Summary

In colonial times, Thanksgiving was a harvest festival, in which the colonists offered thanks to God Almighty for a good harvest, sometimes by feasting, sometimes by fasting. Such a holiday was celebrated already in the Spanish colony of Florida in the sixteenth century, and in the British colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, most famously in 1621, when the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation celebrated their first successful harvest in the company of some of the Native American tribesmen. Thanksgiving became a regularly celebrated national holiday only during the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a day of national Thanksgiving in 1863, and each president since has annually issued Thanksgiving Day proclamations. The date for the holiday was set as the fourth Thursday in November by an act of Congress only in 1941.

But the first day of national Thanksgiving was proclaimed by George Washington in the first year of the new American republic, whose appearance on the world stage—after the perilous Revolutionary War, the failure of the Articles of Confederation, and the contentious Constitutional Convention—seemed little short of miraculous. Washington spoke not of harvests but (mainly) of matters political.

Section Overview

The structure of his proclamation is straightforward. After the formal introductory opening—“By the President of the United States of America. A Proclamation.”—the three paragraphs deal in turn with the reasons President Washington is issuing the proclamation, the things for which he recommends we give thanks to God, and the things for which we should humbly offer God our prayers and supplications.

Section Overview

Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation raises questions about the role of government in our private and religious lives, about the place of religion and piety in the American political order, about the connection between our public and our private—and between our natural and our political—blessings. It also invites questions about the meaning of the holiday of Thanksgiving and the role it should play in American life today.