Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience byMelanie Kirkpatrick, (Encounter Books, 2016)

Why Jefferson Said 'No' to Thanksgiving

There is a notable absence in the list of presidents who issued Thanksgiving proclamations: Thomas Jefferson. The third president of the United States famously declined to do so.

Jefferson had principled reasons for refusing to issue such a proclamation, which he explained in a letter to a New York City minister by the name of Samuel Miller, dated January 23, 1808. The Reverend Miller had written the president soliciting his views on whether his constitutional powers extended to naming a day of national Thanksgiving and prayer. Jefferson wrote in reply that he did “not consider [himself] authorized” to issue a Thanksgiving proclamation because the Constitution prohibits a president from “intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.” He quoted the First Amendment, which he described as “the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment, or free exercise, of religion.”


Naming a day of thanksgiving and prayer was a religious matter, he informed the minister, and therefore not an appropriate role for the federal government. “Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, & the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands, where the constitution has deposited it.”

Jefferson offered a second reason for his decision. Under the Constitution, he wrote, the authority to issue a Thanksgiving proclamation rightly belongs to the states, not the federal government. The Constitution reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the central government.Certainly no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the general government. It must then rest with the states.”