November 23, 2017
FROM THE THANKSGIVING ARCHIVES: THE GREAT, NOT TRANSCENDENTAL, EMANCIPATOR:
Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving: Of Puritans, prayer, and the Capitol dome. (David Gelernter, 11/28/2005, Weekly Standard)
FOUR THEMES FLOW TOGETHER AT one of the most remarkable points in American history--the evening when Abraham Lincoln for the last time proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving. It was April 11, 1865: two days after the Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox; four days before the president was murdered. Our national Thanksgiving Day is a good time to remember the president who had more to do with the institution of Thanksgiving and the actual practice of thanking God than any other, and to recall his last public speech.On that misty April evening, the world had a rare glimpse of the symbolism of a powerful prophecy literally fulfilled, if only for a few moments. The brilliant "city on a hill" that the 17th-century Puritan settlers spoke of seemed embodied in Washington, as the capital sprang to life in a blaze of gaslight. The president spoke of the nation's long-sought victory in terms not of triumph but of reconciliation, and of the nation's debt to God.
Some of Lincoln's friends and admirers, recalling that night, remembered the president as if he were Moses looking "into the Promised Land of Peace from the Pisgah summit," as one of them, the journalist Noah Brooks, wrote. Lincoln like Moses stood at the very brink of the promised land he would never enter. (It's hard not to see Lincoln as the greatest religious figure this country has ever produced.)
Thanksgiving itself is theme number one.
Except that Lincoln was no Jonathan Edwards.
(originally posted: 11/23/05)
Posted by oj at November 23, 2017 12:01 AM
No, Lincoln trancended Jonathan Edwards by preaching human love and reconciliation in the face of God's Justice:
Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at November 24, 2005 1:23 AM
Our Thanksgivings were ever to express gratitude for military victory.
The first official thanksgiving proclamation of which we have a record www.law.ou.edu/hist/thanksgiv.html was to acknowledge military deliverance from the terrorist insurgency of one King Philip, the son of the same Wampanoag chief Massasoit who had earlier accommodated the Pilgrims.
Posted by: Lou Gots at November 23, 2005 6:32 PM