer and the longtime editor of Godey's Lady's Book, a widely read magazine, began writing editorials in the 1840s urging a national day of thanksgiving. She wrote to governors, to members of Congress and to presidents, year after year, for many years. She believed that a shared day of gratitude would knit the country together at a time when it was straining to pieces. The nation was dividing over slavery and sectional rivalry, and she thought a common holiday might help.

This is a good place to note something for those who think nothing ever changes in politics by persistence. One editor, writing letters, moved a nation. No lobbyist, no committee and no organized movement was needed. She wrote, and kept writing. In September 1863, she wrote again, to President Lincoln. The country was in the middle of a war in which brothers killed brothers, and the letter asked for a national thanksgiving. This time the letter arrived at a government that wanted to say something.

Step four: Lincoln's proclamation, October 3, 1863

Lincoln issued his proclamation on October 3, 1863, exactly seventy-four years after Washington's, to the day. The text was countersigned by his Secretary of State, William Seward, and it is a small masterpiece of public prose.

It opens with an image: "The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies." That is not a battlefield sentence, and the contrast is deliberate. Lincoln had a country at war, and he began with fields and skies. Then comes the turn, the sentence the whole proclamation is built around: that these blessings came "in the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity," and that peace had been preserved with all nations. Industry had gone on, the fields had produced, the country had grown in strength and the population had increased.

Note what the 1863 text says about the source of these goods. They are, it states, "the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy." Hold that clause up beside Washington's "pardon our national and other transgressions." The two presidents, seventy-four years apart, are saying the same thing: gratitude and guilt travel together. The nation is not thanking God because it is blameless. It is thanking God because it is not getting what it deserves.

Lincoln then invites his fellow citizens "in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands," 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 he asks them to commend to God's care the widows, orphans and mourners "who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife," and to ask the interposition of the Almighty Hand "to 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."

Pause on "heal the wounds of the nation." In the autumn of 1863, those were not figures of speech. The battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg had been fought that July. The Gettysburg Address was still weeks away, delivered on November 19. The Union was far from won. And the President chose, at that moment, to ask the whole country, North and, in principle, South, to stop and give thanks. He did not wait for victory. That is the thing I admire most. Gratitude that waits for a convenient moment is a luxury. Gratitude in the middle of the fire is a discipline.

Side by side

Here is a short comparison, so the pattern is easy to see.

The coincidence of the date, October 3 in both years, is just that, a coincidence, though a pleasant one. The resemblance of the content is not an accident. Lincoln, a careful student of the founders, was reaching back across the years to the first President, and he was saying that the American people had been thankful together once, at the beginning, and ought to be thankful together again now.

Step five: the law that fixed the date

After 1863, the holiday settled into a pattern. Each president proclaimed it each year, usually for the last Thursday of November. The pattern held, with the usual small variations, for decades. In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt moved the date a week earlier in an attempt to lengthen the Christmas shopping season during the Depression, which produced a short-lived confusion in which some states followed him and some did not. The country was divided over it, and some wags called the earlier date "Franksgiving."

Congress settled the question in 1941. A joint resolution, signed by President Roosevelt on December 26, 1941, fixed Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November and made it a legal public holiday. Notice the timing: Pearl Harbor had been attacked just weeks earlier, and the country had entered the Second World War. The statute that made gratitude permanent was signed in the same month that the nation went to war. Once more, a thanksgiving came in the middle of the storm.

What gratitude means in a free country

What shall we make of all this? I think there are three lessons, and I will number them, since a host should know when to organize his thoughts.

1. Gratitude is a civic duty, not just a private feeling. Both presidents spoke of what the nation owes. A free people that forgets that its liberties are gifts, inherited and not self-made, tends to treat them as entitlements, and entitlements are easy to take away. The thankful citizen is the one who protects what he has received.
2. Gratitude and humility are partners. Both proclamations confess national failings alongside their thanks. That is the right instinct. A country that cannot admit its sins cannot be thankful for its mercies, and a country that sees only sins cannot be thankful for anything. The founders' balance is the correct one: we are neither perfect nor worthless.
3. Gratitude does not wait for good news. Washington gave thanks for a government that was untested. Lincoln gave thanks in the middle of a war. If the nation waits for a quiet moment to be thankful, it will wait forever.

Now the objection that deserves a hearing. Some say that presidential proclamations of thanks to God sit uneasily with the First Amendment, and that the founders themselves were divided, as Jefferson's refusal and the 1789 debate show. That is a serious point. Here is the answer. The First Amendment forbids Congress from making a law respecting an establishment of religion. A proclamation recommending a day of thanks is not a law, binds no one and punishes no one. It is an act of public speech by an elected official, which is in the same category as a president's invitation to a moment of silence or a governor's tribute to a church's centennial. You can disagree about whether it is wise for presidents to issue them, and Jefferson did. But the test is whether anyone is compelled, and no one was. For the larger context of church and state at the founding, read Sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment, read phrase by phrase. And for another reading of the same two documents, see Thanksgiving Proclamations of 1789 and 1863, Read as Lessons in Gratitude.

Meanwhile, back at the table. The next time a relative asks what we are thankful for, and somebody offers a joke about the pie, give the question a moment. We are the heirs of a country that thanked God before it had won anything, and thanked Him again when it was bleeding. The least we can do, with a full plate in front of us, is say it too.

The case in brief

1. Washington's proclamation of October 3, 1789, issued at Congress's request, named the peaceful establishment of a constitutional government as the first reason for national thanks and paired gratitude with penitence and a prayer for lawful government.
2. Sarah Josepha Hale's decades-long campaign revived the idea, and Lincoln's proclamation of October 3, 1863, seventy-four years later, called the country to give thanks in the middle of a civil war and to pray for the healing of the nation's wounds.
3. In 1941, Congress fixed Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November by joint resolution, signed December 26, weeks after Pearl Harbor.
4. A proclamation recommends and compels no one, which answers the constitutional objection, though Jefferson's refusal shows the founders' own disagreement.
5. Gratitude in a free country is a civic duty, partnered with humility, and it does not wait for good news.

What you can do: before your next Thanksgiving dinner, read both proclamations aloud at the table, which takes about five minutes, and ask each person to name one thing they are thankful for in their country.