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Title: THE FEDERALIST
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Federalist No. 03-48 Special Edition
A
Patriot's Thanksgiving -- 2003
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THE FOUNDATION
"Go on, then, in your generous enterprise with gratitude
to Heaven for past success, and confidence of it in the future." --Samuel
Adams
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GOOD NEWS
"In everything give thanks." (I Thessalonians 5:18)
++ "Be anxious for nothing, but in
everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be
made known to God." (Philippians 4:6)
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ICTUS IMPRIMIS
"In want or in plenty, in times of challenge or times of
calm, we always have reasons to be thankful. America is a land of abundance,
prosperity, and hope. ...This Thanksgiving, we again give thanks for all of our
blessings and for the freedoms we enjoy every day. Our Founders thanked the
Almighty and humbly sought His wisdom and blessing. May we always live by that
same trust, and may God continue to watch over and bless the United States of
America." --President George W. Bush
(Link here for a Thanksgiving quiz
for children --
http://federalist.com/news/thanks.asp )
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INSIGHT
"Measured by the standards of men of their time, ...
[the Pilgrims] were the humble of the earth. Measured by later accomplishments,
they were the mighty. In appearance weak and persecuted they came -- rejected,
despised -- an insignificant band; in reality strong and independent, a mighty
host of whom the world was not worthy, destined to free mankind." --Calvin
Coolidge
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LIBERTY
"Thursday, Americans all over the world will gather to
celebrate with family and friends and give thanks for the blessings of freedom
and of life. Thanksgiving is a very special American holiday, first in 1621,
I'm told -- although I wasn't there -- and celebrated every year since. It's a
reminder not just of the abundance that freedom brings, but of the origins of
our great country, really the first nation in the history of the world to be
founded on freedom. For the Pilgrims, Thanksgiving was the culmination of a
long year of hardship and struggle, a struggle in which they risked everything
for the right to be free. Freedom lies at the heart of who we are and what we
believe as Americans. And for well more than two centuries, our country has
been blessed, year after year, with men and women willing to fight and die to
defend freedom, the freedom that we all cherish. This Thanksgiving, Americans
have a great deal to be grateful for and proud of. " --Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld
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THE GIPPER
"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life,
but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in
my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans,
windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony
and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.
...After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the
granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's
still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the
pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward
home." --Ronald Reagan
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THANKSGIVING 2003
THE CHARACTER OF
THANKSGIVING
Which of our country's many blessings are we most
grateful for here at The Federalist?
Certainly, chief among these blessings is the genius and intrepidity of our
Founding Fathers -- humanly flawed men, to be sure, but nonetheless brilliant,
resilient, and God-fearing.
Consider the circumstances of our country's
first Thanksgiving Day celebrated after our Declaration of Independence. The
first national Thanksgiving Proclamation, issued by the revolutionary
Continental Congress on November 1, 1777, expressed gratitude for the colonials'
October victory over British General Burgoyne at Saratoga. Authored by Samuel
Adams, its one sentence of 360 words reads in part: "Forasmuch as it is the
indispensable duty of all men to adore the superintending providence of Almighty
God; to acknowledge with gratitude their obligation to him for benefits
received...together with penitent confession of their sins, whereby they had
forfeited every favor; and their humble and earnest supplications that it may
please God through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot
them out of remembrance...it is therefore recommended...to set apart Thursday
the eighteenth day of December next, for solemn thanksgiving and praise, that
with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feeling of
their hearts and consecrate themselves to the service of their Divine
Benefactor...acknowledging with gratitude their obligations to Him for benefits
received....To prosper the means of religion, for the promotion and enlargement
of that kingdom which consisteth 'in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy
Ghost'."
On Wednesday, December 17th, General George Washington issued
general orders including the following: "Tomorrow being the day set apart by the
Honorable Congress for public Thanksgiving and Praise; and duty calling us
devoutly to express our grateful acknowledgements to God for the manifold
blessings he has granted us, the General directs that the army remain in its
present quarters, and that the Chaplains perform divine service with their
several Corps and Brigades. And earnestly exhorts, all officers and soldiers,
whose absence is not indispensably necessary, to attend with reverence the
solemnities of the day."
Lt. Col. Henry Dearborn's diary entry for
December 18th described the want and privation shrouding Washington's troops,
despite their military victories: "This is Thanksgiving Day. God knows we have
very little to keep it with, this being the third day we have been without flour
or bread, and are living on a high, uncultivated hill, in huts and tents, lying
on the cold ground. Upon the whole I think all we have to be thankful for is
that we are alive and not in the grave with many of our friends."
For our
nation, Thanksgiving has been best celebrated in the shadow of want, and thus
Thanksgiving shows the best of our character. We recount the origins of our Day
of Thanksgiving that we may celebrate the holiday as our forebears did, in
humble acknowledgment and heartfelt gratitude for God's many blessings upon His
people and our nation, and that we may focus respectfully on the origins of our
freedom.
The celebration we now popularly regard as "The First
Thanksgiving" was the Pilgrims' three-day feast celebrated in early November of
1621. Thanksgiving alone among American religious holidays derives in the main
from Puritan observances. Christmas, Easter and saints' days trace to origins
in other Christian faiths, and although all these festive celebrations have
developed an essentially American stamp, Thanksgiving alone is the
quintessentially American holiday.
The Pilgrims were Puritans. They were
America's Calvinist Protestants -- those who rejected the institutional Church
of England and embarked from Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, sailing
for a new world that offered the promise of both civil and religious liberty.
For almost three months, 102 seafarers braved harsh elements to arrive off the
coast of what is now Massachusetts, in late November of 1620. On December 11,
prior to disembarking at Plymouth Rock, they signed the "Mayflower Compact,"
often cited as America's original document of civil government and the first to
introduce self-government. While still anchored at Provincetown harbor, their
Pastor, John Robinson, counseled, "You are become a body politic ... and are to
have only them for your ... governors which yourselves shall make choice of."
Governor William Bradford described the Mayflower Compact as "a combination made
by them before they came ashore ... occasioned partly by the discontented and
mutinous speeches that some of the strangers amongst them had let fall....That
when they came ashore they would use their owne libertie; for none had power to
command them...."
Upon landing in America, the Pilgrims conducted a
prayer service, then quickly turned to building shelters. Starvation and
sickness during the ensuing New England winter killed almost half their
population, but through prayer and hard work, with the assistance of their
Indian friends, the Pilgrims reaped a rich harvest in the summer of 1621. The
first Thanksgiving to God in the Calvinist tradition in Plymouth Colony was
actually celebrated during the summer of 1623, when the colonists declared a
Thanksgiving holiday after their crops were saved by much-needed
rainfall.
In 1630, while sailing to America, devout Puritan John
Winthrop, later to become Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, meditated on
the task before the colonists seeking religious liberty: "We will be as a city
upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely
with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His
present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the
world." The earliest Americans knew that self-government rests equally on
liberty and virtue -- and that liberty and virtue are inseparable.
By the
mid-17th century, the custom of autumnal Thanksgivings was established
throughout New England. Observance of Thanksgiving festivals began to spread
southward during the American Revolution, and the Continental Congresses,
cognizant of the need for God’s continued blessing upon their warring
country, proclaimed yearly Thanksgiving days during the Revolutionary War, from
1777 to 1783. They then officially recognized the importance of a day for
giving thanks for our nation's blessings in one of the first acts of the
constitutional government. Soon after adopting the Bill of Rights to the
Constitution, a motion in Congress to initiate the proclamation of a national
day of thanksgiving was approved. Both chambers of Congress asked President
George Washington "to recommend to the people of the United States a day of
public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful
hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them
an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and
happiness."
Washington thus penned the following words, then set his
signature to the first day of thanks for the liberties enshrined in our new
Constitution:
"Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the
providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits,
and humbly to implore His protection and favor....
"Now, therefore, I do
recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by
the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who
is the Beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be;
that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks
for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their
becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable
interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late
war....
"And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our
prayers and supplication to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him
to pardon our national and other transgressions ...[and] to render our national
government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a government of
wise, just and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and
obeyed....
"Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3d day of
October, AD 1789."
Our nation’s second president, John Adams,
followed the custom of declaring national days of thanks, and James Madison, our
fourth president, called for three national observances of fasting and grateful
prayer for deliverance during the War of 1812.
Thanksgiving has,
historically, brought forth the best in our nation and its citizens. Indeed, it
is our great good hope at The Federalist
that we disavow our recent dalliances with hollow
self-aggrandizement; that we move beyond our petty penchant for materialism;
that we truly and humbly give thanks to God for our myriad blessings; and that
His hand may yet again guide us toward a future secure beyond the dangers and
hardships of the current age.
President Ronald Reagan frequently
invoked John Winthrop's vision of America “as a city upon a hill.”
In this and many other ways, he administered the moral clarity that, through
trial and testing, restored our nation to its place of promise and prominence:
"[O]ur cause must be to rediscover, reassert and reapply America's spiritual
heritage to our national affairs. Then with God's help we shall indeed be as a
city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon us."
But as John
Winthrop warned, "if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but
shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve
them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good
land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.
"Therefore let us choose life,
that we and our seed may
live,
by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him,
for He is our life and our prosperity."
On this Day of Thanksgiving,
we are again a nation at war. As our forebears remembered with every prayerful
word of gratitude, even self-reliance is, at its root, reliance on Him. How can
we give thanks when all we have is a gift of
our Heavenly Father? On this day, then, let our gratitude center not upon the
bounty so much as the blessing. And as Thanksgiving cultivates our
perseverance, let us press on in our fight to keep secure the blessings of
liberty.
"Go on, then, in your generous enterprise with gratitude to
Heaven for past success, and confidence of it in the future. For my own part, I
ask no greater blessing than to share with you the common danger and common
glory ... that these American States may never cease to be free and
independent." --Samuel Adams
On this Thanksgiving Day, especially, we ask
that you pray for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm's way around the
world in defense of our liberty, and for the families awaiting their safe
return.
As always, it is an honor and privilege to serve you as editor
and publisher of The Federalist. We thank
your for your continued support, and we’re humbled to count you among our
readers. On behalf of our Advisory Committee and staff, thank you, and may God
bless you and your family.
Lex et Libertas -- Semper Vigilo, Paratus,
et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher
(Permission to reprint and/or forward
is hereby granted.)
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