A proclamation for a public thanksgiving. ... Thursday the twenty-third day of November instant ... Given under our hands at the Council-chamber, in Watertown, this fourth day of November ...

A proclamation for a public thanksgiving. ... Thursday the twenty-third day of November instant ... Given under our hands at the Council-chamber, in Watertown, this fourth day of November ...

Table of contents

A PROCLAMATION FOR A PUBLIC THANKSGIVING.

§

[Page]

[Page]

A PROCLAMATION FOR A PUBLIC THANKSGIVING.

ALTHO' in Consequence of the unnatural, cruel, andbarbarous Measures, adopted and pursued by the British Administration, great and distressing Calamities are brought upon our oppressed Country, and on this Colony in particular; we feel the dreadful Effects of Civil War, by which America is stained with the Blood of her valiant Sons, who have bravely fallen in the laudable Defence of our Rights and Priviledges;—Our Capital, once the Seat of Justice, Opulence and Virtue, is unjustly wrested from its proper Owners, who are obliged to flee from the Iron Hand of Tyranny, or are held in the unrelenting Arms of Oppression:—Our Sea-Ports greatly distressed, and Towns burnt by the Foes, who have acted the Part of barbarous Incendiaries.—And altho' the wise and holy Governor of the World, has, in his righteous Providence, sent Droughts into this Colony, and wasting Sickness into many of our Towns; yet we have the greatest Reason to adore and praise the Supreme Disposer of Events, who deals infinitely better with us than we deserve; and amidst all his Iudgments hath remembered Mercy, by causing the Voice of Health again to be heard amongst us;—Instead of Famine, affording to an ungrateful People a Competency of the Necessaries and Comforts of Life; in remarkably preserving and protecting our Troops, when in apparent Danger, while our Enemies, with all their boas [...]ed Skill and Strength, have met with Loss, Disappointment, and Defeat;— and in the Course of his good Providence, the Father of Mercies hath bestowed upon us, many other Favours, which call for our grateful Acknowledgements.

Therefore,
WE have thought fit, with the Advice of the C [...]uncil and House of Representatives, to appoint THURSDAY the Twenty-third Day of November Instant, to be observed as a Day of public THANKSGIVING, throughout this Colony; hereby calling upon Ministers and People, to meet for religious Worship on said Day, and devoutly to offer up their unfeigned Praises to Almighty GOD, the Source and benevolent Bestower of all Good, for his affording the necessary Means of Subsistance, tho' our Commerce has been prevented, and the Supplies from the Fishery denied us.—That such a Measure of Health is enjoyed among us; that the Lives of our Officers and Soldiers have been so remarkably preserved, whi [...]e our Enemies have fell before them:—That the vigorous Efforts which have been used to excite the Savage Vengeance of the Wilderness, and rouse the Indians to Arms, that an unavoidable Destruc [...]ion might come upon our Frontiers, have been almost miraculously defeated:—That our unnatural Enemies, instead of Ravaging the Country with uncontrouled Sway, are confined within such narrow Limits, to their own Mortification and Distress, environed by an American Army, brave and determined;—That such a Band of Union, founded upon the best Principles, unites the American Colonies:—That our Rights and Priviledges, both Civil and Religious, are so far preserved to us, notwithstanding all the Attempts of our barbarous Enemies to deprive us of them.—

And to offer up humble and fervent Prayers to Almighty GOD, for the whole British Empire; especially for the UNITED AMERICAN COLONIES:—That he would bless our Civil Rulers, and lead them into wise and prudent Measures in this dark, and difficult Day:—That he would endow our General Court with all that Wisdom which is profitable to direct:—That he would graciously Smile upon our Endeavour; to restore Peace, preserve our Rights and Priviledges, and hand them down to Posterity:—That he would give Wisdom to the American Congress, equal to their important Station:—That he would direct the Generals, and the American Armies, wherever employed, and give them Success and Victory:—That he would preserve and strengthen the Harmony of the UNITED COLONIES:—That he would pour out his Spirit upon all Orders of Men, thro' the Land, bring us to a hearty Repentance and Reformation; purify and sanctify all his Churches:—That he would make Our's Emanuel's Land:—That he would spread the Knowledge of the Redeemer thro' the whole Earth, and fill the World with his Glory.

And all servile Labour is forbidden on said Day.

GIVEN under our Hands at the Council-Chamber, in Watertown, this Fourth Day of November, in the Year of the LORD, One Thousand seven Hundred and Seventy-five.

By their Honor's Command,

PEREZ MORTON, Dep'y. Secr'y.

IAMES OTIS,

W. SPOONER.

CALEB CUSHING.

IOSEPH GERRISH,

IOHN WHETCOMB.

IEDEDIAH FOSTER,

IAMES PRESCOTT,

ELDAD TAYLOR,

BENIA. LINCOLN.

MICHAEL FARLEY,

IOSEPH PALMER.

SAMUEL HOLTEN,

IABEZ FISHER,

MOSES GILL,

BENIA. WHITE.

GOD SAVE THE PEOPLE.

§

§

WATERTOWN: Printed by Benjamin Edes, Printer to the Honorable COUNCIL, and House of REPRESENTATIVES. M, DCC, LXXV.

Information about this book

Title statement

A proclamation for a public thanksgiving. ... Thursday the twenty-third day of November instant ... Given under our hands at the Council-chamber, in Watertown, this fourth day of November ...

Massachusetts. Council.

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI :

Date

2004-08.

ID [DLPS]

N11217

ID [TCP]

N11217

ID [STC]

Evans 14199

ID [NOTIS]

APY9210

ID [IMAGE-SET]

14199

ID [EVANS-CITATION]

99036773

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early American Imprints, 1639-1800 ; no. 14199.

Notes

(Evans-TCP ; no. N11217)

Transcribed from: (Readex Archive of Americana ; Early American Imprints, series I ; image set 14199)

Images scanned from Readex microprint and microform: (Early American imprints. First series ; no. 14199)

Source

— A proclamation for a public thanksgiving. ... Thursday the twenty-third day of November instant ... Given under our hands at the Council-chamber, in Watertown, this fourth day of November ..., Massachusetts. Council..

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.) ; 43 x 33 cm.

Printed by Benjamin Edes, printer to the Honorable Council, and House of Representatives.,. Watertown [Mass.]: :: M,DCC,LXXV [1775].. (Signed by James Otis and fourteen other members of the Massachusetts Council. "By their honor's command, Perez Morton, dep'y. secr'y.") (Printed area measures 37.4 x 18.5 cm.)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.