People of all creeds, races and locations around the earth have given thanks for many millennia, following their own traditions of gratitude for life, safety, food, shelter, family and companions. In America, the earliest native settlers celebrated and gave thanks for bountiful hunts and harvests, as did the early Spanish settlers in New Mexico, the English at Jamestown, the French in Quebec on the St. Lawrence River, and later the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock in the 1620s.
During the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered special thanksgiving services for his troops after successful battles and in recognition of military alliances. Washington wrote of this time, “To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lay on, without shoes, by which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet, and almost as often without provisions as with; marching through frost and snow … is a mark of patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce by parallel’d.”
The Oneida tribe, one of the original Hou-Du-No-Shaun-EE or People of the Long House, later known as the Iroquois Confederacy, decided to help. A delegation set off to walk more than 200 miles from Fort Stanwix to Valley Forge carrying 600 baskets of corn. One of the group, a woman named Polly Cooper, taught the Continentals how to cook the white corn, and she stayed the winter, cooking and nursing sick soldiers. Grateful soldiers thanked her, and Martha Washington, who brought buggies of clothing and shoes for the troops, gave Cooper a black shawl. To this day, the Oneidas keep the shawl as a treasured thank-you gift.
Washington’s general orders issued May 2, 1778, included direction, “that divine service be performed every Sunday at 11 o’clock in those brigades to which there are chaplains—those which have none to attend the places of worship nearest to them … The signal instances of providential goodness which we have experienced and which have now almost crowned our labours with complete success, demand from us in a peculiar manner the warmest returns of gratitude and piety to the supreme author of all good.”
Washington first mentioned the possibility of a national Thanksgiving Day in a confidential letter to James Madison in August 1789, just months after taking office as the first president of the United States, asking for Madison’s advice on approaching the Senate for their opinion on “a day of thanksgiving.” By the end of September 1789, a resolution was introduced to the House of Representatives requesting “a joint committee of both houses be directed to wait upon the president of the United States, to request that he would recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving.” Thus, on Oct. 3, Washington issued the first national Thanksgiving Proclamation designating “a day of public thanks-giving” to be held on Thursday, Nov. 25, 1789, stating in part, “it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty god, and humbly to implore his protection and favor,” and declaring the day, “to be devoted by the people of these states, to the service of that great and glorious being … that we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks for his kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union and plenty, which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general, for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.”
While some subsequent presidents failed to maintain this tradition, it was Washington’s original proclamation that guided Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1863—the middle of the Civil War. In fact, Lincoln issued his proclamation on the same day, Oct. 3, and marked the same Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, Nov. 25. The tradition of observing Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November continues today. This year, Thanksgiving is once again Nov. 25.
Lincoln’s proclamation acknowledged a long list of many great things that “are the gracious gifts of the Most High God,” and he concluded:
“It has seemed to me fit and proper that they (the great things) 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 at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and union.”
This Thanksgiving, in addition to the blessings of god, family, friends and living in relative abundance, I am especially grateful to be an American blessed by many opportunities and the freedom to pursue them, which are ensured by multiple levels of government and volunteers who provide for safety, security and the rule of law. I treasure our Declaration of Independence, the U.S. and Montana constitutions, and the Bill of Rights.
I am encouraged by many efforts to rediscover our nation’s unifying values and to continue crafting a more perfect union. I pray this Thanksgiving will inspire more people to stand together in mutual efforts so that we may extend our institutions of freedom, foster love for our country, and aid in securing the blessings of liberty, for all people.
I wish you a happy, blessed Thanksgiving. As always, I am grateful and blessed to call Montana home.
Hamman, a Clancy resident, is former deputy director of the Montana Governor’s Office of Budget and Program Planning.
