Ed Jackson and Charles Pou

The University of Georgia

January 27

1785 The Georgia legislature enacted into law Abraham Baldwin's proposed charter for the University of Georgia. In so doing, Georgia became the first state to charter a state university. The act's preamble declared:

"When the minds of the people in general are viciously disposed and unprincipled and their conduct disorderly a free government will be attended with greater confusions and evils more horrid than the wild uncultivated state of nature. It can only be happy where the public principles and opinions are properly directed and their manners regulated. This is an influence beyond the reach of laws and punishments and can be claimed only by religion and education. It should therefore be among the first objects of those who wish well to the national prosperity to encourage and support the principles of religion and morality and early to place the youth under the forming hand of society that by instruction they may be molded to the love of virtue and good order. Sending them abroad to other countries for their education will not answer these purposes; it is too humiliating an acknowledgment of the ignorance or inferiority of our own, and will always be the cause of so great foreign attachments, that upon principles of policy it is inadmissible.

"This country, in times of our common danger and distress, found security in the principle and abilities which wise regulations had before established in the minds of our countrymen. That our our present happiness, joined to the pleasing prospect, should conspire to make us feel ourselves under the strongest obligations to form the youth, the rising hope of our land, to render the like glorious and essential services to our country."

1933 Governor Eugene Talmadge announced plans to cut over two million dollars from Georgia's general appropriations budget in both 1934 and 1935. Without divulging the details of his cuts, Talmadge did say that they would go "all the way down the line and cut all expenditures to the bone."

1941 Delta Airlines announced plans to make Atlanta its base for its fleet of 21-passenger aircraft.

1944 Boston Braves manager Casey Stengel resigned as manager after six years with the team.

1957 An unexploded bomb was discovered on the front porch of the Martin Luther King Jr.'s house in Montgomery, Alabama.

1968 Seven weeks after his death, Otis Redding's "( Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" was released on this day. In less than two months, the record became number one. [See Sept. 9 entry for biographical information on Redding.]

1985 Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Company announced its plans to sell Coke products in the Soviet Union -- long an exclusive market for rival Pepsi Cola.

1994 Actor Claude Akins died. Born May 25, 1926 in Nelson, Ga., Akins appeared in such movies as From Here to Eternity, The Caine Mutiny, The Defiant Ones, Porgy and Bess, and numerous other films and television programs. His most common role, however, was that of a bad guy in movie westerns.

In Their Own Words on This Day. . .

1735 What kind of food items were available in the early years of the colony? Not a lot. Elisha Dobree had come to Georgia eight months earlier, and apparently was working at the Trustees' store in Savannah. Also, he hoped to use his five-acre garden lot to grow crops for the store, as noted in a letter to the Trustees:

". . .[T]he settling your Store's account [is] taking almost my whole time and gives me no small trouble through the confused state they are in . . . .

"As to my garden, I have with all the endeavours I possibly could make us of got seeds from sundry places and am now daily expecting more . . . .

"As we have no fresh beef nor pork out of the Store, eating so much salt meat heats the blood and causes the scurvy. I have sowed a vast quantity of greens and have now fine salad, peas and cabbage plants and almost ready to eat. Turnips from Carolina are sold this day at 2/2 Sterling per bushel. Good cabbages would readily sell for 6 and 8 pence [a]piece, but none good to be had. At any rate few are coming from New York but mostly spoiled. . . .

". . . I am now going to sow the following seeds: almonds, currants, raisins, lime, lemons and other foreign seeds. I have already put in orange, cotton, olive &c. I have poppies, which grow up very fine. Some people tells me they are valuable in physick, for which reasons I shall take care to make the best of them.

"I design to plant or sow this week a sort of beans which grows about 12 or 15 foot high and produce extraordinary large beans of wonderful size, scarce and hard to be met with. . . .

"Molasses from Charles Town have been lately sold here by Mr. Houston at 2/6 per gallon and at the rate I see them in the London invoice it would save some money to send them there. . . .

"Mr. Musgrove is very ill and like[ly] to die. I should gladly accept of some of his trade were Your Honours pleased to grant me license for the same. . . ."

Source: Mills Lane (ed.), General Oglethorpe's Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1733-1743 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1990), Vol. I, pp. 118-120.

1864 From Dalton, Ga., Oliver Strickland wrote to his mother with distressing news. He had been arrested for falling asleep on guard duty and now feared being executed:

"Mother, I am sorry [to] write to you my condition. But I reckoned that you want to hear the truth about me. I am under guard for going to sleep on my post night before last. I don't know what they will do with me, that I don't know. I want you to come and see me once more. They may shoot me and if they do I want to see you and all the children once. I want you to come as soon as you get this and maybe you can do me some good by coming. Mother, they haven't tried me yet and by that reason why I want you to come. . . . I hope and trust in God that I will get out of here alive once more. I think that I would be a different man to what I am. . . ."

Source: Mills Lane (ed.), "Dear Mother: Don't grieve about me. If I get killed, I'll only be dead.": Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1990), p. 281.

1865 Was the civilian population in the vicinity of Andersonville Prison aware of the exceedingly high mortality rate of Union POWs at the facility? Apparently, as evidenced by this entry in the diary of 24-year-old Eliza Frances Andrews (who was visiting her older sister near Albany):

". . . While going our rounds in the morning, we found a very important person in Peter Louis, a paroled Yankee prisoner, in the employ of Capt. Bonham. The captain keeps him out of the [Andersonville] stockade, feeds and clothes him, and in return, reaps the benefit of his skill. Peter is a French Yankee, a shoemaker by trade, and makes as beautiful shoes as I ever saw imported from France. My heart quite softened towards him when I saw his handiwork, and little Mrs. Sims was so overcome that she gave him a huge slice of her Confederate fruit cake. I talked French with him, which pleased him greatly, and Mett and I engaged him to make us each a pair of shoes. I will feel like a lady once more, with good shoes on my feet. I expect the poor Yank is glad to get away from Anderson[ville] on any terms. Although matters have improved somewhat with the cool weather, the tales that are told of the condition of things there last summer are appalling. Mrs. Brisbane heard all about it from Father Hamilton, a Roman Catholic priest from Macon, who has been working like a good Samaritan in those dens of filth and misery. It is a shame to us Protestants that we have let a Roman Catholic get so far ahead of us in this work of charity and mercy. Mrs. Brisbane says Father Hamilton told her that during the summer the wretched prisoners burrowed in the ground like moles to protect themselves from the sun. It was not safe to give them material to build shanties as they might use it for clubs to overcome the guard. These underground huts, he said, were alive with vermin and stank like charnel houses. Many of the prisoners were stark naked, having not so much as a shirt to their backs. He told a pitiful story of a Pole who had no garment but a shirt, and to make it cover him the better, he put his legs into the sleeves and tied the tail round his neck. The others guyed him so on his appearance, and the poor wretch was so disheartened by suffering, that one day he deliberately stepped over the deadline and stood there till the guard was forced to shoot him. But what I can't understand is that a Pole, of all people in the world, should come over here and try to take away our liberty when his own country is in the hands of oppressors. One would think that the Poles, of all nations in the world, ought to sympathize with a people fighting for their liberties. Father Hamilton said that at one time the prisoners died at the rate of 150 a day, and he saw some of them die on the ground without a rag to lie on or a garment to cover them. Dysentery was the most fatal disease, and as they lay on the ground in their own excrements, the smell was so horrible that the good father says he was often obliged to rush from their presence to get a breath of pure air. It is dreadful. My heart aches for the poor wretches, Yankees though they are, and I am afraid God will suffer some terrible retribution to fall upon us for letting such things happen. If the Yankees ever should come to South-West Georgia, and go to Anderson[ville] and see the graves there, God have mercy on the land! And yet, what can we do? The Yankees themselves are really more to blame than we, for they won't exchange these prisoners, and our poor, hard-pressed Confederacy has not the means to provide for them, when our own soldiers are starving in the field. Oh, what a horrible thing war is when stripped of all its 'pomp and circumstance'!"

Source: Eliza Frances Andrews, The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1908), pp. 76-79.

1870 Though it had been six years since his death, Gertrude Thomas still mourned the loss of her beloved father, especially as her husband's debts continued to mount, much of which was owed to family members:

"Reading over what I have written I have the consciousness of knowing that I am morbid. I know cousin Polly has a right to what is owing her, but her having advertised the house has caused others to present their claims and caused Mr. thomas great anxiety of mind. I have been sick with terrible cold for the last two weeks. Several days I was in bed from which at times I almost wished I would never have to rise again. One morning Mr. Thomas was leaving for town utterly unable to know what the day or hour would bring forth, what new execution would be levied. . . . 'Oh Pa! Pa!' I thought 'if you were living this would not be so. You would help us with your good judgment, or cheer me with some kind word.' As I thought of him I burst into tears and wept such tears as relieve the pressure of an overburdened heart. . . . And now my Journal let me tell you a strange thing which happened a few nights since. Before I went to bed I knelt and prayed earnestly to God to help Mr. Thomas, to show him some way to relieve himself of the terrible oppression of debt and while I prayed I thought of Pa, and I asked God if spirits were permitted to visit their friends upon earth to commission the soul of my father to commune with mine that night. I hoped that in the quiet watches of the night Pa would come to me and tell me what was best for us to do. I rose, took paper and pen from the desk and seating myself by the fire I thought if only Pa could guide my pen and give me his autagraph [sic] I would instantly recognise it. I had heard of such things as one's feeling the pressure of the invisible hand which guides the pen. I felt nothing of the kind. My pen glided on and made the signature of T Clanton but I am almost certain I had no spiritual assistance. . . ."

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. 330-331.