Today, we should metformin 500 mg price thank magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale for our first national Thanksgiving proclamation. Undaunted by her age of 74, by 15 years of rejections by previous administrations, and driven to tidy up the scattered statewide Thanksgiving dates of New England legislatures, she wrote to President Lincoln in 1863 that a Thanksgiving “needs national attention and authoritative fixation, only, to become an American tradition.” Lincoln assigned William Seward to write it.

Seward believed people recognized God’s bounties and providence. His lofty language of the day proclaimed, “Bounties so constantly enjoyed … they cannot fail to penetrate and soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.”

What were those bounties? This holiday can we give thanks as fervently as Hale and Seward with softened insensible hearts? Yes, but it may be harder.

Seward listed bounties of a generous harvest, economic growth, domestic order, international tranquility and steady progress of Union forces. Here is his list: “Fruitful fields and healthful skies, peace preserved (with other nations), order has been maintained, laws respected and obeyed, harmony prevailing everywhere except in the theater of military conflict, where the theater has been greatly contracted by advancing armies and navies of the Union. (The war’s) diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry … have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as of iron and coal as the precious metals, have yielded 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 increases of freedom.”

Seward concluded that such bounties could only come from a gracious God and not “human counsel … nor any mortal hand.”

Can we possibly reunite with Hale and Seward to be as thankful today? We had fruitful fields, although human counsel on immigration policies impaired their harvest. Peace has been preserved in most countries, although waste in the camp and the battlefields of Afghanistan are in the 10th year and President Karzai proclaims his warlords would welcome our troops to continue fighting. Domestic order has been maintained, despite unemployment and occupiers on Wall Street testifying against the unequal distribution of our nation’s wealth. Harmony exists in Washington, D.C. but only because both parties destroyed the supercommittee so Congress could pass the task of resolving the debt and deficits to a newly elected Congress and administration in 2013. Finally, tantalizing yields of wealth exist through gold mining, oil drilling, natural gas fracking and coal mining, but human counsel is divided as to whether and how we should extract and distribute the wealth and energy.

Despite the self-wrought weakening of our nation, yes, we can unite with Hale and Seward to be thankful. We can give profound thanks our country grants us the freedom to voice and vote for deliverance from dysfunction.

Hoping for mercy, we can also remember our country has persevered over greater troubles. Lincoln’s second inaugural address pondered the devastation brought by slavery and inspired us with these words: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; … to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

And we can thank Hale for persisting until we had a day dedicated for thanks giving.

Got a comment on Jim’s column? Shoot us an e-mail at weekly@empire-press.com, or visit his blog at blog.jamessrussell.com.