It has pleased Almighty God to prolong our national life another year,
defending us with His guardian care against unfriendly designs from
abroad and vouchsafing to us in His mercy many and signal victories over
the enemy, who is of our own household. It has also pleased our Heavenly
Father to favor as well our citizens in their homes as our soldiers in
their camps and our sailors on the rivers and seas with unusual health.
He has largely augmented our free population by emancipation and by
immigration, while He has opened to us new sources of wealth and has
crowned the labor of our workingmen in every department of industry with
abundant rewards. Moreover, He has been pleased to animate and inspire
our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient
for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our
adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to
afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from
all our dangers and afflictions:
Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do
hereby appoint and set apart the last Thursday in November next as a day
which I desire to be observed by all my fellow-citizens, wherever they
may then be, as a day of thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God, the
beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe. And I do further recommend
to my fellow-citizens aforesaid that on that occasion they do reverently
humble themselves in the dust and from thence offer up penitent and
fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of Events for
a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony
throughout the land which it has pleased Him to assign as a dwelling
place for ourselves and for our posterity throughout all generations.
In testimony 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 20th day of October, A.D. 1864, and
of the Independence of the United States the eighty-ninth.