Ed Jackson and Charles Pou

The University of Georgia

April 25

1734 Though he was in America, James Oglethorpe won reelection to his Haslemere seat in the House of Commons – thanks to efforts on Oglethorpe's behalf by Speaker of the House Arthur Onslow. Speaker Onslow was from Guilford, a Surrey town near Oglethorpe's hometown of Godalming.

1893 The Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America was organized in Savannah.

1912 Politician Iris Faircloth Blitch was born in Vidalia, Georgia. She attended the University of Georgia and South Georgia College before marrying in 1929. During the 1930s she and her husband ran successful businesses involving naval stores, pulpwood, and livestock. She served in the Georgia Senate (1946-47), Georgia House (1948-49), and again in the Senate (1952-1954). In the early 1950s, she also worked as secretary of the Georgia Democratic executive committee and was a Georgia delegate on the National Democratic Committee.

In 1954, Blitch was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia's Eight District, serving four consecutive terms. In 1956, she joined Georgia's congressional delegation and legislators from other states in signing the "Southern Manifesto," pledging to work toward undoing the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. She also worked to protect the jute industry in her district from foreign competitors, and defended the use of the comic strip character Pogo in a government pamphlet for parents concerned with television viewing habits. Failing health prevented Blitch from running again in 1962; in 1964 she announced she was switching parties to support Barry Goldwater for president. She died on Aug. 19, 1993.

1996 Gov. Zell Miller signed legislation declaring English to be the official language of Georgia. [Click here to read the full text of the act.]

2009 The University of Georgia had two players taken in the first round of the NFL draft, including the top pick – quarterback Matthew Stafford selected by the Detroit Lions. Running back Knowshon Moreno was selected with the 12th pick by the Denver Broncos.

Matthew Stafford (left) and Knowshon Moreno (right)

2009 University of Georgia professor George Zinkhan shot and killed three people, including his wife, at a gathering at a local theater in Athens. The couple had argued earlier and one of the victims, Ben Teague, tried to intervene. Zinkhan left the gathering, returned with two handguns, and killed Teague, former UGA research analyst Tom Tanner, and his wife Marie Bruce. He then left in a jeep with his children, dropped them off with a neighbor, and disappeared. His jeep was found abandoned in a ravine near his home five days later, but no other sign of Zinkhan himself was found. Police, including the FBI, instituted a nationwide manhunt for Zinkhan. His body was discovered two weeks later in the wooded area near where his jeep was found; he had concealed himself in a hole, then committed suicide.

In Their Own Words on This Day. . .

1865 In Washington, Georgia., Eliza Frances Andrews wrote in her journal of returning Georgia soldiers who had served with Robert E. Lee at the time of his surrender two weeks earlier:

"The square is so crowded with soldiers and government wagons that it is not easy to make [your] way through it. It is especially difficult around the government offices, where the poor, ragged, starved, and dirty remnants of Lee's heroic army are gathered day and night. The sidewalk along there is alive with vermin, and some people say they have seen lice crawling along on the walls of the houses. Poor fellows, this is worse than facing Yankee bullets. These men were, most of them, born gentlemen, and there could be no more pitiful evidence of the hardships they have suffered than the lack of means to free themselves from these disgusting creatures. Even dirt and rags can be heroic, sometimes. At the spring in our grove, where the soldiers come in great numbers to wash their faces, and sometimes, their clothes, lice have been seen crawling in the grass, so that we are afraid to walk there. Little Washington is now, perhaps, the most important military post in our poor, doomed Confederacy. . . . Soon all this will give way to Yankee barracks, and our dear old Confederate gray will be seen no more. The men are all talking about going to Mexico and Brazil; if all emigrate who say they are going to, we shall have a nation made up of women, negroes, and Yankees.

" . . . Everybody is cast down and humiliated, and we are all waiting in suspense to know what our cruel masters will do with us. Think of a vulgar plebeian like Andy Johnson, and that odious Yankee crew at Washington, lording it over Southern gentlemen! I suppose we shall be subjected to every indignity that hatred and malice can heap upon us. Till it comes, 'Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' Only, we have almost nothing to eat, and to drink, and still less to be merry about.

"The whole seems to be moving on Washington now. An average of 2,000 rations are issued daily, and over 15,000 men are said to have passed through already, since it became a military post, through the return of the paroled men has as yet hardly begun."

Source: Eliza Frances Andrews, The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1908), pp. 183-185.

1865 In Columbus, Ga., planter and businessman John Banks recorded in his diary the sad news that Lee had surrendered to Grant. He further noted the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and U.S. secretary of state William Seward (who had been wounded in the assassination plot but recovered):

"Now for a dark page. Have just received a dispatch that General Lee had been overpowered by General Grant's army and had surrendered. Grant had about two hundred thousand men, while Lee had only about ten thousand fighting men. This is sad news to come just after the destruction of our town. All is uncertain about our fate. Wilson's army that took Columbus, moved off in the direction of Macon. The surrender of General Lee has caused a cessation of fighting and Wilson's troops have not gone into Macon. Hopes are now entertained that the war is at an end but the details not understood. None of my sons except Elbert in the field, have not heard from him for a long time but suppose he is somewhere in North Carolina and that he had not joined Lee's army.

"President Lincoln and Secretary Seward were killed in Washington City. We got news last week and no contradiction of it yet; it is generally believed. We have been overpowered and must now wind up on the best terms we can. We learn that [Alexander] Stephens and [John Archibald] Campbell are commissioned to arrange it."

Source: John Banks, Autobiography of John Banks, 1797 - 1870 (Austell, Ga.: privately printed by Elberta Leonard, 1936), p. 37.

For more, see This Week in Georgia Civil War History.