"The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God." – Abraham Lincoln, 1863.Thanksgiving was first proclaimed as a national public holiday by Lincoln in 1863 soon after the emancipation proclamation to end slavery and to mobilize over two hundred thousand African Americans to help defend the Union. Was Lincoln thanking the Africans for helping to save the Union? During the 2024 Thanksgiving Holiday, I asked colleagues if President Abraham Lincoln was paying tribute to the contributions of people of African descent when he proclaimed the first national holiday for Thanksgiving Day in October 1863.
One response came from a Political Science Professor who stated: ‘No; I don't think Lincoln used the Thanksgiving proclamation to celebrate Black folks. But it's an interesting thought! ‘.
Another from an Emeritus Professor of History said: ‘I think Lincoln was unifying the nation by superseding state Thanksgiving days with a national one. Virginia had a Thanksgiving in 1619, before the Massachusetts one that figures in the US’s historical myth of Thanksgiving. And there were sporadic, impermanent national Thanksgivings in the years between.
Many American Indian Natives do not celebrate Thanksgiving Day, they commemorate the Day of Mourning Genocide. Some African Americans and White liberals do not celebrate it either perhaps because of the commercialization of the holiday with Black Friday shopping frenzy. Do African Americans have any reasons to celebrate Thanksgiving Day even while also mourning the millions that were lost? Yes, everyone has something to be thankful for. We are not going back to the evil old days!
See the transcripts of Lincoln's Thanksgiving Day Proclamation (epigraphed above) archived by the Obama White House. The proclamation came 9 months after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the freed Black men changed the battle of the civil war fought over slavery.
The proclamation started by urging Americans to show some gratitude for the sources of the food they took for granted. What were the sources of the food and comforts of Americans? The land of the indigenous American Indians, their food crops and their animals deserve all the gratitude that Americans could express, American Indian Natives have continued to contest the mythology that their ancestors peacefully surrendered their land to the invaders and taught them how to grow food to save them from starving to death and from engaging in cannibalism to survive. The natives did not surrender their land and vanish, they were subjected to genocide by the ungrateful conquistadores. The US has since recognized the rightful owners of the land by reserving land for some of the surviving native tribes and nations while others still fight for recognition.
Women deserve thanksgiving too for they also provided, and prepared the bulk of, the food Americans took for granted. One of the early advocates of a national Thanksgiving holiday was the slavery abolitionist feminist writer, Sarah Hale, who allegedly wanted to recognize it as a whites-only holiday, probably to avoid opposition from white-supremacist men and women who wanted freed Africans to 'go back to where they came from'. The emancipated Africans defiantly stated that they and their descendants were here to stay, come what may, no matter what others say.
Lincoln made his historic proclamation at a conjuncture in history when the survival of the Union was in doubt due to the pro-slavery rebellion of the confederate states over the so-called ‘state right’ to expand slavery to the whole of the United States to end the dilemma of hunting for run-away enslaved people in the land of the free. Initially, Lincoln refused to allow people of African descent to join the Union army and stated that if he could keep the nation united without emancipating a single person from enslavement, he was prepared to do so.
He also proposed to repatriate the emancipated Africans to a colony island near Haiti.
Eventually, he was forced by the circumstances of confederate battle victories to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, to weaken the economies of the confederate slave states and he welcomed formerly enslaved Africans to join the union army and help to defeat the confederacy.
Nine months later, the bravery of the former enslaved Africans in battle had turned the tide of the Civil War in favor of the Union Army and that was the context of the Thanksgiving Day proclamation. Two years later, in 1865, Lincoln made the Gettysburg Address to honor the troops who were wasted in the battlefield towards the end of the war.
"Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom." Lincoln, 1863.At the time of the proclamation, the labor of the enslaved Africans and the poor working class Whites was the main source of the food and industry that Americans took for granted. Lincoln did not make this explicit in his proclamation, of course not. He was saying Graces and giving thanks to ‘Providence’ the way you do even when you know that it was your papa and mama that produced and reproduced the food, goods, and services for your survival.
It might be a coincidence rather than a causation that X came before Y, Emancipation before Thanksgiving Day Proclamations in the same year during the Civil War, but there is absolutely no reason why Americans would not give thanks for the sacrifices that people of African descent made to build the nation in chains and defend it since then.
On this 2024 Thanksgiving Day, let all Americans remember the sufferings of people of African descent in the country, say thanks to Providence for providing their livelihood, offer apologies to the descendants of the enslaved for the crimes against humanity that the country visited on them, and offer them a significant package of reparative justice.
The Obama White House, by archiving the transcripts of this proclamation by Lincoln, may have been calling for reflections on the centrality of African Americans in Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1863.
There is no justification for the consensus that erased the African presence from the Thanksgiving narratives by the media, historians, sociologists, and poets.
President Biden should use this opportunity of his last Thanksgiving Day celebration in office to issue the long overdue Reparations Proclamation and apology to people of African descent for the crimes of hundreds of years of enslavement that built the United States and defended the Union against pro-slavery rebellions.
Listen to President Joe Biden on 3 December, 2024 at the National Museum of Slavery in Angola as the first US president to visit the country. The US should be encouraged to use their bully pulpit to announce a reparative justice package for people of African descent and invite European states to contribute regarding what Biden called 'the original sin' (it is a crime against humanity and not simply a sin) of the US (and European countries, not the US alone), the enslavement of millions of Africans for hundreds of years:
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