2013 Home for the Holidays Special edition of LINCOLN DAILY NEWS.com Page 7
Sarah Hale, whose letter is preserved in the Library
of Congress, was the editor of a women’s magazine,
Godey’s Lady’s Book, and was determined to have a
national day of Thanksgiving.
With President Lincoln’s numerous proclamations
and requests for thanksgiving and fasting, Mrs. Hale
believed that if there was going to be a national day
of Thanksgiving, Lincoln was the man who could
make it happen.
She finally found the result she sought. On Oct.
3, 1863, Lincoln issued a proclamation asking the
American people to “set apart and observe the last
Thursday of November next, as a day of [Thanksgiv-
ing] and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth
in the Heavens.”
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In this proclamation he asked for
prayer for “all those who have become widows,
orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil
strife in which we are unavoidably engaged.”
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This was an act that, again, Lincoln used as a way of
uniting the American people to care for one another.
By 1864 Lincoln felt that the country needed to be
reminded of the reasons to be thankful. He issued two
more proclamations. In the first one, issued on May 9,
1864, he asked for thanksgiving and prayer for recent
successful operations of the army, and the second,
issued on July 7, 1864, was the “Proclamation of a Day
of Prayer.” These two proclamations were very similar
to the proclamations he made at the beginning of the
war. He used days of thanksgiving to unite the coun-
try and remind the American people what they were
fighting for.
But it was not until Oct. 24, 1864, that President Lin-
coln finally created the “Proclamation of Thanksgiv-
ing,” which set the last Thursday of November as a day
of thanksgiving. Upon this proclamation, editor Sarah
Hale summed up the day perfectly in her article “Our
National Thanksgiving”:
“On the twenty-fourth of this month recurs the
Day – ‘The last Thursday in November’ – which
has now become firmly established as one of the
three National Festivals of America. ‘The Birth
of Washington,’ which brings before all minds
the example of the patriot hero and the Christian
man; ‘Independence Day,’ which reminds us of
the free principles on which our Government
was founded; and ‘Thanksgiving Day,’ which
lifts our hearts to Heaven in grateful devotion,
and knits them together in bonds of social affec-
tion are three anniversaries such as no other Peo-
ple have the good fortune to enjoy. We fervently
trust that, so long as the nation endures, these
three Festivals will continue to be observed with
an ever deepening sense of their beauty and
value.”
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