“Nationalize as much as possible” to “make men love their
country before their states. All private interests, all local
interests, all banking interests, the interests of individuals, everything,
should be subordinate now to the interest of the Government.”
–Senator John Sherman, 1863 (Cited in Heather Cox
Richardson, The Greatest Nation on the Earth,
p. 87
George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving
Proclamation on October 3, 1789 as a way of celebrating the newly-ratified
Constitution. He distributed his proclamation to the governors of the
states and suggested that they participate in the celebration, which the
states all did in their own ways for many years. The federal government
was not yet a centralized, consolidated, monopolistic, central-planning
bureaucracy, so Washington’s proclamation was no more than a suggestion
offered to the citizens of the free and independent states.
Thanksgiving did not become a national holiday until Lincoln
nationalized all the state Thanksgiving celebrations by issuing a
proclamation written by Secretary of State William Seward (according to
Lincoln’s White House secretary, John Nicolay) on October 3, 1863. Lincoln’s
Thanksgiving Proclamation is a masterpiece of lies, deceptions, and false
propaganda that would have impressed any twentieth-century tyrant.
In order to keep the Northern public sufficiently
frightened and paranoid (and hence supportive of the war), the Seward/Lincoln
Thanksgiving Proclamation announced that the war “seemed to foreign States to
invite and provoke their aggression.” In reality, no foreign state
would ever have considered invading a country across a large ocean that had
just assembled one of the largest and best-equipped armies in the history of
the world. In fact, at the end of the war many British politicians and
opinion makers were terrified that Sherman would cross the Atlantic and
invade England as punishment for trading with the Confederacy during the war.
The most absurd claim made in Lincoln’s proclamation is
that “order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and
harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theater of military
conflict.” This was three months after some fifteen thousand U.S. Army
soldiers were ordered to leave the Gettysburg battlefield and march to New
York City to put down the New York City Draft riots, which they did by
murdering hundreds, if not thousands, of draft protesters by shooting them
down in the streets (See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots).
Colonel Arthur B. Fremantle, a British government emissary to the Confederate
Army, was making his way back to England via New York at the time and
described the scene in his book, Three Months in the Southern States:
“The reports of outrages, hangings, and murder, were now
most alarming, the terror and anxiety were universal. All shops were shut;
all carriages and omnibuses had ceased running. No colored man or woman was
visible or safe in the streets, or even in his own dwelling.
Telegraphs were cut, and railroad tracks torn up.”
Violent mobs roamed the streets for days, wrote
Freemantle, attacking the police and especially affluent Republicans who were
able to buy their way out of the enslaving draft law for $300. Such was
the Seward/Lincoln idea of “harmony.” The fact that there was a massive
desertion crisis in the Union Army (See Ella Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War),
along with hundreds of thousands of draft evaders, also proves the absurdity
of the claim that “harmony has prevailed” in the Northern States.
The notion that “the laws have been respected” is equally
absurd, since Lincoln had illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and
imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern citizens without due process on the
mere suspicion of criticizing himself or the government (See Freedom Under Lincoln by
Dean Sprague and Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln by James Randall). Hundreds of Northern newspapers were
shut down by Republican Party thugs in a gross assault on freedom of the
press. Lincoln redefined treason from the definition of it in the
Constitution (Article 3, Section 3) as being the levying of war upon the
states, which is exactly what he had done, to criticism of him and his
regime. These are just a few of the reasons why generations of
historians referred to “the Lincoln dictatorship.” It was a lawless
regime that boastfully lied about the laws being “respected.”
When the South seceded it had no intention whatsoever of
attacking the Northern states. Jefferson Davis did not want to run the
government in Washington, D.C. any more than George Washington wanted to run
the government in London. Yet the Seward/Lincoln Thanksgiving
Proclamation speaks of “diversions of wealth” to “the national defense”
(emphasis added). But Lincoln was waging an offensive war, the
purpose of which, according to his own numerous declarations and the
declarations of the U.S. Congress, was to force the Southern states back into
the union so that “the duties and imposts” can be collected from them, as Abe
announced in his first inaugural address.
In the Northern states freedom of speech was essentially abolished; tens of
thousands of political dissenters were imprisoned; taxes of every kind were
raised to astronomical levels; hundreds of thousands of soldiers had already
been killed or maimed for life in the war; inflation was raging; draft riots
occurred not just in New York City but throughout the North; capital
investment was massively diverted from civilian to military uses, thereby
crippling economic growth; and international trade had almost come to a
halt. Yet the Seward/Lincoln Thanksgiving Proclamation cheerfully
concluded that “the country” is “rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented
strength and vigor.”
This was an obvious attempt to falsely equate “the
country” with “the government” in the minds of the public. War always
explodes the size, scope and powers of the state by crippling,
diminishing, nationalizing, or destroying parts of the civil society and the
private enterprise system.
Lincoln also claimed to know what was in the mind of God
in his Thanksgiving Proclamation by asserting that God is “dealing with us in
anger for our sins” by forcing a war on the nation. This was also
the main theme of Lincoln’s second inaugural address – that the war was not
in any way his fault, but just “came” as God’s punishment for all Americans,
North and South, for the sin of slavery. Americans were “unavoidably
engaged” in a war, he said in the Thanksgiving Proclamation.
Lincoln never attempted to explain why God would punish
only Americans for the sin of slavery while ignoring the fact that some 95
percent of all the slaves that were brought to the Western Hemisphere were
kidnapped and transported there by the British, Spanish, French, Dutch,
and others besides Americans.
Lincoln concluded his Proclamation by urging the
nationalization of Thanksgiving by celebrating “with one heart and one
voice by the whole American people.” It is unlikely that any American
from a Southern state (which Lincoln always insisted were at all times a part
of the American union) at the time would have been so motivated.
