ational reformation as a whole people? We
have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been
preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in
numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have
forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in
peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly
imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings
were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated
with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the
necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God
that made us:

It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to
confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness:

Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in
the views, of the Senate, I do by this my proclamation designate and
set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national
humiliation, fasting, and prayer. And I do hereby request all the people
to abstain on that day from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite
at their several places of public worship and their respective homes in
keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of
the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion. All this being done
in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope, authorized by
the divine teachings, that the united cry of the nation will be heard on
high, and answered with blessings no less than the pardon of our national
sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its
former happy condition of unity and peace.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of
the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this thirtieth day of March, in the
year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the
independence of the United States the eighty-seventh.

A. LINCOLN.

By the President: WILLIAM H. SEWARD,
Secretary of State.

LICENSE OF COMMERCIAL INTERCOURSE.

EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, March 31, 1863.

Whereas by the act of Congress approved July 13, 1861, entitled "An act to
provide for the collection of duties on imports, and for other purposes,"
all commercial intercourse between the inhabitants of such States a