Ed Jackson and Charles Pou

The University of Georgia

April 28

1787 Commissioners from Georgia and South Carolina signed the Convention of Beaufort, resolving three outstanding boundary conflicts between the two states. One of principal reasons for the treaty was a dispute over whether the Seneca/Keowee River or the Tugaloo River was to be used in determining the headwaters of the Savannah River – which served as the legal boundary between the two states. Both Georgia and South Carolina claimed the land between the two rivers and were issuing land grants in the disputed area.

The treaty, however, established the Tugaloo River as the branch of the Savannah to be used in marking the boundary – but allowed Georgia land grants in the disputed area to stand.

1883 William Montague Browne died in Athens, Georgia. Born July 7 1827, County Mayo, Ireland, he later fought with the British army in the Crimean War, after which he briefly served as a diplomat and newspaper editor. Immigrating to America, Browne would serve the Confederacy as an aide to President Jefferson Davis (with the rank of cavalry colonel) and interim Secretary of State (Feb.- Mar. 1862).

He was assigned to Georgia to oversee the Confederate conscription law. In Nov. 1864, Browne assumed command of an infantry brigade to prepare for Savannah's defense. Following the war, Browne's career included work as a lawyer, editor, writer, and professor at the University of Georgia. After his death, he was buried in Oconee Hill Cemetery in Athens.

1894 Politician, businessman, and philanthropist Young Loften Gerdine Harris died in Athens, Georgia.

Born in Elbert County sometime in 1812, Harris was admitted to the bar in 1834. Harris represented that county in the Georgia House in 1841. After moving to Athens, he served as justice of the inferior court of Clarke County for five years, and as a state representative for three terms. Harris was also a Clarke County representative to the constitutional convention of 1865. He had begun working with the Southern Mutual Insurance Company in 1849; by 1866 he was its president and would remain so for the rest of his life. Harris, a devout Methodist, gave generously to further the education of north Georgia's youth. Two buildings at Emory were constructed through his donations. In 1887, a minister running a small institute for educating children in the Brasstown Valley of Towns County approached Harris for help in funding the school. So generous was Harris's donation that the school and the town that grew up around it were named in his honor. When Harris died, he left a large cash donation and valuable stock to Young Harris College. Harris was buried in Athens' Oconee Hills Cemetery.

1910 Military leader, businessman, and historian Edward Porter Alexander died in Savannah, Georgia. Born May 26 1835, in Washington, Georgia., he decided on a military career early in life, and attended West Point, finishing third in his class in 1857. His U.S. military service was cut short by the Civil War. Alexander, beginning as a captain in the engineering corps and later signal corps, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel as chief of ordnance for the Army of Northern Virginia. In Feb. 1864, Alexander was promoted to brigadier general and served at the battles of Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg (where he was wounded).

After the war Alexander became a railroad executive after briefly teaching at the University of South Carolina. In 1892 he retired to a rice plantation in South Carolina, where began writing for various magazines on a wide variety of subjects. But it was his memoirs of the Civil War that people most wanted to hear, so in 1896, while arbitrating a boundary dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, he began his memoirs. He spent three years in Nicaragua; upon returning home he broadened his memoirs to include a critical analysis of the military strategies used in the Civil War. In 1907 Alexander's Military Memoirs of a Confederate was published. His objective observations of so many major battles has been a bountiful source of information for historians. But many southerners did not care for the work, because it criticized some of the actions of men such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, who had become folk heroes in the South. Nevertheless Alexander's Memoirs remains a very important contribution to the history of the Civil War. [For more information on Alexander, click here and here.] After his death in Savannah, his body was returned to Augusta, where he was buried in Magnolia Cemetery.

1913 On day two after the discovery of her body, two more men were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the murder of Mary Phagan. One was John Gantt, a former bookkeeper at the National Pencil Factory, who had openly admired Phagan. He was arrested in Marietta with a packed suitcase, waiting to board a train. The second man arrested was an unnamed black man. The Atlanta Constitution published an appeal, along with a reward of $1000, for anyone who had seen Mary Phagan after noon on April 26 to come forward. Meanwhile police had to disperse a white mob threatening to lynch Newt Lee, the night watchman who had discovered Phagan's body and was also under suspicion. In a side note to the investigation, the superintendent of the National Pencil Factory was questioned perfunctorily in the case, then expressed his unhappiness with the investigation's progress, so he personally brought in a Pinkerton's detective to aid in the investigation. This was the first public mention of superintendent Leo Frank by Atlanta's press. For more, see the Leo Frank Case page.

1983 Alice Walker's The Color Purple won the prestigious American Book Award for fiction.

2011 A series of storms, spawning numerous tornados, swept through northwest Georgia in the early morning hours, destroying many homes and buildings, knocking out power to thousands, and killing at least fifteen people.

In Their Own Words on This Day. . .

1741 From Frederica, James Oglethorpe wrote the Trustees in London:

"Notwithstanding the silliness and desertion of some our inhabitants and the underhand endeavours of the Spaniards. . ., the town [Frederica] contains of freeholders and there is more likelihood of planting upon this island [St. Simons] than there has hitherto been, being about 150 acres already planted besides 40 acres of clear meadow enclosed for hay and some teams of oxen and horses, besides a great many riding horses, most of 'em taken from the Spaniards.

". . . I still think this province is likelier to succeed than ever and to become a strong frontier and useful in furnishing all those productions of warm countries, which we have from the Mediterranean, and by the raising of them gives support to persecuted Protestants from foreign countries and others who are will to be industrious, and do not doubt to accomplish the ends mentioned in our first proposals. I have the more reason to believe this since we have had the utmost opposition both public and private that could possibly have been given by the enemies of the Nation, as well as by the idleness, wickedness and folly of our inhabitants and the jealousy and self-interest of the neighbouring colonies. As God has been pleased hitherto to overcome all these oppositions, I think from thence we are much more likely now to succeed that we were before we knew what oppositions we were to receive. The chief thing is to persevere and go on steadily in spite of calumny, the weak but poisoned weapon of impotent enemies. Is think still, as I have already mentioned, the greatest service that can be done is to send over married recruits with industrious wives."

Source: Mills Lane (ed.), General Oglethorpe's Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1733-43 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1990), Vol. II, pp. 572-573.

1865 Two days after Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to William T. Sherman, thus ending the Civil War for Georgia, Eliza Frances Andrews wrote in her journal of her distress and bitterness as she witnessed thousands of hungry and weary Confederate soldiers returning to Georgia from the battlefields of Virginia and North Carolina:

"I was busy all the morning helping to get ready for a supper that father gave to Gen. Elzey and staff. The table was beautiful; it shone like a mirror . . . everything on it solid silver, except the cups and saucers and plates, which were of beautiful old china. . . .But it was all in absurd contrast to what we had to eat. The cake was all made of sorghum molasses, and the strawberries were sweetened with the coarsest kind of brown sugar, but we were glad to have even that, and it tasted good to us hungry Rebs. Emily was kept so busy all day cooking rations for soldiers that she hardly had time for anything else, and I was so sorry for the poor fellows that no matter what I happened to have in my hand, if a soldier came up and looked wistfuly at it, I couldn't help giving it to him. Some of them, as they talked to me about the surrender, would break down and cry like children. . . . In spite of his being a strong Union man, and his bitter opposition to secession, father never refuses anything to the soldiers. I blame the secession politicians myself, but the cause for which my brothers risked their lives, the cause for which so many noble Southerners have bled and died, and for which such terrible sacrifices have been made, is dear to my heart, right or wrong. The more misfortunes overwhelm my poor country, the more I love it; the more the Yankees triumph, the worse I hate them, wretches! I would rather be wrong with men like Lee and Davis, than right with a lot of miserable oppressors like Stanton and Thad Stevens. The wrong of disrupting the old Union was nothing to the wrongs that are being done for its restoration. . . ."

Source: Eliza Frances Andrews, The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1908), pp. 187-189.