Friday, November 28, 2008

The First Independent Thanksgiving of the Revolution

During this time of Constitutional Crisis, Americans need to be reminded what is at steak here before they entirely give up what was so valiantly fought for so long ago. Here is a bit of history that is no longer taught in our government controlled schools.



It would be the first American Thanksgiving proclamation issued for many years that didn't end in "God Save the King," this proclamation issued in 1774 just two hundred years ago. And it would set a pattern for all future American Thanksgiving proclamations. Almost from the beginning, the colonists in New England had set aside a day in spring for fasting and prayer and, again in the autumn, a day to give thanks for the blessings of God. These mostly had been proclaimed, however, by Royal Governors on paper bearing the royal crest. But in this October of 1774, there was no hope of this. For nine years, since the time of the imposition of the aborted Stamp Tax, Britain and her American colonies had been struggling in a cold war, and it was getting hotter.

The street riots, later to be called "The Boston Massacre", when British soldiers fired on demonstrating civilians, were only four years in the past. Just ten months earlier, in December, 1773, "The Mohawks" inflamed by a new tax on tea, had swarmed over London-loaded vessels in the Boston port and dumped overboard the cargoes of tea -- tea worth L10,000 which washed up in windrows around the edges of the harbor.

The proclamation and the following Thanksgiving day were enthusiastically received. "Their edicts are implicitly obeyed," an embittered General Gage complained. On that December 15, the business of the Province shut down. The Boston Gazette reported that "two or three embittered persons of the most insignificant and contemptuous of Sects" opened their shops, but that even some British soldiers had chided them for insulting their countrymen. FULL STORY.

http://www.atlah.org
/broadcast/manningreport.html

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