Lincoln sets the last Thursday of November aside for thanksgiving and praise
Two and a half years into a war that had not spared a single state, Abraham Lincoln sat down in Washington to write something other than a battle order. On October 3, 1863, he issued Presidential Proclamation 106, inviting Americans everywhere, including those at sea and abroad, to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise. The proclamation also asked the nation to pray for its widows, orphans, mourners, and all who suffered from the conflict. It was not the first American Thanksgiving, but it was the first to set a fixed national date.
Before 1863, Thanksgiving was a scattered, state-by-state custom. No president had fixed a single national date for it. Congress made that date law in 1870. The rhythm Lincoln set, giving thanks in late November, eventually became the fourth Thursday of November that Congress fixed in 1941, and that is the date Americans still observe today.
QWho was Sarah Josepha Hale and why did Lincoln listen to her?
Hale was the editor of Godey's Lady's Book, one of the most widely read magazines in antebellum America, giving her a direct line to the country's middle-class readership. She spent years writing letters to sitting presidents pressing for a national Thanksgiving, framing it as a patriotic holiday that could unite Americans in purpose and values rather than just a harvest custom. Her campaign outlasted several administrations before Lincoln finally acted on it in 1863. Hale never held office and never ran for one, yet she reshaped the American calendar through persistence alone.
QDid the Pilgrims actually hold the first American thanksgiving?
Not by a long shot, and even the New England version is contested. The earliest documented civil day of thanksgiving in that tradition was declared at Plymouth Colony in 1623, three years after the Mayflower landed, not at the famous 1621 harvest feast most people picture. Some historians push the claim further back, pointing to earlier thanksgiving observances in colonial Virginia and in Spanish Florida, decades before Plymouth existed. The New England harvest-festival story was only one claim among several competing origin stories by the time Lincoln acted.
QDid Thanksgiving proclamations exist before the United States was even a country?
Yes. The Continental Congress itself issued national days of thanksgiving during the Revolutionary War, years before the Constitution existed, and the practice carried straight through into the new federal government. Presidents Washington and Adams both continued issuing their own thanksgiving proclamations once the Constitution took effect, treating it as an inherited wartime custom rather than a new invention. That means the idea of a president calling for a day of national gratitude was already roughly seventy-five years old by the time Lincoln sat down to write his 1863 version, a tradition Lincoln revived rather than invented.
