From the Publisher

We are going through a very difficult time as a nation, as we all well know. Unemployment remains intractable; household incomes have been sliding; our state and our national governments face daunting financial challenges; and we are at the tail of the line of the developed nations in educating our children. Would that suggest a bright future for us?
Imagine how President Lincoln felt as he faced overwhelming problems in the midst of our Civil War. In his proclamation, he told the nation that we had brought the problems on ourselves, and he told us what we needed to do to work our way out. His admonition is equally applicable to us today as it was then.
May I encourage you to celebrate this Thanksgiving Day by carefully considering his timeless words to our nation.
Art Hall, publisher
President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation
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 subject to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we 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 those 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.
Abraham Lincoln, 1863