Ed Jackson and Charles Pou

The University of Georgia

March 8

1898 Former Confederate general Edward Lloyd Thomas died in South McAlester, Oklahoma.

Born March 23, 1825, in Clarke County, Ga., he served in the Mexican War, returning to Georgia to become a planter. After Georgia's secession, Thomas recruited the 35th Georgia Voluntary Infantry. In the fall of 1861, he was promoted to colonel and served at the Battles of Seven Pines, Seven Days, and Mechanicsville. Thomas commanded Anderson's Brigade in Hill's Light Division at Cedar Mountain, Second Manassas, and Sharpsburg. In Nov. 1862, he was promoted to brigadier general. Thomas commanded the 3rd Brigade in Hill's Division at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, followed by the 3rd Brigade in Pender's Division at Gettysburg, Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Appomattox. After the war, Thomas again became a planter before taking federal positions in the Land Department and the Indian Bureau.

1937 Gov. E.D. Rivers signed an act of the General Assembly creating the State Planning Board – Georgia's first state agency with responsibility for planning for the physical, social, and economic development of Georgia.

1945 Gov. Ellis Arnall signed legislation creating the State Department of Veterans Service. The new agency's purpose was to assist returning veterans with a variety of educational, medical, employment, housing, financial, and other services. One of the first things the new agency did was to publish a booklet for returning veterans outlining the variety of services available to them.

The agency also created regional DVS offices around the state to assist the tens of thousands of returning veterans.

1945 The General Assembly adopted a joint resolution calling on the governor and other state official to press for the federal government to cede the land comprising Camp Stewart to the original owners.

The resolution further protested any effort to have the military reservation declared waste land, sold for commercial purposes, or converted to other uses – such as a federal or state park, game preserve, or forest preserve. Camp Stewart was principally located in Liberty and Bryan counties, but also extended into Long, Tattnall, and Evans counties.

Camp Stewart Shown on a 1945 Georgia Highway Map

1946 An international monetary conference convened at the General Oglethorpe Hotel on Wilmington Island near Savannah and continued through March 22.

Attended by delegates from around the world, the purpose of the assembly was to create an International Monetary Fund and an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (more commonly known as the World Bank). The inaugural meeting of the Board of Governors of the IMF and IBRD was held, and Washington, D.C. was chosen as the permanent home for the two new institutions.

1949 WAGA-TV, now part of FOX Television Network, began broadcasting on channel 5 as Atlanta's CBS affiliate.

1963 Noted Georgia educator Cosby Smith Hubbard died in Atlanta, Georgia.

Born in Calhoun on Dec. 24, 1889, he was raised in the mountains of north Georgia, where he early saw the need for improved educational conditions. Hubbard taught in local schools for over twenty years before serving in the Georgia House of Representatives (1931-32) and in the Georgia Senate (1933-34). His focus in the legislature was on education, and while serving on the legislative committee of the Georgia Education Association, he prepared three important bills for consideration: one to provide a seven-month school term, one to institute a lay board of education, and one to provide free textbooks for all students. These bills were passed into law, and in 1937 Hubbard was appointed director of the textbook and library programs of the Georgia Department of Education to help implement the new laws. Hubbard's plan for providing multiple lists of textbooks and efficiency in distributing them earned praise as the "Georgia Plan" from the U.S. Department of Education. Most southeastern states adopted the "Georgia Plan" for their own textbook distribution programs.

Each Free Textbook Had an Imprint Inside the Front Cover for
Students Using the Book to Record Their Name and the
Date the Book was Issued and Returned.

Hubbard went on to assist in the development of rural public libraries, procuring needed funding and helping them provide better service. Hubbard was appointed assistant superintendent of schools in 1958, a position he maintained until his retirement in 1962.

In Their Own Words on This Day. . .

1797 White encroachment on Indian lands was a continuing problem faced by U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins. On this day, he wrote to an assistant working with the Creek Indians on the U.S. attempts to draw boundaries that could be enforced:

". . . We must try and stop this business; if we do not, the day of reckoning will come and we shall see another long roll which must be paid. The troops have arrived from the northward and are fixed and fixing down to keep peace on these frontiers. Col. Gaither will do everything in his power that will lead thereto, but the chiefs must help him, or all will be in vain. I have just had sent on to me the conferences had with the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees and the mad Spaniard in Philadelphia; the substance will be sent to you by Mr. Barnard. The President, with the advice of the Senate, has appointed me, with General Pickins and General Winchester, to ascertain and mark the lines between the Indian nations and the United States; this thing presses much, and we have determined to begin the Cherokee line first, and to finish that early the next month; we did intend to run your line first, but we find that delay would be injurious to the Cherokees, as intrusions are continually increasing on their lands. . . ."

Source: Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, Vol. IX, Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1806 (Savannah, Georgia Historical Society, 1916), pp. 98-99.

1821 Cherokee leader John Ridge wrote Pres. James Monroe:

". . . I rejoice that my dear nation now begins to peep into the privileges of civilization -- that this great and generous government is favorable to them, and that ere long, Congress will give them the hand of strong fellowship – that they will encircle them in the arms of love, and adopt them into the fond embraces of the Union. . . .

"It is a known fact, that those Indians who have missionaries among them, and who live on this side [of] the Mississippi [River], are coming up, with faster steps to civilization, than those who have been enticed to remove to the west. . . . How different is the condition of that part of my nation, who have been enticed by their foolish imaginations, and particularly by the allurement of the white men, to remove to the Arkansas [Territory]. . . ."

Source: Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Story of the Ridge Family and of the Decimation of a People (New York: MacMillan Co., 1970), p. 129.

1839 On his St. Simons Island plantation, Pierce Butler provided a crude medical facility for treatment of his slave. His wife, Fanny Kemble Butler, visited the facility and was shocked by what she saw, as noted in her journal:

". . . In the afternoon I made my first visit to the hospital of the estate, and found it, as indeed I find everything else here, in a far worse state even than the wretched establishments on the rice island [Butler Island], dignified by that name; so miserable a place for the purpose to which it was dedicated I could not have imagined on a property belonging to Christian owners. The floor (which was not boarded, but merely the damp hard earth itself) was strewn with wretched women, who, but for the moans of pain, and uneasy, restless motions, might very well each have been taken for a mere heap of filthy rags; the chimney refusing passage to the smoke from the pine-wood fire, it puffed out in clouds through the room, where it circled and hung, only gradually oozing away through the windows, which were so far well-adapted to the purpose that there was not single whole pane of glass in them. My eyes, unaccustomed to the turbid atmosphere, smarted and watered, and refused to distinguish at first the different dismal forms, from which cries and wails assailed me in every corner of the place. By degrees I was able to endure for a few minutes what they were condemned to live their hours and days of suffering and sickness through . . . ."

Source: John A. Scott (ed.), Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 by Frances Anne Kemble (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), pp. 255-256.

1865 Twenty-four-year-old Eliza Frances Andrews was staying with her oldest sister, who lived near Albany, Ga. On March 7, she had traveled to Americus to see her cousin, who was a doctor, about her eyes. Invited to spend the night, Eliza wrote in her journal of a rare war-time luxury she enjoyed that night:

". . . I occupied Flora's room that [last] night. Cousin Bessie lent me one of her fine embroidered linen nightgowns, and I was so overpowered at having on a decent piece of underclothing after the coarse Macon Mills homespun I have been wearing for the last two years, that I could hardly go to sleep. I stood before the glass and looked at myself after I was undressed just to see how nice it was to have on a respectable undergarment once more. I can stand patched-up dresses, and even take a pride in wearing Confederate homespun, where it is done open and above board, but I can't help feeling vulgar and common in coarse underclothes. Cousin Bessie has brought quantities of beautiful things from beyond the blockade, that make us poor Rebs look like ragamuffins beside her. She has crossed the lines by special permit, and will be obliged to return to Memphis by the 2d of April, when her pass will be out. It seems funny for a white woman to have to get a pass to see her husband, just like the negro men here do when their wives live on another plantation. The times have brought about some strange upturnings. Cousin Bolling is awfully blue about the war, and it does begin to look as if our poor little Confederacy was about on its last legs, but I am so accustomed to all sorts of vicissitudes that I try not to let thoughts of the inevitable disturb me. The time to be blue was five years ago, before we went into it. . . . We met Mr. Wheatley and Maj. Daniel on our way to the dépot, and they told us that a dispatch had just been received stating that the Yanks have landed at St. Mark's and are marching on Tallahassee. We first heard they were 4,000 strong, but before we reached the dépot, their numbers had swelled to 15,000."

Source: Eliza Frances Andrews, The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1908), pp. 110-112.

1933 Three years into the Great Depression, America's banking system appeared on the verge of collapse and depositors hurried to withdraw their funds. Two days earlier, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt had declared a national four-day banking holiday. In Atlanta, major banks prepared to issue script instead of currency to their customers. Reacting to the crisis, the Atlanta Constitution carried an editorial ray of hope on today's newspaper:

"No more convincing example of the ability of the American people to 'take it on the chin' and come up smiling has appeared in the history of the nation than the spirit with which they have accepted the inconveniences resulting from the four-day bank holiday.

"As a people we have greeted this drastic step with cheer and increased confidence.

"For such a manifestation there is, of course, more reasons than merely the sturdiness of spirit and bulldog stick-to-it-iveness we inherit from our forebears.

"Chief among these reasons is the sure faith of the people of the United States in the certain return to normal conditions. they know their country well enough – its latent wealth, its boundless resources and its wide-flung opportunities for prosperity and happiness – to realize that the troubles of the day are only temporary, and that the 'sun will shine tomorrow.'

"Its glow already brightens the horizon."

Source: Franklin M. Garrett, Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of Its People and Events (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969 reprint of original 1954 edition), Vol. II, p. 904.