The president of the United States adjusted his spectacles to read the letter once more.
Finishing, he leaned forward over his desk. His long, slender fingers clutched a pen, dipped it in the inkwell and began to write. After a moment, unsatisfied, he folded the paper and dropped it into the waste basket.
It had been a long day, much of it consumed by what he called his “public relations bath” – times when people of all walks lined up for a chance to talk to their president.
Propping his chin in his palm, he slowly stroked his whiskers, deep in thought. On the corner of the table he noticed his worn Bible, given to him long ago by his beloved step-mother.
He reached for the book and opened it. He had read it through several times, but like many men, the urgency of the moment seemed often to draw him away.
This night, the pages opened before him to a favored passage in the Psalms:
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me …”
The rail-thin giant, who had gained fame and a nickname for his ability to split the real things as a young man, stood up and walked to the window.
Friends and associates could clearly see the toll of more than two years of dreadful war. The lines on his lean face had deepened. His thick black hair was graying. His once purposeful stride had slowed, and the shoulders atop his 6-foot-4-inch frame slumped, as though bearing a great, invisible weight.
Most of all, there was a poignant, almost eerie sadness in the eyes of Abraham Lincoln.
Often unable to sleep – and bedeviled by nightmares when he did – he could be seen wandering the White House and its grounds in the middle of the night. He routinely seemed preoccupied, his mind wandering to faraway battlefields or wrestling with some political entanglement, knotted by lesser men.
Through the window, across the dimly lit and muddy street, he could see an apparently elderly woman, struggling with a couple of packages. A young soldier crossed over and assisted her. She stretched forth her hand, as if to offer a coin in appreciation, but the soldier refused, stepped back, bowed slightly, and tipped his cap.
The hint of pleasantness showed on Lincoln’s face.
“Thank God for such,” he thought to himself as he walked back to his desk and reopened the letter.
Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, had written to him, encouraging the establishment of a national day of thanksgiving.
Lincoln had intended to reply but, as he had said, he had been entirely “controlled by events.” There was something about her words, and even her penmanship that struck a chord with the president.
He could remember the sweet lady, one of his few teachers so long ago, whose handwriting looked similar. He recalled the students huddled around the wood stove in their ramshackle schoolroom as she told them the story about the Pilgrims who boarded the Mayflower and sailed into the unknown.
Her eyes would light up as she related the story, especially about those fabled days in the fall of 1621. The Pilgrims had endured a year of relentless hardship. Half of the brave company had died before spring finally began to warm the frozen coast. They made contact with the local Wampanoag tribe and the two groups became friends. A couple of the natives spoke English, and shared their knowledge of how to build shelters and to grow crops successfully – and to store them for the winter.
And when the harvest was gathered, the tribe’s great king Massasoit led nearly 100 of his men – and at least as many women and children – to the humble settlement to celebrate. Together, they hunted for turkey and ducks, and prized venison. They competed in sports and played games. And they gave thanks for their blessings, together.
Though there were also other similar celebrations at different times along the coast of the New World, the Pilgrims’ thanksgiving was generally considered the first on the continent.
The Continental Congress had proclaimed the first day of thanksgiving in 1777. Presidents George Washington, John Adams and James Monroe had followed suit, but it had been nearly a half-century since the last such commemoration.
Sarah Hale had been campaigning to institute a national day of thanksgiving for nearly 20 of those years. Her entreaties had been ignored.
Now she had written to Lincoln on “a subject of deep importance to lay before the president of our Republic … a day of our annual thanksgiving.”
A few months earlier, the president had proclaimed a day of thanks for the victory over Gen. Robert E. Lee and his Confederate army at Gettysburg, Pa., in early July.
But Lincoln felt the urge to do more. He well knew that celebratory gathering at table had been tradition with the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, who offered tributes to their gods after a good fall harvest. The Children of Israel commemorated both harvest and deliverance with the festival of Sukkot. Giving thanks was as old as mankind and was commanded in the Scriptures.
He adjusted the flame of the lamp, leaned over close to his desk, and began to write:
“A Proclamation.
We have endured a year of strife and difficulty beyond which we have known or experienced since the coldest misery of the Revolution.
He scowled at the paper. In his mind he could see the faces of the women who had loved and encouraged him in his youth.
They always urged him to be cheerful. “We must let our Father know we are thankful for our blessings.”
He started again. Line after line, his surprisingly petite, almost copybook handwriting filled the page.
“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.”
At almost the same hour as at Gettysburg, General Grant had finally been victorious at Vicksburg, reopening the Mississippi River. “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to sea,” Lincoln had said.
He had been irritated that General Meade had allowed the Army of Northern Virginia to escape from Pennsylvania. Lincoln was certain that General Lee could have also been forced to surrender if Meade would have just moved.
But he knew all those blue-coated boys were tired – every one of them some mother’s precious son who had volunteered and fought. So many of them had given everything. And, in a way, the same was true of the boys in gray and butternut.
The president again dipped his pen.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.
The war tormented Lincoln. Yet he had come to acknowledge that perhaps it was the atonement for sin and, if so, the spilling of blood was inescapable. God reigns, and His judgments are righteous and true.
By the end of the Vicksburg campaign, nearly 20,000 men were dead and wounded. The three-day cataclysm at Gettysburg had resulted in more than 50,000 casualties, nearly 10,000 of them dead on the fields around the little town.
No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
It has seemed to me fit and proper that they 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 lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.
Late one night, one of Lincoln’s trusted secretaries had found him kneeling in a dark room and he helped “The Tycoon” – his nickname for the president – to his feet.
Lincoln had quietly told him that, more and more, he felt driven to his knees in prayer, in the certainty that he had nowhere else to go.
And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.
In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the city of Washington, this 3d day of October, A.D. 1863, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.
Abraham Lincoln signed his name and laid his pen upon the desk.
Sarah Josepha Hale, a pioneer for the advancement of women in both culture and education, was instrumental in the establishment of Vassar College. She wrote many essays and tracts, including the beloved poem, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She died April 30, 1879, at age 92.
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States. The brief, poetic entreaty he offered at the dedication of Gettysburg National Cemetery is generally regarded as one of the greatest examples of American letters. He was shot on the night of April 14, 1865, and died early the next morning. He was 56 years old.
