During the Civil War, both presidents, Lincoln and Jeff Davis, issued Thanksgiving Day proclamations and celebration of the holiday as we know it grew as a result.
We all know about the famed Pilgrims who feasted with the local Indians in 1621, but after that the holiday was only observed once in a while. When he was the general commanding the American forces during the Revolution, George Washington issued a Thanksgiving proclamation in December of 1777. After the war, in 1789, he did so once again. Then, as President, John Adams also issued proclamations for two of his four years in the highest office of the land. But after that it was more or less a forgotten idea.
It wasn’t until 1863, in the midst of a great war, that President Lincoln revived the tradition. The northern president wasn’t the only one to do this during the war, though. President Jefferson Davis had issued his Thanksgiving Day proclamation a year earlier, in 1862. Jefferson’s idea of Thanksgiving was a bit different than the one we think of today. The southern President had declared that the south’s observance would be a day of fasting and reflection, not feasting and revelry.
Of course, the holiday we are familiar with is connected to Lincoln’s proclamation. But, apparently the proclamation was not all Lincoln’s idea. It wasn’t just the war that spurred Lincoln to issue his proclamation, but a letter from a woman named Sarah Hale that convinced him to do so. Hale, the writer of the poem now called “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” had been trying to convince presidents to issue a Thanksgiving proclamation since 1846 and when Lincoln saw her letter he decided to follow her suggestion.
From there our formal national holiday was born.
President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation:
The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.
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Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation”
It is indisputable that the Republican Party is really the party of civil rights, not the Democrats. And today we have one more example of that truism with the 145th anniversary of the Republican Party’s essential outlawing of the Ku Klux Klan, the Democrat Party’s domestic terror group.
In their lust to destroy America’s history, anti-American, Antifa fascists have been attacking Civil War statues, statues to our founders, and even statues to Revolutionary War heroes. In their ignorance, they imagine all these statues are black and white instances of evil. But to prove that history isn’t just a black and white issue, there is the history of the black soldiers of the western armies who became famous killing American Indians. What will these idiots do with statues to the famed Buffalo Soldiers?
A few years after the Civil War as the nation started upon its long road toward reconciliation, rebuilding, and healing the wife of one of the war’s union generals noticed the touching devotion of Confederate widows, wives and their children as each year they came together to place flowers and little flags at the graves of their fallen. Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan was so moved by the devotion she witnessed that she urged her husband, Illinois General John A. “Blackjack” Logan, to look into creating what was to become Memorial Day.
HEADQUARTERS GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC
An African American Georgetown University professor thinks that in the face of a lack of government policies each white person in America should start a personal bank account from which they can individually pay blacks reparations for slavery.
Today, December 19, is the day the electors meet to cast their Electoral College votes to actually certify who will become the next president of the United States and if the anti-American left has its way enough of these electors will defy their duty and vote for anyone other than the actual winner, Donald J. Trump. Even if this last second effort doesn’t beat Trump, the whole campaign is thoroughly anti-American and can’t end well.
When people today say that “the south” were all racist “Confederates” during the civil war you can dismiss them as either historically illiterate cranks, or liars. That’s because there was no such thing as “the south” during the civil war. History is more complicated than that and we risk not understanding our own country if we ignore this fact.
Jeb Bush has now told the entire south that he doesn’t want their vote by claiming that the Confederate flag and all who support it are racist.
Fresh off her PR victory of calling for the end of Confederate history, this weekend South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called for the removal of cotton balls from the her state citing the long history of racism the product represents.
PBS is not fair or balanced and nothing it does can be trusted. We see this claim fully validated with how the network bent over for actor Ben Affleck’s demand that his slave-owning ancestry be eliminated from a recent program tracing the actor’s family.
The faux President of the United States on the ABC TV show Scandal gave one of those typically left-wing TV speeches that is more like an uninformed screed meant to push a leftist agenda than truthful commentary. In this case the actor pretending to be president scorned the Second Amendment and then said incorrectly that slavery was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
Leave it to leftist Illinois to use a museum dedicated to celebrating Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents in history, as a platform to celebrate a loser like Adlai Stevenson while at the same time ignoring Ronald Reagan, a native son, big winner, and another greatest president.
Hillary Clinton is an Illinois girl, right? Oh, and Hillary Clinton is the smartest woman in the world, isn’t she? Then how come she thinks Abraham Lincoln got elected to the Senate before he became President, when he never did?