Subject: Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Speech, 1863



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 land, to set apart and observe the third Thursday in November as a
day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the
heavens.

Abraham Lincoln

October 3, 1863





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