Today in History—October 3: President Lincoln Proclaims a Day of Thanksgiving

On this day in 1863, U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln heeded a request from a letter and proclaimed a day of “Thanksgiving and Praise.”

It was the height of the Civil War, and the country was suffering. Thousands of Americans had been killed in the Battle of Gettysburg just months earlier. Lincoln’s proclamation called on Americans to “observe the last Thursday of November next” even as the “lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged” continued.

This was not without precedent. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress also called for days of thanksgiving. In 1789 Pres. George Washington declared November 26 a day of thanksgiving, and in 1815 Pres. James Madison did the same. It was fairly common in American leadership. Over the course of his presidency, in fact, Lincoln would call for nine such days of gratitude.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Then there was Sarah Josepha Hale. She was the first female editor of the Ladies’ Magazine and later the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which became the most important and widely read women’s magazine in the country during her 40-plus years of stewardship.

In it she published works by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She supported women’s education and the end of slavery. She also believed that the fledgling United States lacked a cultural identity—a problem she felt Thanksgiving could help solve.

Before Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation, it was largely left to individual states to decide when—or even if—to celebrate Thanksgiving. Hale believed that the country needed one fixed date around which to unify its celebrations. And she wrote Lincoln a letter on September 28, 1863, telling him just that.

Hale had been unsuccessfully urging governors, congressmen, and even prior presidents to take up this task—for decades. But Lincoln responded immediately.

He proclaimed the last Thursday in November a day of thanksgiving—and asked the entire country to participate at once. It wasn’t quite the day of Thanksgiving that we know today, but it stuck, establishing the tradition of one national Thanksgiving observance, which was renewed by presidents who followed. And in 1941, Congress made it an official national holiday.