The Relevance of Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

The circumstances of the United States (such as it was) in 1863 and now in 2022 are greatly different, but there is much to learn from President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation issued then. Consider the relevance of Lincoln’s lasting words written in that momentous year. 

Here in the U.S., this Thursday (Nov. 24) is Thanksgiving Day, and across the country people will be scrambling to be with loved ones for that traditional time for families to be together—and sometimes finding traveling difficult as depicted in the 1987 comedy film Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

The USAmerican Thanksgiving Day “myth” is traced back to 1621, and for decades from the early days of the USA in 1789 on, national thanksgiving days were observed only intermittently.

But on October 3, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Pres. Lincoln issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation, calling for November 26 of that year to be a national day of "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens."

This year, then, marks the 160th year that Thanksgiving Day has been observed annually, and for the last 80 years the official national holiday has been on the fourth Thursday of November.

In recent decades, Thanksgiving Day has become less and less a time for giving thanks to “our beneficent Father” and more and more a time of feasting, arguing with relatives around the dinner table, watching football games, and even shopping for Christmas presents.

Perhaps the time has come to go back to Lincoln’s proclamation and to recover his original intention. The fall of 1863 was certainly not the “best of times” to have a national day of thanksgiving. But in spite of the difficulties the President was looking back with thanksgiving and looking forward in hope.

In January 1863, Lincoln issued the Proclamation Emancipation, changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free.

Then, exactly three months before that 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation, the victorious battle at Gettysburg on July 3 marked the turning point in the Civil War. Thus, in that call to national thanksgiving, the President noted the coming likelihood of a “large increase in freedom.”*

Lincoln’s call for thanksgiving also included an appeal for citizens “to 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.”

In his second inaugural address, delivered seventeen months later on March 4, 1865, Lincoln reiterated his call for thanksgiving with an appeal for magnanimity. That magnificent speech/sermon ended with these words:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.**

In this month of the U.S. midterm elections, which were held following a long period of militant mud-slinging and rancorous political campaigning, let’s join in the spirit of Lincoln to give thanks that democracy and the common good were largely victorious.

Further, as we celebrate Thanksgiving Day this year, let’s ask our family and friends to join us in going forward “with malice toward none and justice for all,” seeking to do all we can to create a nation, and our own neighborhood, with peace and justice for all. 

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* Lincoln’s outstanding Gettysburg address was delivered on November 19 of that year. I recommend reading Heather Cox Richardson’s last Saturday’s informative “letter” regarding that address (see here).

** On Feb. 28, 2015, I made a blog post titled “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech/Sermon,” which was how I referred to his second inaugural address.

Overcoming Thanksgiving Day Myths

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.—and it is the 400^th anniversary of what is often said to be the first Thanksgiving Day. In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Native People called Wampanoag* shared an autumn harvest feast that became the basis of the common Thanksgiving story.

November has also once again this year been designated as National Native American Heritage Month. In light of the latter, many of us USAmericans need to overcome various Thanksgiving Day myths that have long been abroad in the land.

Acknowledging Thanksgiving Day Myths

Kaitlin Curtice is a Potawatomi woman and a Christian. In her 2020 book Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God, she writes how she and other Native Americans are “bombarded with Thanksgiving myths” every November and how hard that is.

Curtice writes, “My non-Native friends have to understand that the myths told at Thanksgiving only continue the toxic stereotypes and hateful language that has always been spewed at us” (pp. 67, 68)

“The Thanksgiving Myth” by Native Circle is explained here in a 2019 post. The authors write, “The big problem with the American Thanksgiving holiday is its false association with American Indian people; the infamous 'Indians and pilgrims' myth.”

They continue, “It is good to celebrate Thanksgiving, to be thankful for your blessings. It is not good to distort history, to falsely portray the origin of this holiday and lie about the truth of its actual inception.”

David Silverman, a professor at George Washington University who specializes in Native American and Colonial American history, tells the true American Thanksgiving story in This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (2019).

As UCC pastor Jane McBride writes in her helpful Christian Century review, Silverman begins his lengthy book “by shattering the myth of the first Thanksgiving.” Then in his concluding paragraph, Silverman asserts,

The truth exposes the traditional tale of the First Thanksgiving as a myth rather than history, and so let us declare it dead except as a subject for the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture (p. 427).

References to Thanksgiving myths are not just recent incidences, though. Back in 1986, Chuck Larsen, a high school history teacher in the state of Washington, wrote how the Thanksgiving stories most children have learned are “a mixture of both history and myth.”

Larson emphasized the “need to try to reach beyond the myths to some degree of historical truth.” He also said, “When you build a lesson on only half of the information, then you are not teaching the whole truth. That is why I used the word myth.”**

Thankfully, there are many more resources available now for learning the truth of the first Thanksgiving than were available in 1986, so there is no excuse for us to hang on to the old myths.

Overcoming Thanksgiving Day Myths

There is an abundance of ways to celebrate Thanksgiving Day without reiterating the Thanksgiving myths, which tend to foster white Christian nationalism and to whitewash the harsh mistreatment of Native Americans.

We can begin to overcome those myths by listening to the scholars such as Silverman and/or to Native American voices such as Larsen’s as found in his article linked to in the second footnote below.

Then, we can overcome Thanksgiving myths by focusing primarily on the many blessings we have received from Creator God, who dearly loves each person and all the people groups in God’s good Creation.

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* “This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later. Long marginalized and misrepresented in U.S. history, the Wampanoags are bracing for the 400th anniversary of the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving in 1621” (headlines of a Nov. 4 Washington Post article).

** Larsen, who has Native American ancestry, wrote “Introduction for Teachers” to help them in teaching the truth about Thanksgiving Day. That instructive piece has been reproduced in many places, but here is a link to a PDF version. It is well worth reading.

The Sand Creek Massacre, a National Disgrace

Earlier this month I wrote about sometimes feeling embarrassed to identify as a Christian. But I am embarrassed not only because of things some Christian leaders do in the present but also because of what some have done in the past. The Sand Creek Massacre is one sad example.  

The Bare Facts

There are background events that I don’t have the space to elucidate here, but here are the bare facts of the Sand Creek Massacre, which occurred 155 years ago yesterday, on November 29, 1864.

The Third Colorado Cavalry commanded by Colonel John Chivington attacked a settlement of Cheyenne/Arapaho Indians at Sand Creek, about 175 miles southeast of Denver. At Chivington’s insistence, they murdered around 200 Native Americans, most of them women and children.

Prior to the massacre, Chivington reportedly said, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! ... I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians. ... Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”

This was all done with the approval of Colorado Governor John Evans, who was also the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in Colorado.

The Embarrassing Facts

John Milton Chivington was born in 1821 into an Ohio farm family. In 1844 he was ordained as a Methodist minister, serving in that capacity in Illinois, Missouri, and then assisting in a Methodist missionary expedition to the Wyandot Indians in Kansas in 1853. (The church I now attend is in Wyandotte County.)

Gov. Evans was also a Methodist. He had joined with other Methodists in 1850 to found Northwestern University in Illinois. Then two years after becoming governor of Colorado in 1862, he and Chivington founded Colorado Seminary, which later became the University of Denver.

The Sand Creek Massacre has, indeed, been an embarrassment for the United Methodist Church, and five years ago they sought repentance for that national disgrace (see here).

There were two Cavalrymen with the Third Regiment, Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer, who refused to join in the massacre and testified against Chivington—and Soule was shot in the back and killed in April 1865 because of his testimony against Chivington.

It is also embarrassing to us Christians that in contrast to Evans and Chivington, Soule was described as a “healthy skeptic” rather than a religious believer.

Repenting of the Facts

This past Sunday Sarah Neher, the Director of Faith Formation and Youth Ministries at Rainbow Mennonite Church, preached on “Deconstructing Thanksgiving.” It was a bold, fitting sermon for the Sunday before the national holiday and for the last week of National American Indian Heritage Month (here is a link to more about that).

Sarah said in her sermon,

This simple narrative [of the traditional Thanksgiving] sets the story like a fairytale. Casting Colonization as beneficial for everyone and that it was relatively peaceful. When in reality over the centuries since Europeans invaded Indigenous land, Natives have experienced genocide, the theft of their lands, and the attempted extinction of their culture.

Yes, the Sand Creek Massacre was simply the continuation of the “whites’” treatment of Native Americans from the beginning—starting with the Pequot War of 1636~38 and the Mystic Massacre of May 1637.

It was the continuation of words about “the merciless Indian Savages” included in the Declaration of Independence of 1776.

Perhaps rather than observing the day after Thanksgiving as “Black Friday,” those of us in the dominant culture should rather observe the days following Thanksgiving as Repentance Weekend for the way our ancestors treated the Native Americans.

That treatment has, indeed, been a national disgrace.

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For Further Information

Here is the link to an article about the 21st annual Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run/Walk, currently in progress.

“Who is the Savage” is an excellent 14-minute video about Black Kettle, the “peace chief” head of the Sand Creek Native Americans in 1864.

And here is the link to a Rocky Mountain PBS documentary on the Sand Creek Massacre.

Questioning Salvation History

Last month (here) I made reference to the second chapter of Miguel De La Torre’s disturbing book Embracing Hopelessness (2017). This article is about a theological problem I encountered in that same chapter.

Accepting Salvation History

One of the first theological German words I learned in seminary was Heilsgeschichte; I never understood why it was so often used in place of the English equivalent: salvation history. Then, the year I finished my basic seminary degree and entered graduate school (1962), Dr. Eric Rust, my major professor, published a book titled simply Salvation History.

While I mainly wanted to study Christian philosophy under Dr. Rust, I also studied Old Testament theology under him—and at that time I had no trouble accepting the basic ideas presented about salvation history—which still seem to be used in Christian colleges/seminaries, as is seen in the following diagram: 

(This diagram is copyrighted by Marion G. Bontrager (b. 1936), retired professor at Hesston College, a Mennonite school in Kansas.) 

Questioning Salvation History

I first began to question the validity of the concept of salvation history I had learned and accepted when I read books by Taiwan theologian C.S. Song, whose writings I studied and wrote essays about in the 1980s and ’90s.

In his seminal 1975 work Christian Mission in Reconstruction, Song (b. 1929) proposed the doctrine of creation rather than salvation history as the starting point for doing theology in Asia.

Japanese theologian Ken Miyamoto has a helpful section in his book God’s Mission in Asia (2007) titled “The Problem of Salvation History” (pp. 168~170). (My review of Miyamoto’s book was published in the January 2010 issue of Missiology: An International Review.)

Much more recently, as mentioned above, I read De La Torre’s rejection of salvation history. That stringent criticism is largely based on how he sees that idea linked to the notion of “manifest destiny,” which was so disastrous for American Indians.

In relating the horrific story of the Sand Creek Massacre, which occurred on November 29, 1864, De La Torre declares: “Sand Creek marked the start of a catastrophic collapse of the Plains Indians’ way of life, an unavoidable consequence of the reigning salvation history of the era known as Manifest Destiny” (p. 40).

In a way, the ideas of salvation history, American exceptionalism, and manifest destiny have been intertwined from the beginnings of the British “invasion” in the 17^th century of what is now North America —even though those connections have seldom been sufficiently recognized.

Thanksgiving Day, which most Americans have just celebrated and during which many recalled the so-called “first Thanksgiving” of 1621, is by no means a time for remembering a glorious past for those who are not white.

A few days ago I read the following hard-hitting article written by Glen Ford, the Executive Editor of the Black Agenda Report. It is titled, “American Thanksgiving: A Pure Glorification of Racist Barbarity”—and it is quite different from what we usually read about the beginnings of Thanksgiving Day in this country.

Read it here, if you dare.

Affirming Salvation History

Questioning salvation history has led me to the following conclusions:

** The concept of salvation history has sometimes led to a destructive triumphalism among some Christians, and that is unacceptable. De La Torre’s criticism must be taken seriously. But that misuse of the concept doesn’t call for rejection of the idea. Rightly understood it can still be affirmed.

** Salvation history recounts important matters regarding God’s work in the world—but not all of God’s work. C.S. Song’s criticism must also be taken seriously. Affirming salvation history does not necessitate denying God’s grace that has operated and is operating outside the confines of that framework.

The “Illegal Aliens” of 1620

Thanksgiving Day means different things to different people. But in addition to school and work holidays it often involves family gatherings around big meals, watching football games by some, and maybe even thinking a little about the first English-American Thanksgiving Day.

After a perilous voyage on the Mayflower in the autumn of 1620, an extremely difficult winter, and then a fruitful harvest in the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth Colony held a harvest festival and gave thanks for God’s blessings that made possible their survival.

Giving thanks for blessings received is certainly a good thing, and I hope all of us will use this Thanksgiving season to reflect upon our many blessings and to give thanks for what we have received, just as those first English immigrants did.

At the same time, it might be good to reflect on how the Pilgrims of 1620 could certainly be considered “illegal aliens.” They definitely were not invited by the Native Americans, and they clearly encroached upon land occupied by others.

True, the “Indians” had no laws prohibiting others from coming to Massachusetts, and they did not own titles to the land on which they lived. (To them the idea of owning land seemed as preposterous as owning the sky.) Still, the English “aliens” were invaders of their territory.

There have been several recent works portraying the Pilgrims’ journey to “New England” and their struggles in their new habitat. “Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower” is a TV movie produced by the History Channel in 2006. One of the commentators in that movie is Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (2006).

Earlier this year Nick Bunker’s lengthy book, Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World, was published. While much of this book is about the background of the Pilgrims, it does, of course, tell their story from the time they first set foot in the “new world” on November 11, 1620—and, it should be noted, that was on Cape Cod, not on Plymouth Rock.

That first month was a hard one, and it was during that time that the Pilgrims stole seed corn that the “Indians” had buried for use the following year, and they also dug up a grave, confiscating some of the jewelry and other articles in it. It is no wonder, then, that the English “aliens” found those first Native Americans they encountered to be quite hostile.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving this year, let’s remember that those who first celebrated it were the same as illegal aliens in the land occupied by the American Indians. Perhaps we can use this occasion to do something for the sake of present day Native Americans, such as donating to the American Indian College Fund. (The address is 8333 Greenwood Blvd. Denver, CO 80221, and information about the AICF, rated four stars, out of four, by Charity Navigator, is easily found on the Internet). Or maybe your church, like mine, has a ministry to Native Americans to which you could contribute.

What About the First Thanksgiving Day?

Much of what most of us learned as children about the first Thanksgiving Day in what became the United States was wrong. And it seems that some of what some children are being taught today is also wrong.

It was true, of course, that a day of thanksgiving was held in November 1621 by the surviving band of "Pilgrims" and others who had come to the "New World" the previous year. But some argue that the first Thanksgiving was actually celebrated in St. Augustine, Florida, on September 8, 1565. And others say that the First Nations (I like the Canadian term better than Indians or even Native Americans) observed harvest festivals and times of thanksgiving long before Europeans came to this part of the world.

Then, many seem to think that most of the people who came across the Atlantic Ocean on the Mayflower did so because of their desire for religious freedom. Actually, fewer than half of those on the Mayflower were religious "pilgrims," as William Bradford called them; the others came for economic or other reasons. And even the Pilgrims had religious freedom in the Netherlands before they left there, so it seems that their main reason for making the dangerous voyage was not for religious freedom as such.

And then there are the Native Americans. The assistance and generosity of the Indians to the Plymouth settlers have generally been recognized, and those like Squanto, a Patuxet, have been highly regarded. But what has not usually been taught is that Squanto, along with many others, had been captured as slaves. Squanto was able to help the Plymouth colony partly because he learned English in the Old World where he had been taken as a slave.

Further, little recognition has been given to the fact that a large percentage of the Native Americans in "New England" had already died before 1621 from diseases (mostly smallpox) brought by the Europeans who had come in the previous decade. When the Mayflower landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, all the Patuxet living in the area had already died from such illnesses.

To counter the numerous Thanksgiving Day myths, errors, and half-truths that have usually been taught in the schools, some have developed alternative curriculum materials. But, unfortunately, the ones I found on the Internet also seem, unfortunately, to contain errors and misleading statements. Combating errors with errors is not helpful. In this case, as in all others, we need to seek to learn and to live by the truth. And that is hard to do.