Transcript
Dave Ramsey (0:05)
Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. Normal is broke and common sense is weird. So we're here to help you transform your life. From the Ramsey Network and the Fairwinds Credit Union studio, this is the Ramsey Show. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host, Rachel Cruze, number one best selling author, Ramsey personality and my daughter is my co host on this Thanksgiving eve. If you don't know William Henry Seward. William Seward was Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State. He was also the brains behind that presidency in a lot of ways, including he wrote a lot of Abraham Lincoln's speeches that became world renowned and famous, including this proclamation that was issued October 3, 1863, right in the middle of the Civil War. The Civil War would end about 18 months after this proclamation was issued by the President of the United States of America. Here's Lincoln. The year that is drawing towards 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 soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations. Order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict. While that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. 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 axe 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. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged and 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 testimony whereof I have heretofore set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed, done at the city of Washington this third day of October, the year of our Lord 1863. President Abraham Lincoln. Wow. I've read that every year that I've been on the air for 30 something years and I never get over it. Some of you people think I'm a cornball, but it's my show, so shut up. I'm just signing up for head cornball. That's me. But I mean, the President of the United States issues a proclamation to say thank you to God for his blessings. And if you didn't hear that in there, you weren't listening. That's exactly what this says. And it's so far afield from the way people think today, and especially people in Washington, D.C. think today. But man, what a great reminder of the greatness of these men and that their source was their faith.