President George Washington issued a proclamation designating November 26, 1789, as a national day of thanksgiving and prayer, at the request of Congress, to give thanks for the successful establishment of the new federal government under the Constitution. It was the first Thanksgiving proclamation issued by a U.S. president, though a fixed annual national holiday would not be established until Lincoln's presidency in 1863.
Congress passed a joint resolution in late September 1789 asking Washington to recommend a day of thanksgiving to the American people, and Washington obliged with a proclamation crafted with the help of Secretary of State-designate Thomas Jefferson and others. His language was carefully ecumenical, thanking 'that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be,' avoiding sectarian specifics in a young nation still working out the relationship between government and religion.
The proclamation cited gratitude for the peaceful establishment of the Constitution and the new government, still barely eight months old, as well as for the nation's general prosperity and safety. Not everyone was pleased; some, including future president James Madison, worried about the precedent of presidential religious proclamations at all.
The holiday did not become a fixed annual national tradition immediately; various presidents issued or skipped thanksgiving proclamations on different dates for decades afterward. It took Abraham Lincoln's 1863 proclamation, urged by magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale during the Civil War, to establish the modern, annually recurring late-November Thanksgiving holiday Americans now observe.
Key people: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson