Deconstructing Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation
November 28, 2024
Various states held Thanksgiving holidays decades before Lincoln nationalized the holiday with his October 3, 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation. The Proclamation was signed by him but authored by William Seward, which is why it includes more religious language than the few religious buzz words that are found in some of the atheist president’s other speeches and proclamations. (His wife and his law partner William Herndon, his only real friend, both said that he never became a Christian or believed in the afterlife).
Like so many of Lincoln’s speeches and proclamations, the Thanksgiving Proclamation is filled with audacious lawyerly tongue-twisting lies and deceptions. It starts out boasting of a year that was “filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies.” Not in the Southern states, of course, which Lincoln always considered to be a part of the United States. His armies had already imposed scorched earth policies in the South and the death and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the burning of private homes, the bombing of cities, and the waging of total war on the civilian population of the South can hardly be described as “healthful.”
“Order has been maintained,” Lincoln said, ignoring the fact that there were draft riots in New York City and elsewhere with Union Army troops “maintaining order” in New York by firing into crowds of draft posters and killing hundreds. That of course was unconstitutional because soldiers are prohibited by the Constitution to engage in civil law enforcement.
“The laws have been respected and obeyed,” said the Illinois pork barrel politician. Not by himself, however, when he illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and ordered the military to mass arrest thousands of Northern state civilians for merely criticizing him and his war policies. Not by himself when he committed treason by invading the Southern states in violation of Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution that defines treason as “levying war upon the United States” and “giving aid and comfort to their enemies” (emphasis added). As in all the founding documents, “United States is in the plural, signifying that treason was when the government in Washington wages war against Mississippi, Virginia, Alabama, and the other free and independent Southern states. Lincoln unilaterally and illegally “amended” the Constitution by redefining treason as criticism of himself and the Republican party.
Lincoln was also not respecting the law when he decimated the First Amendment by shutting down over 300 newspapers in the Northern states and arresting and imprisoning newspaper owners and editors. Republican party mobs assisted him by literally destroying printing presses of opposition newspapers.
By far the biggest knee slapper in Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation is his statement that “harmony has prevailed everywhere” except on the battlefield. The New York City draft riots were not exactly “harmonious,” nor was the rounding up at gunpoint and the mass imprisonment of political dissenters and newspaper editors. There was also a massive desertion crisis in the Union army, which is hardly a sign of “harmony.” Nor is the mass killing of Americans in the Southern states for that matter. The period of 1861-1864 was the least harmonious period of American history.
There was also a touch of economic ignorance in the speech when it was claimed that “diversions of wealth” from “peaceful industry” to the military has “not arrested” economic growth. Utter nonsense. It took decades for the diversion of capital investment from consumer to military resources to recover in America to where it was before the war. Not to mention the generational cost to the economy of the death and maiming of hundreds of thousands of young men.
The speech gave a preview of the blasphemous comment that Lincoln would make in his Second Inaugural Address in March of 1865 when he claimed that the war just “came,” implying that he had nothing to do with it, and that it was God’s way of punishing Americans for the sin of slavery. It is blasphemous because it suggested that Lincoln somehow knew what was in the mind of God. It was also nonsensical because it begs the question of why God would not also have punished the British, French, Danes, Dutch, Spaniards, and the original slave masters, the African chiefs who enslaved their own people and sold them first to Europeans and then to Americans. The Seward/Lincoln Thanksgiving Proclamation proclaimed that God was supposedly “dealing with us in anger for our sins . . .”
All of the “great things” that supposedly occurred during the first two-and-a-half years of the Lincoln regime “should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people,” which in Lincoln’s world included Southerners since he always held that secession was illegal. How absurd.
In his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, Larry Tagg used original sources from Lincoln’s lifetime to argue that he was by far the most hated and reviled of all American presidents during his lifetime. The New York Times devoted an editorial in May of 1864 to summarize what other Northern newspapers had been saying about Lincoln, calling him “a perjurer, a usurper, a tyrant, a subverter of the Constitution, a destroyer of the liberties of his country, a desperate desperado, a heartless trifler over the last agonies of an expiring nation.” There were Northern newspapers that were even calling for Lincoln’s assassination. John Wilkes Booth must have read them.
After instigating a war over tariff collection that ended up killing perhaps a million Americans and maiming more than double that number, Lincoln generously urged Americans to pray for “all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers.” Once again absolving himself from all responsibility for the war, he said that it was “unavoidably engaged.”
Lincoln ends the Proclamation by asking God to “restore” the “full enjoyment” of the union. The union that was currently being “restored” at gunpoint with the killing of hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans, the bombing and incinerating of their towns and cities, the plundering of their private property, and the destruction of their entire civilization. The South seceded because it no longer “enjoyed” being in a union with New England Yankees. They believed that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, and they no longer consented. So did the vast majority of Northerners at the time. As H.L. Mencken once wrote, it was the South that was fighting for government of the people, for the people, by the people, and the North that was fighting to destroy that Jeffersonian right. Did Lincoln and Seward really think that God and not Satan would answer such prayers?
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