As the big holiday approaches, it is fitting to remember that 2005 marks the 140th anniversary of the first officially proclaimed Thanksgiving, which occurred in November 1865 and was declared by President Lincoln in April of that year shortly after the Confederacy surrendered and the Civil War ended.
David Gerlertner has an excellent piece up at The Weekly Standard about the themes that pervaded that first Thanksgiving, and what they mean for America today.
The Union was in a good mood that night and deserved to be; it had fought a terrifically hard war to the finish. Lincoln hated slavery, but led the Northern states into the Civil War strictly to preserve the Union. Public opinion wouldn’t have supported a war to end slavery. But as the fighting continued and the casualties mounted, public thinking shifted. In September 1862, Lincoln changed the whole character of the war by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in rebellious parts of the nation. He understood the Proclamation merely as a first step; he intended for all slaves to be freed by constitutional means (which the Thirteenth Amendment accomplished).
We are fighting a different war today. Like the Civil War, it began for reasons of self-interest and self-defense–fair grounds for war. Today we see a larger goal: to liberate Iraq; to fight tyranny and spread democracy. The casualties of Iraq are minute relative to those of the Civil War, though the grief caused by each is just as great; and the Iraq war is proving (like the Civil War) to be longer and harder than we ever imagined. Do we have the resolve and steady purpose and high ideals and guts we had then?
Read the whole thing.
