In the tumult of a bloody civil war and a month before the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln asked his country to give thanks.
As he looked out over the Potomac in the autumn of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln must have been thinking about the tens of thousands of soldiers who, like the maple leaves along the river’s bank, had forever fallen to temper the American soil.
It was in the wake of those nine relentless, eventful months that Lincoln, on Oct. 3, 1863, issued a proclamation of Thanksgiving to “set apart” the final Thursday in November. George Washington declared the first national Thanksgiving in 1789, but it didn’t take. By the time of Lincoln’s presidency, the holiday was often declared by Northern state governors for dates scattered throughout November and early December, making it something of an impromptu, regional custom.
Lincoln’s rhetoric entrenches those opening words of the Declaration of Independence as the voice of the American spirit of liberty, above even the Constitution. Liberty is tied to “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” and it is not an entitlement. Rather, it is an “unfinished work” that the American people mustn’t take for granted, because it is constantly reborn by our own choices.
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