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, required 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 owe 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, in so much as 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 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 views of the Senate, I do, by this 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 from 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 blessings, 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 here unto set my hand, and caused the seal of
the United States to be affixed.
Done at the city of Washington this thirtieth day of March, in the year
of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence
of the United States the eighty-seventy.
By the President:
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
William H. Seward, Secretary of State