Whereas,
the Senate of the United States devoutly recognizing the Supreme
Authority and just Government of Almighty God in all the affairs of men
and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to
designate and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation:
And whereas, it is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their
dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and
transgressions in humble sorrow yet with assured hope that genuine
repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime
truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history: that
those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord:
And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like
individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisement in this
world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war,
which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us
for our presumptuous sins to the needful end of our national
reformation as a whole people?
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven.
We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity.
We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has
ever grown.
But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand
which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and
strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of
our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior
wisdom and virtue of our own.
Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient
to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to
pray to the God that made us!
It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to
confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
Now, therefore, in compliance with the request and fully concurring in
the view of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation designate and set
apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national
humiliation, fasting and prayer.
And I do hereby request all the people to abstain on that day form
their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places
of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy
to the Lord and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties
proper to that solemn occasion.
All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in
the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the
nation will be heard on high and answered with blessing no less than
the pardon of our national sins and the restoration of our now divided
and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of
the United States to be affixed. By the President:
Abraham Lincoln
March 30, 1863
[back]