A Thanksgiving Meditation on American Constitutional Law, Liberty, and Gratitude

By Hon. William Wagner (Ret.)

“I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart; I will recount all of your wonderful deeds.”

Psalm 9:1

Each Thanksgiving, we American citizens do something quietly radical: we pause a nation that never stops moving, and we give thanks—publicly, communally, and often in language that acknowledges God. That custom is older than stuffed turkey and older than the football. It is woven into the culture and the deeply rooted cultural history and legal traditions of the American nation.

In a constitutional republic, public gratitude is not mere sentiment. It is civic discipline. It reminds a free people that rights are not bestowed by government, and that power is bounded—first by the Rule of Law, and ultimately by the moral order that makes law intelligible. The American Thanksgiving, rightly understood, provides a recurring lesson in limited government, unalienable rights, and humble citizenship.

The long legal pedigree of Thanksgiving is as American as the Constitution. It did not enter our national life by accident or drift in on the tides of culture. It came by proclamation—often in times of national trial—when leaders recognized both Providence and duty. Before there was a Constitution, the Continental Congress called for a national thanksgiving in 1777, even as the young Republic fought for its survival. Our earliest statesmen treated gratitude as a public virtue necessary for republican endurance. In the Bible, Moses tells Israel—on the cusp of becoming a self-governing people in their own land—that national endurance depends upon remembering blessings with gratitude, rather than drifting into the illusion of self-sufficient pride:

“When you have eaten and are satisfied, bless the LORD your God for the good land He has given you… Beware lest you forget the LORD… and your heart be lifted up… You may say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who gives you power…” (Deut. 8:10–14, 17–18) (emphasis added)

Here gratitude is treated as a civic necessity, not a private sentiment or just a long weekend. We ought to publicly express thankfulness to the Lord for the goodness of this great nation He has given to us. Ingratitude is politically and morally corrosive; forgetfulness conduces to pride, and pride eventually leads to national ruin. That ancient Biblical logic closely parallels the early American conviction that republics endure when citizens habitually acknowledge gifts and limits beyond themselves, and decay when they attribute everything to their own power.

Indeed, when the Constitution was brand new, the first president under that Constitution—at Congress’s request—issued the first federal Thanksgiving Proclamation. On November 26, 1789, George Washington urged the nation to acknowledge “the providence of Almighty God.” That phrase was not a rhetorical flourish. It was a confession of jurisdiction. Washington was reminding the country that blessings precede government and that liberty is not self-caused. He issued another Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1795, directing attention again to national peace and constitutional stability. John Adams followed with proclamations in 1798 and 1799, framing national gratitude, fasting, and repentance as fitting for a people under threat—foreign and domestic. Even Thomas Jefferson’s refusal to issue federal proclamations, often invoked today for the wrong reasons, proves the opposite of what secular absolutists claim. Jefferson was not declaring public gratitude unconstitutional; he believed, as a matter of prudence, that such proclamations were better handled by states and churches. The Founding generation debated placement, not permissibility.

James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” resolves any supposed ambiguity. During the War of 1812 he issued Thanksgiving proclamations recommending prayer to “Almighty God” for peace and national preservation. Madison understood the text he helped draft, and he understood the difference between establishment and acknowledgment. If the First Amendment banned public invocations of God, Madison was either ignorant of his own handiwork or deliberately defiant. Neither proposition is credible.

The tradition reached its most defining moment in the administration of Abraham Lincoln. In 1863, when the nation was bleeding profusely and uncertain of its own continuance, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thanksgiving Proclamation, and the two belong together. The Emancipation Proclamation, grounded in Lincoln’s Article II war powers as Commander in Chief, freed slaves in areas in rebellion. Lincoln closed that legal executive action with a sentence as candid as it is constitutional: he invoked “the gracious favor of Almighty God.” He was not establishing a church. He was placing the nation under moral judgment.

Nine months later, in his Thanksgiving Proclamation of October 3, 1863, Lincoln called a war-wearied people to gratitude, repentance, and hope in “the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.” He set the last Thursday of November as a national day of thanksgiving—an observance every president since has continued. Congress later made Thanksgiving a federal holiday in 1870, and after a brief calendrical dispute, Franklin Roosevelt signed Congress’s 1941 resolution fixing Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November, where it remains. This is not a thin or episodic history. It is a continuous constitutional practice spanning the Republic’s whole life, beginning with the very Congress that framed the First Amendment. Thus, when secular progressives chronically claim that the First Amendment Establishment Clause requires a secular purpose for all government action, and that the action must not even symbolically endorse religion, their contention collapses under its own weight. For, if were true, the presidential Thanksgiving and Emancipation proclamations would be unconstitutional violations of the Establishment Clause. The Establishment Clause forbids the federal government from establishing a national church or coercing religious conformity. Properly understood in light of text, history, and Supreme Court precedent, it does not ban a Christian point of view among the perspectives in the public square. The First Amendment was drafted and ratified amid practices like congressional chaplains, legislative prayer, and presidential days of thanksgiving and fasting. The same Congress that proposed the Establishment Clause also asked Washington to issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation. It is impossible to believe they thought they were violating the Constitution they had just written.

The Supreme Court has, in recent decades, returned to this historical ground. In Marsh v. Chambers, the Court upheld legislative prayer because it is embedded in our “unique history.” Town of Greece v. Galloway reaffirmed that longstanding public invocations are constitutional when rooted in national tradition and not coercive. And in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the Court made unmistakable what the Founders assumed: First Amendment Establishment Clause analysis must be guided by deeply rooted history and tradition, not by modern hostility to religion. Under that clarity of truth, Thanksgiving proclamations are not borderline cases; they are paradigmatic examples of that which is constitutionally proper.

Just as important, neither Lincoln’s Emancipation nor his Thanksgiving Proclamation did any of the things the Establishment Clause forbids. Neither created a church, funded a denomination, required worship, penalized dissent, or conferred legal benefit based on belief. They invited gratitude and reflection—civic in purpose, voluntary in observance. There is no coercion. There is no denominational preference. There is, instead, humility—the posture that keeps government in its proper limited place.

A final point, more foundational than technical, goes to the Republic’s moral grammar. A constitutional order that recognizes unalienable rights necessarily presupposes a source of rights above the state. That is why the Declaration of Independence speaks of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and why presidents have used Thanksgiving to remind citizens that liberty is a gift to steward, not a license to squander. Public acknowledgments of God in this tradition are not establishment; they are an act of constitutional realism. They affirm that government is not God.

We impoverish ourselves when we flatten Thanksgiving into mere secular holiday culture. At its core, it is a constitutional habit of heart. Law depends on gratitude because a people who receive everything as entitlement will soon treat rights as government grant rather than divine endowment. Freedom depends on virtue because ordered liberty requires moral self-government, and Thanksgiving renews that lesson without statute and without force. Unity depends on shared memory, and in 1863 Lincoln did not wait for peace to give thanks. He gave thanks to make peace possible. A grateful nation is harder to fracture.

So this Thanksgiving, we should not blush at the language of our presidents—whether Washington’s “providence of Almighty God,” Madison’s “Great Sovereign of the Universe,” or Lincoln’s plea for the Almighty hand to heal the nation’s wounds. They were not violating the Constitution. They were practicing it—by acknowledging a truth the Constitution assumes: that blessings, rights, and history alike come with duties.

May we give thanks not only for the harvest of the year, but for the Rule of Law, the miracle of liberty, and the still-unfinished work of justice—undertaken, as Lincoln said, with “the considerate judgment of mankind,” and in humility before the One whose favor no republic can afford to disdain.

The author gratefully acknowledges the use of AI-assisted drafting tools (specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT) in the preparation of this Issue Brief. All ideas, structural decisions, analysis, and final edits are solely the author’s own, and the author bears full responsibility for the content.