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Welcome to our Thanksgiving page. We wish you the best for the holidays from Txusa.com, Hicks & Associates CPAs and many of our friends and associates from our other web sites.
We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? We have been the recipients of the choisest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PilgrimsThe Pilgrims were English Separatists who founded (1620)
Plymouth Colony in New England. In the first years of the 17th century, small numbers of
English Puritans broke away from the Church of England because they felt that it had not
completed the work of the Reformation. They committed themselves to a life based on the
Bible. Most of these Separatists were farmers, poorly educated and without social or
political standing. One of the Separatist congregations was led by William Brewster and
the Rev. Richard Clifton in the village of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire. The Scrooby group
emigrated to Amsterdam in 1608 to escape harassment and religious persecution. The next
year they moved to Leiden, where, enjoying full religious freedom, they remained for
almost 12 years. In 1617, discouraged by economic difficulties, the pervasive Dutch
influence on their children, and their inability to secure civil autonomy, the
congregation voted to emigrate to America. Through the Brewster family's friendship with
Sir Edwin Sandys, treasurer of the London Company, the congregation secured two patents
authorizing them to settle in the northern part of the company's jurisdiction. Unable to
finance the costs of the emigration with their own meager resources, they negotiated a
financial agreement with Thomas Weston, a prominent London iron merchant. Fewer than half
of the group's members elected to leave Leiden. A small ship, the Speedwell, carried them
to Southampton, England, where they were to join another group of Separatists and pick up
a second ship. After some delays and disputes, the voyagers regrouped at Plymouth aboard
the 180-ton Mayflower. It began its historic voyage on Sept. 16, 1620, with about 102
passengers--fewer than half of them from Leiden. After a 65-day journey, the Pilgrims
sighted Cape Cod on November 19. Unable to reach the land they had contracted for, they
anchored (November 21) at the site of Provincetown. Because they had no legal right to
settle in the region, they drew up the Mayflower Compact, creating their own government.
The settlers soon discovered Plymouth Harbor, on the western side of Cape Cod Bay and made
their historic landing on December 21; the main body of settlers followed on December 26.
The term Pilgrim was first used by William Bradford to describe the Leiden Separatists who
were leaving Holland. The Mayflower's passengers were first described as the Pilgrim
Fathers in 1799.
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It is the duty of nations as
well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their
sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance
will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy
Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the
Lord. 