Ed Jackson and Charles Pou

Carl Vinson Institute of Government

The University of Georgia

February 14

1779 In the backcountry northwest of Augusta, Lt. Col. Elijah Clarke led a force of Georgia patriots and South Carolinians in a victory against British loyalists in the Battle of Kettle Creek. Although it was not a major battle of the American Revolution, it was an important one in securing the support of Georgians who had been undecided on whether to support the patriot or loyalist cause.

1829 Confederate general Alfred Iverson Jr. was born in Clinton, Ga. He served in the Mexican War, then practiced law. In 1855, he was commissioned as an officer in the 1st U.S. Cavalry. After Georgia's secession, Iverson resigned from the U.S. Army and became a captain in the Confederate Army in Wilmington, N.C., where he recruited the 20th North Carolina. In Aug. 1861, he was promoted to colonel and served in the battles of Seven Days, South Mountain, and Sharpsburg. In Nov. 1862, Iverson was promoted to brigadier general in command of his own brigade in Rodes' Division. He served at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, but in the latter battle he reportedly performed poorly and was reassigned to command state troops in Georgia. During Sherman's Georgia campaign in 1864, Iverson commanded a brigade in Wheelers' brigade. After the war, he served as a businessman and farmer. He died March 31, 1911 in Atlanta.

1850 Gov. George Towns signed legislation creating Clinch County as Georgia's 95th county. Created from Lowndes and Ware counties, the county was named for Gen. Duncan L. Clinch, who defeated Osceola in the Second Seminole War and who also represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives (1844-45).

1858 A group of Atlanta Presbyterians met across the street from the combination Atlanta City Hall/Fulton County Courthouse and established the Central Presbyterian Church. After the Civil War, the city hall/county courthouse was torn down and Georgia's state capitol built on the spot. The church has remained active and today is one of Atlanta's oldest standing structures.

1867 William Jefferson White and former slave Richard C. Coulter opened the Augusta Baptist Institute. In 1879, the school moved to Atlanta, where it name was changed to Atlanta Baptist Seminary, then Atlanta Baptist College (1897), and finally Morehouse College (1913).

1891 Twenty-seven years after beginning his march through Georgia, former Union general William Sherman died in New York City.

1954 Television station WTOC first went on the air as Savannah's CBS affiliate.

1956 On the day after S.B. 98 (which changed Georgia's state flag) was signed into law, three of its authors -- senators Willis Harden, Jefferson Lee Davis, and Nelson Coffin --were joined by Sen. James Dykes of Cochran in introducing S.R. 48, a joint resolution calling on protection of the Confederate flags of Georgia regiments in the state capitol, and specifically directing the secretary of state to have the flags cleaned, insect proofed, and placed in protective display cases. The resolution would be approved by both houses and signed into law on Feb. 27. [Click here to read text of resolution.]

1957 The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was organized in Atlanta, with Martin Luther King Jr. as its first president.

1958 Gov. Marvin Griffin signed a joint resolution of the Georgia General Assembly censuring Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower for calling out the National Guard to enforce integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. [Click here to read text of resolution.]

1975 A statue of U.S. Senator Richard B. Russell was unveiled on the grounds of the Georgia state capitol.

In Their Own Words on This Day. . .

1730 James Oglethorpe is widely credited as the founder of Georgia. One reason is that he personally led the first English settlers to the new colony in 1733. Yet, there is another reason. Oglethorpe was an important force in the origin of the Georgia movement in Parliament, as noted by Sir John Percival in his diary:

". . . I afterwards went to the House [of Commons] . . . . I met Mr. Oglethorp, who informed me that he had found out a very considerable charity, even fifteen thousand pounds, which lay in trustees' hands, and was like to have been lost, because the heir of the testator being one of the trustees, refused to concur with the other two, in any methods for disposing the money, in hopes, as they were seventy years old each of them, they would die soon, and he should remain only surviving trustee, and then might apply all to his own use. That the two old men were very honest and desirous to be discharged of their burthen, and had concurred with him to get the money lodged in a Master of Chancery's hands till new trustees should be appointed to dispose thereof in a way that should be approved of by them in conjunction with the Lord Chancellor. That the heir of the testator had opposed this, and there had been a lawsuit thereupon, which Oglethorp had carried against the heir, who appeled against the decree; but my Lord Chancellor had confirmed it, and it was a pleasure to him to have been able in one year's time to be able at law to settle this affair. That the trustees had consented to this on condition that the trust should be annexed to some trusteeship already in being, and that being informed that I was a trustee for Mr. Dalone's legacy, who left about a thousand pounds to convert negroes, he had proposed me and my associates as proper persons to be made trustees of this new affair; that the old gentlemen approved of us, and he hoped I would accept it in conjunction with himself, and several of our Committee of Gaols [Jails] . . . . I told him it was a pleasure to me to hear his great industry in recovering and securing so great a charity, and to be joined with gentlemen whose worth I knew so well; that I had indeed been thinking to quit the trusteeship of Dalone's legacy, because we were but four, and two of them were rendered incapable of serving and the third was a person I never saw. That when I accepted the trusteeship it was in order to assist Dean Berkley's Bermuda scheme, by erecting a Fellowship in his college for instructing negroes . . . .

". . . He [Oglethorpe] then returned to the new trusteeship, and said that though annexed to this of Dalone's, Dalone's legacy might be a matter remaining distinct from the scheme he proposed for employing the charity he had acquainted me with . . . . That he had acquainted the Speaker, and some other considerable persons, with his scheme, who approved it much, and there remained only my Lord Chancellor's opinion to be known. . . .[T]hat the scheme is to procure a quantity of acres either from the Government or by gift or purchase in the West Indies and to plant thereon a hundred miserable wretches who being let out of gaol by the last year's Act, are now starving about the town for want of employment; that they should be settled all together by way of colony, and be subject to subordinate rulers, who should inspect their behaviour and labour under one chief head; that in time they with their families would increase so fast as to become a security and defence of our possessions against the French and Indians of those parts; that they should be employed in cultivating flax and hemp, which being allowed to make into yarn, would be returned to England and Ireland, and greatly promote our manufactures. All which I approved. . . ."

Source: U.K. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Diary of the First Earl of Egmont (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1923), Vol. I, pp. 44-46.

1839 Fanny Kemble Butler traveled from Butler Island to Darien for a return visit with some of the "local gentry." In her journal entry for this day, she wrote of the trip, as well as Sunday church service four days earlier:

". . . The road was a deep, wearisome sandy track, stretching wearisomely into the wearisome pine forest . . . .

"On our drive we passed occasionally a tattered man or woman, whose yellow mud complexion, straight features, and singularly sinister countenance bespoke an entirely different race from the Negro population in the midst of which they lived. These are the so-called pinelanders of Georgia, I suppose the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth -- filthy, lazy, ignorant, brutal, proud, penniless savages, without one of the nobler attributes which have been found occasionally allied to the vices of savage nature. They own no slaves, for they are almost without exception abjectly poor; they will not work, for that, as they conceive, would reduce them to an equality with the abhorred Negroes; they squat, and steal, and starve, on the outskirts of this lowest of all civilized societies, and their countenances bear witness to the squalor of their condition and the utter degradation of their natures. To the crime of slavery, though they have no profitable part or lot in it, they are fiercely accessory, because it is the barrier that divides the black and white races, at the foot of which they lie wallowing in unspeakable degradation, but immensely proud of the base freedom which still separates them from the lash-driven tillers of the soil.

". . . On Sunday morning [February 10] I went over to Darien to church. Our people's church was closed, the minister having gone to officiate elsewhere. With laudable liberality, I walked into the opposite church of a different, not to say opposite sect . . . . The bulk of the congregation in this church was white. The Negroes are, of course, not allowed to mix with their masters in the house of God, and there is no special place set apart for them. Occasionally one or two are to be seen in the corners of the singing gallery, but any more open pollution by them of their owners' church could not tolerated. Mr.'s [a reference to her husband, Pierce Butler] people have petitioned very vehemently that he would build a church for them on the island. I doubt, however, his allowing them such a luxury as a place of worship all to themselves. Such a privilege might not be thought well of by the neighboring planters; indeed, it is almost what one might call a whity-brown idea, dangerous, demoralizing, inflammatory, incendiary. . . ."

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. 181-186.

1865 From Augusta, Confederate soldier Lavender Ray wrote his father back in Newnan:

". . . What is your opinion about our present situation? It appears gloomy enough, but I hope and think we will yet be independent. Our only hope is to fight until we conquer a peace. . . .

"I regard the Negro as the prime cause of our separation from the old Union, and it is humiliating to have to surrender one of our greatest institutions, both for the prosperity of our country and protection and civilization of the black race, to popular opinion of other nations. Yet, I think this will have to be done, sooner or later, and I believe Congress is of the same opinion. If so, why not make the Negro useful to us in achieving our independence/ We can put 100,000 in service and discipline them so they will do good fighting. . . ."

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), pp. 344-345.

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