Ed Jackson and Charles Pou

The University of Georgia

February 17

1736 After spending the night on Skidaway Island, James Oglethorpe and his small party continued southward on the inland waterway on their journey from Savannah to lay out a town and fort on St. Simons Island. Benjamin Ingham, who was on the 10-oar boat, recorded in his diary that around 2 p.m.:

"We set forward again, and with great difficulty crost [sic] over the Mouth of the River Ogeeky [Ogeechee}. The Wind was exceeding high, and the water rough, almost every wave drove over the Side of the boat, So that ever moment we were in danger of our lives; and truly, if Mr. Oglethorpe had not roused up himself, and Struck life into the Rowers, I do not know but that most of us might have here made our Exit."

Around 6 p.m. they arrived at Bear Island and went ashore to spend the night. Here, they found the advance party of colonists bound for St. Simons Island that had left prior to their departure.

1783 Georgia's House of Assembly passed legislation entitling officers and soldiers who had fought in Georgia militia units during the Revolutionary War to a bounty of unallocated lands within the state. Veterans could select available land in any existing county in the state, or in a special military reserve set in newly created counties.

1784 Georgia's House of Assembly enacted new legislation for distributing public land in the state. The 1777 headright formula was continued -- 200 acres to each head of a family, plus 50 acres for each family member (including up to 10 slaves) -- but the maximum number of acres per family was increased to 1,000. To retain their grants, grantees had to clear and cultivate at least three acres out of every 100.

1844 After receiving orders at Charleston, 1st Lt. William Tecumseh Sherman reported for duty at Marietta, Ga. For the next six weeks, Sherman helped take depositions in Georgia and Alabama with respect to personal loses of horses and equipment by militia members from the two states that had fought in the Second Seminole War in Florida. During this assignment, the young 23-year-old officer had a chance to familiarize himself with the area of northwest Georgia that he would visit again 20 years later under vastly different circumstances.

1854 Gov. Herschel Johnson signed legislation directing that at the next general election, the ballot include the question of whether voters favored or opposed removal of the state capital from Milledgeville.

1893 U.S. Representative Tom Watson secured an amendment to the appropriations bill for the U.S. Post Office Department requiring the Postmaster General to use a portion of the funds to experiment with delivering mail to residents outside incorporated towns and cities. This marked the beginning of Rural Free Delivery.

1936 Football great Jim Brown was born on St. Simons Island. He went on to a storied career at Syracuse University and in the National Football League with the Cleveland Browns. He has been enshrined in both the College and NFL Halls of Fame.

1958 Atlanta educational television station WPBA (channel 30) began broadcasting as WETV.

1960 Alabama prosecutors issued a warrant for Martin Luther King Jr.'s arrest on charges of falsifying his 1956 and 1958 state income tax returns.

1974 The Georgia state capitol portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled.

1979 Arnold Blum, Alice Coachman Davis, Frank (Hop) Owens, Billy Paschal, Charlie Grisham, Beau Jack, Johnny Raunch, B.L. (Crook) Smith, and George Stallings were inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame.

Georgia cities and towns first incorporated by acts approved by the governor on Feb. 17:

1854 Fairburn (then Fayette and Campbell counties, now Fulton County)

In Their Own Words on This Day. . .

1739 From New Ebenezer, Salzburger minister John Martin Boltzius recorded in his journal about unhappy Savannah colonists:

"An Englishman told me the contents of the petition which the citizens of Savannah, from the highest to the lowest, have addressed to the Lord Trustees and of which a copy was sent to Mr. Oglethorpe in Frederica. They ask: (1) For full power to dispose of their land as they wish, i.e. to sell it or give it away to whomever they wish. (2) For free and full commerce with the West Indies, so that they may import from there not only a few restricted goods but all that can be bought, including rum, for their own trade here. For, unless they also buy rum from the merchants there, they are refused sugar, molasses or syrup, and other goods. If, however, such free trade were permitted, they hope that many ships will come from the West Indies to Savannah to deliver their cargo and load up with cut and sawed wood, boards, etc., of which there is said to be a great shortage down there, to the benefit of the inhabitants here, for otherwise no one can subsist in Savannah. (3) For a limited number of Negroes or Moorish slaves, without whom no Englishman here can exist. They cannot get anywhere with the whites, whom they cannot treat as they would the Negroes, the fault for which condition, however, is to be blamed more on the masters than on the servants.

"It is said that many copies of this petition, which is a special document that is most obnoxious to Mr. Oglethorpe, have reached friends of high rank and members of Parliament in England and Scotland. It was drafted and sent, it is said, because the people in Savannah had learned that the citizens of Frederica had likewise drafted and sent a petition to the Trustees in London, wherein they requested the very opposite of the previous three articles, viz, to refuse permission for free disposition over the land, free commerce with the West Indies, and the introduction of Negro slaves. The original of the Savannah petition will be presented to the Lord Trustees themselves by a gentleman merchant from Savannah, a Captain [Robert] Williams, who may well be the author of this document. He is intending to travel to England shortly on his vessel via St. Christopher. If he should not succeed with the Trustees, he is empowered to present it to the King's Privy Council and to Parliament."

Source: George Fenwick Jones and Renate Wilson (trans. and ed.), Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America . . . Edited by Samuel Urlsperger, Vol. VI, 1739 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), pp. 24-25.

1739 Thomas Jones served as the Trustees' storekeeper in Savannah. On this day, he wrote the Trustees' accountant Harman Verelst about conditions in Savannah:

". . . There are some things in the behaviour of the people very disagreeable and offensive to me, viz:

"The profanation of the Lord's Day. When at church in the time of divine service, can hear continual firing of guns by people that are shooting at some game, others carrying burdens on wheelbarrows by the church door.

"The uncommon lewdness practiced by many and gloried in.

"The negligence of officers in permitting several in this town to retail rum and strong liquors, unlicensed, who have no other visible way of livelihood, where servants resort and are encouraged to rob their masters. . . .

"I need not mention profane swearing and drunkenness, which are not so common here as in some other places, and few are notorious therein, besides Mr. Baliff Parker, who I have seen wallow in the mire. . . .

"It is with no small concern of mind that I trouble you with such trivial, though melancholy, accounts, but have nothing agreeable and pleasing from this part of the colony to acquaint you with. Yet do hope when His Excellency [James Oglethorpe] visits us affairs will take a better turn.

"The Stores are, by the issues made towards the payment of the debts incurred, rough-drained of all necessary provisions. There's no meat-kind of any sort, nor rice, but a small quantity of biscuit. But having some flour yet remaining, I have of late bought Indian meal, which I paid for, with which, and half flour, I caused bread to be made. . . .

"There is a large quantity of Indian corn yet remaining, though none of it sound and good, a great part damaged, all which I have removed into the Store and hope to preserve from further damage. . . .The corn had sweated, and the weevil was got into it and some of the houses it had rained into, [so] that, when opened, the corn seemed to be a green field. It had sprouted and was grown to a considerable height. . . ."

Source: Mills Lane (ed.), General Oglethorpe's Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1733-1743 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1990), Vol. II, pp. 390-395.

1839 After a six-week visit to his rice plantation on Butler Island, Pierce Butler, moved his family to his sea island cotton plantation on the northern end of St. Simons Island on Feb. 16. His wife, Fanny Kemble Butler, recorded the reaction of the slaves on Butler Island to her leaving, as well as her impression of the desire of slaves to read:

". . . At every moment one or other of the poor people rushed in upon me to bid me good-by; many of their farewells were grotesque enough, some were pathetic, and all of them made me very sad. Poor people! how little I have done, how little I can do for them.

"I had a long talk with that interesting and excellent man, cooper London [a slave], who made an earnest petition that I would send him from the North a lot of Bibles and Prayer Books; certainly the science of reading must be much more common among the Negroes than I supposed, or London must look to a marvelously increased spread of the same hereafter. There is, however, considerable reticence upon this point, or else the poor slaves must consider the mere possession of the holy books as good for salvation and as effectual for spiritual assistance to those who cannot as to those who can comprehend them. Since the news of our departure has spread, I have had repeated eager entreaties for presents of Bibles and Prayer Books, and to my demurrer of 'But you can't read, can you/' have generally received for answer a reluctant acknowledgment of ignorance, which, however, did not always convince me of the fact. In my farewell conversation with London I found it impossible to get him to tell me how had learned to read: the penalties for teaching them are very severe -- heavy fines, increasing in amount for the first and second offense, and imprisonment for the third. Such a man as London is certainly aware that to teach the slaves to read is an illegal act, and he may have been unwilling to betray whoever had been his preceptor even to my knowledge; at any rate, I got no answers from him but: 'Well, missis, me learn; well, missis, me try'; and finally: 'Well, missis, me 'spose Heave help me'; to which I could only reply that I knew Heaven was helpful, very very hardly to the tune of teaching folks their letters. I got no satisfaction. . . ."

Source: John A. Scott, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 by Frances Anne Kemble (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), pp. 193-194.

1862 From Richmond County, Gertrude Thomas recorded the events of the Civil War in her journal. Though the war was not yet upon her doorstep, she was still feeling its effects:

"My pen refuses to fly fast enough to record the thick coming events. Just now we are in the midst of a great crisis. The Anaconda embrace with which Lincoln has threatened us is almost being fulfilled. As he unfurls 'his slow length along' we begin to perceive the better his huge proportions. The Yankees are upon our coast and his footprints are upon the soil of almost every Confederate state. We have recently sustained some startling reverses but today we have the news that Fort Donelson has surrendered and we have had 15000 of our men taken prisoner. . . . Oh these are troublous times. For two or three weeks an hourly attack has been expected at Savannah. We lost Roanoke Island and between two and three thousand prisoners. Poor Cap Wise was killed there but in dying called to his men 'to fight them on.' Last night and tonight there is a meeting at the City Hall to adopt some measures for the defence of this place. . . ."

Source: Virginia Ingraham Burr (ed.), The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848-1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 200-201.

1865 Following the losses of Atlanta, Savannah, and Nashville, Confederate officials in Richmond seriously began to consider the need to arm slaves to serve on behalf of the Confederacy. The debate quickly spread to Georgia. On Feb. 9, Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin demanded enactment of a bill to arm the slaves. Eight days later, Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown spoke to a special session of the Georgia General Assembly, then meeting in Macon. Brown spoke against the proposition, arguing that black slaves would not fight for the South:

"We cannot expect them . . . to perform deeds of heroic valor when they are fighting to continue the enslavement of their wives and children. . . . It is said we should give them their freedom in case of their fidelity; . . . that we should give up slavery, as well as our personal liberty and State sovereignty, for independence. . . . If we are ready to give up slavery, I am satisfied we can make . . . a better trade."

Source: Philip D. Dillard, "The Confederate Debate Over Arming Slaves: Views from Macon and Augusta Newspapers," LXXIX Georgia Historical Quarterly (Spring 1995), p. 137.