"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 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 has seemed to me fit and proper that God
should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully, acknowledged,
as with one heart and one voice,
by the whole of the 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
as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficient Father who dwelleth in the heavens."
Abraham Lincoln
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