voyage shall
start with the best possible chance of saving the ship. This is due to
the people, both on principle and under the Constitution. Their will,
constitutionally expressed, is the ultimate law for all. If they should
deliberately resolve to have immediate peace, even at the loss of their
country and their liberties, I know not the power or the right to resist
them. It is their own business, and they must do as they please with their
own. I believe, however, they are still resolved to preserve their country
and their liberties; and in this, in office or out of it, I am resolved to
stand by them. I may add, that in this purpose to save the country and its
liberties, no classes of people seem so nearly unanimous as the soldiers
in the field and the sailors afloat. Do they not have the hardest of it?
Who should quail while they do not? God bless the soldiers and seamen,
with all their brave commanders.

PROCLAMATION OF THANKSGIVING, OCTOBER 20, 1864.

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

A Proclamation.

It has pleased Almighty God to prolong our national life another year,
defending us with his guardian care against unfriendly designs from
abroad, and vouchsafing to us in His mercy many and signal victories over
the enemy, who is of our own household. It has also pleased our Heavenly
Father to favor as well our citizens in their homes as our soldiers in
their camps, and our sailors on the rivers and seas, with unusual health.
He has largely augmented our free population by emancipation and by
immigration, while he has opened to us new: sources of wealth, and has
crowned the labor of our working-men in every department of industry with
abundant rewards. Moreover, he has been pleased to animate and inspire our
minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient
for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our
adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford
to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our
dangers and afflictions.

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do
hereby appoint and set apart the last Thursday in November next as a day
which I desire to be observed by all my fellow-citizens, wherever they
may be then, as a day of thanksgiving and praise to Almighty God, the
beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe. And I do further recommend
to my fellow-citizens