Lincoln set the national Thanksgiving holiday
On this day · 3 October 1863
Amid the Civil War, Lincoln's October 3, 1863 proclamation fixed Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November.
On October 3, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation inviting Americans “in every part of the United States” to set apart the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving. The first observance under it fell on November 26, 1863.
The document, largely drafted by Secretary of State William Seward, came months after the Union victory at Gettysburg and framed the nation’s wartime survival and harvests as cause for gratitude even amid bloodshed.
Lincoln’s act capped a decades-long campaign by the writer and editor Sarah Josepha Hale, who had lobbied successive presidents to make Thanksgiving a fixed national holiday rather than a patchwork of state observances.
No president had issued a national Thanksgiving proclamation between 1815 and Lincoln’s in 1863.
The “last Thursday” rule held until 1939, when Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to move it earlier caused such confusion that Congress settled the date on the fourth Thursday of November in 1941.
Sources & references
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