Whereas the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the
supreme authority and just government of Almighty God in all the affairs
of men and of nations, has by a resolution requested the President to
designate and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation; and
Whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men to own 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 only are blessed whose God is the Lord;
And, insomuch as we know that by His divine law nations, like
individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this
world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which
now desolates the land may be but 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 behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to
confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in
the views of the Senate, I do by this my proclamation designate and set
apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national
humiliation, fasting, and prayer. And I do hereby request all the people
to abstain on that day from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to
unite at their several places of public worship and their respective
homes in keeping the day holy to the Lord and devoted to the humble
discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.
All this being done in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in
the hope authorized by the divine teachings that the united cry of the
nation will be heard on high and answered with blessings no less than
the pardon of our national sins and the restoration of our now divided
and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.
In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of
the United States to be affixed.
[SEAL.]
Done at the city of Washington, this 30th day of March, A.D. 1863,
and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-seventh.