Thanksgiving and the Religious Awakening of Abraham Lincoln

For Lincoln, Thanksgiving was always intended as a day of national self-reflection—on both the blessings, and the curses, of life.

A detail of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George Peter Alexander Healy. Public domain

Thanksgiving is one of the “high holidays” of American civic life. While proclamations of national days of thanksgiving go back to George Washington, the holiday didn’t become an official feature of the American calendar until, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared that it would fall on “the last Thursday of November” on an annual basis.

But most people don’t realize that for Lincoln, the issuing of the Thanksgiving proclamation represented a spiritual development and catharsis in his own life.