Lest we forget, it was Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States of America, and the first Republican holding that office who set aside a day for our nation and it’s people to give thanks to God. During his presidency the Civil War began and ended after his re-election to that office. Lincoln was called an ape, a baboon, a buffoon, a clown, a usurper, a traitor, a tyrant, a monster, an idiot, a eunuch, a bigot, a demagogue, a lunatic, a despot, a blunderer, a charlatan and a bully, It is said that from the day of his inauguration to the day of his assassination the invective was unrelenting, but he never abandoned his sense of humor, his dedication to purpose and his reverence for God. The same might be said of the forty-third president, also a Republican - George W. Bush whose tour of duty involved an unpopular war. Both served with dignity, both loved their country, both put patriotism before politics! Both "Stayed the course." The United States of America is a better place because of each of them

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 are blessed whose God is the Lord.

We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil ware which now desolates the land may be 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 enrich and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all those 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, to proud to pray to the God that made us. [A. Lincoln, March 1863]

It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my Fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens [A. Lincoln, October 1863]