July 28, 2026 • 54 mins
Rebecca Felton was a major suffragette and the first female senator. She was also, at different points, a slave owner and professional racist who became America's #1 pro-lynching advocate.
(2 Part Series)
Sources:
https://www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Felton.htm
https://archive.is/PpZnj#selection-1919.0-1923.192
https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10695
https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/1898/item/2278
https://www.nhcgov.com/604/Wilmington-Massacre-1898
https://www.neh.gov/article/wilmington-1898-unsupressed-history-massacre
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/when-white-supremacists-overthrew-government/
https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/apr/27
https://evhsonline.org/native-american
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674061853?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
where we tell you everything you don't know about the
very worst people in all of history. And we have
quite a special episode for everybody this week. And to
tell that special episode, we have a special guest, the
great Samantha McVeigh, host of Stuff Your Mom Never Told
(00:22):
You in the podcast and the book Stuff your Mom
Never Told You. I should say, Samantha, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
To the show. I don't know he.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Either way, you did, Jesus stuff Mom never told you.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
It's it's early morning for me, you know.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
It's one friends.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yeah, yeah, well I haven't slept o'clock my time, So there.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
You go, speaking of friend.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Hi Sam, Hi, how is everybody?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
I'm good, Sam. I wanted to know, do you know
anything about the first female senator?
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Uh? First, not the see Now I'm confused because I
remember the pantsuit senator, which we do talk about.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Huh, And I have to go back.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
To my book.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
This is the first female senator, right, This is the
lady who was technically the first female senator. She didn't
actually do the job of a senator really, but she
was an activist who kind of got it as an
award late in life after women got the vote because
she was She was also a major suffragette activist. Her
name was Rebecca Felton, and she was technically the first
female US senator. Now that all sounds great, right, That
(01:30):
doesn't sound like the subject for a buy in the
Bastard's episode. Unfortunately, Rebecca wasn't just a suffragette, right. She
wasn't just someone who was an activist for that. She
was an activist for a lot of things, including lynching.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
And yeah, I was gonna say she was racist. Wasn't
she racist?
Speaker 2 (01:47):
She was a plantation racist.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Georgia, Georgia.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Oh, this is a Georgia story.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
The actual first senator I was thinking about was a
black woman. But maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
I don't I don't know the elected first senator off
the top of my head right now. I read about
her when I was doing the research for this. But
I'm purely focusing on the mod the white technically because
she fits for our purposes here on behind the Bastards.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Right, I'm so excited to talk about racist. I love
talking about racist. This is one of my favorite hobbies.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Let's go, all right, So, Rebecca an Latimer was born
on June tenth, eighteen thirty five, somewhere near Decatur, Georgia.
Felton's family was rich.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Oh okay, cool well, such a it's such a local story.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
This is too close to home.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
This is full on a Samantha McVay episode.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
It is literally my home, guys.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
I think the first female senator was Hattie I forget
her last name. She finished her husband's after he died.
She finished her husband's term because it was.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
It was after Rebecca, after Rebecca Felton, there was a
senator who actually got to do some of the work,
but it was because she taken over for her husband.
And then the first elected female senator was some time
after that. Yeah, Felton was the first technical female senator. Right,
She's a Decatur girl. Her family is rich as hell,
and she was going to be raised and spend all
(03:14):
of her early life living on a seven hundred and
twenty five acre plantation with a big white mansion that
is still around to this day. Sam since your indicator,
you could go see the Latimer home or I's just
until pretty recently. Yeah, this is where she would have
been raised and obviously a seven hundred and twenty five
Acre plantation. They owned a lot of people, right The
Latimer family own a huge number of enslaved people. It
(03:37):
will not surprise you to hear that Rebecca's family had
been rich basically as long as there had been white
people on the East coast of North America. Her ancestors
had been early settlers and had fought in the Revolutionary War.
So they had been prominent Americans in pre Revolutionary times
and after the war. They're kind of part of the
first elite class in this new country.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Right Now.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Her family, at the time of her birth lives in Georgia,
but they'd initially lived in the far East coast. They'd
been on the Potomac right like literally, they'd had a
huge estate on the Potomac for like two hundred years,
and not long before Rebecca was born. When her dad
was like seven years old, the family left for Decatur.
She would later write of this move, quote, the family
left behind them the splendid brick residents, the capacious barn
(04:22):
and outbuildings, all built of brick, perfectly sound and useful
at this present time, a home of former wealth and luxury,
to adventure life, fortunate and happiness, and a sparsely settled country,
fully half of which was still inhabited by Red Indians.
So this is like her dad's generations is still what
she's being raised to feel about, like what the family's doing.
Why we left the Northeast for Georgia, right, is because
(04:43):
there was more adventure there, It was more open, there
was more space. It was only inhabited by these natives.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Right, I was gonna say, So she was there before
the Trail of tears, like she helped you outations.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
The trailft tears happens as she's a girl, basically, right,
Like that's an early early things she would have been
aware of, right, is the Trail of tears, And in
her autobiography, by the way she writes about it is
like a horrifying thing. Like she at least as an
adult after the war, doesn't see as this is good.
But she's also she's very critical of her family and
the South as an adult decades later. So don't take
(05:18):
that to mean that as a kid growing up in
this rich family that's like colonizing this region, She's not
necessarily feeling like it's wrong while she's living it. Right,
this is something she'll come to recognize later in life.
So I don't know why the Latimers left the Potomac
for Georgia other than you know what they said, more adventure.
I think probably the real reason was that by selling
(05:40):
that land and the more crowded East, they were able
to afford to buy a much larger plot of land
in a place with a better growing climate. One of
my sources for these episodes is the exceedingly good history
books Southern Horrors by Crystal Feimster, and she writes that
by the time Rebecca was born, the Latimer family owned
not just their vast plantation, but a flour mill, a
blacksmith shop, a wood shop, tavern, general store, and post office.
(06:02):
They ran Decatur. Really, they owned Decatur pretty much. The
Latimer family runs Decatur in its early Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Our theme is come to Decatur where it's greater. So
maybe they are the ones that placed that there. That's
why they did that.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
That is more or less why why she seems to
think that they gave now the Latimer fa Latimer's East
Coast family land had was sold to the Potomac Boat
Company and made into a park outside of DC that
I think still exists today. So I don't know that's
cool Anyway, Rebecca did not write that autobiography that I
get some of this info from until she was like
in her eighties, And so again we shouldn't assume that
(06:38):
her thoughts in it always reflect your thoughts at the time.
For example, in her autobiography, she writes extensively about the
reason her family was able to buy land in Georgia
in the first place, which was something called the Yazoo
Land fraud. The New Georgia Encyclopedia describes this as the
quote bizarre climax to a decade of fringely speculation in
the state's public lands. See In the immediate wake of
(06:59):
the American Revolution, the state of Georgia, like many states,
was broke and running low of young men. It was
unable to defend its claims to the western Yazoo Land,
so named after the river, So the legislature solicited pitches
from speculators who wanted to create new settlements in the
unsettled areas, and this led to a series of failed
attempts to create communities in the seventeen eighties. But it's
(07:20):
really hard to do that out there, right, So after
those kind of go bunk, Georgia tries to seed the
land to Congress. They're like, well, make this federal land.
I don't want to deal with this shit anymore. And
Congress says, wait, why we don't want to deal with
what are you talking about? And so then in the
seventeen nineties, after a bunch of back and forth public pressure,
the governor transfers thirty five million acres to four companies
(07:42):
that had paid a total of about half a million dollars. Now,
the only way to actually do this transaction was for
the governor to bribe a huge number of people, because
most of what they were doing to kind of force
this through was technically illegal. His I think his assumption
was just, well, this is such a pain to everybody
having this land that if I have to break the
law to get onto someone else's hands so the Georgia
doesn't have to deal with it, it'll be worth it
(08:03):
for everybody. But then the news finds out, and the
news finds out that this guy has basically like bribed
away a huge chunk of the collectively owned like land
of Georgia. As you know, the white people in Georgia
see it, and so there's years and years of lawsuits
and countersuits and the Yazoo fraud kind of dominates Georgia
state politics for around twenty years now. The Native American
(08:24):
tribes in the area also get involved and start in,
you know, counter suing and whatnot, because it's their land
being sold and they have some issues with it, right.
Some of them are like, we should at least get
some money for this, right. So there's a lot of
court fights over this. The land eventually gets seated finally
to the federal government in eighteen oh two, like Georgia
had wanted to do originally, and the federal government pays
(08:45):
Georgia one point twenty five million dollars to extinguish the
remaining claims on the territory. That means they're supposed to
pay off, for example, a lot of these tribes who
say they have claims to this area and then for
the New Georgia Encyclopedia. As cotton culture spread across Georgia,
the national government proved unable to extinguish Creek and Cherokee
claims to land quickly enough for white Georgians who were
(09:06):
rapidly laying claim to inland at tracks through the land
lottery system. Anger over this matter fueled the development of
the state's rites philosophy for which George's leaders became notorious
in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties. Is they continually
proud of the United States to complete the process of
Indian removal. In a sense, the Yazu land fraud helped
lead to the Cherokee Trail of Tears in eighteen thirty eight.
So purpose, Yeah, the purpose is horror, but like that
(09:30):
that's this is Rebecca's understanding of like how her family
gets to Georgia later, which is she realizes it's because
of this fraud that like violently displaced these people, and
she has very early memories of the Trail of Tears.
It's a thing that I think is upsetting to her
even from a young age before she fully understands it.
So I suspect that's kind of why she spends so
much time as an adult trying to understand what had
(09:51):
caused it. But this is something she writes about a lot,
so she knows, my comfortable family life in Georgia only
was possible because these people were robbed and because of
this fast fraud, like we should never have been there,
which is something she's going to like talk about pretty
openly later, but again, isn't really thinking about at the time, Right,
We shouldn't assume she knew any of this as a
little girl.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
You're starting to build her up like she's actually like
human and kind, so I'm really the interested in ware
the story goes.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
The tough thing about Rebecca is she says the right
thing like sixty percent of the time, but if you
interrogate it, like most of the time when she says
the right thing, it's for a really bad reason, and
we get we'll get to all of that. She does
sound weirdly woke at points.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Like this is like the white women's hears those that
that we were like, yeah, we definitely need that intersection
because without it it's very one sided. So this is
where we're at with her, right, Okay, okay, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
So from an early age, Rebecca is aware of how
much of her daily comfort and security is provided for
by the women in her family, and most of her
like most interesting recollections of her childhood is her talking
about how much she admired the older women in her family,
These who are in charge of these huge households and
plantations and are kind of organizing the affairs of all
(11:06):
of these workers and enslaved people. She really admires like
the ladies in her family more than it because that
in part because that's who she has direct contact with.
But she also sees very accurately that a lot of
Southern culture is held up by the labor of these women, right,
even though they don't get a lot of credit for it.
And one of these women that she admires as a
girl is missus Lucy Talbot Swift, who Rebecca described as
(11:28):
the mother of eleven children, all reaching maturity except two
that live to eleven and twelve years. Her industry, her management,
and her executive ability and caring for and carrying on
household affairs are still wonderful memories. So this is like,
this is who she's raised to idolize. This is the
best woman you can be in the South, Right, Is
this like Lucy Swift? You know this lady who has
eleven kids, nine of them make it to adulthood, and
(11:50):
she's really good at managing a household. Right, that's a
successful woman.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
And that's what we call leaning.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
In exactly exactly. And so Rebecca is raised to idolize
that kind of woman all her clothing. All of Rebecca's clothing,
every blanket, and every pillow she ever used were all
handmade and all crafted by her female relatives or by
enslaved people, usually by enslaved people being like watched over
by your female relatives, right. One of Rebecca's first specific
(12:18):
recollections about her own life is that she was given
a pony at a very young age. So this was
her pet, which again shows that she's a very wealthy girl,
but it's also a practical tool for the farm. She writes, quote,
the Negro boys learned to plow with him, and he
was the dependence for going on mill with a sack
of corn on his back for more than a dozen years.
And her family also owns a bunch of race horses.
So all of their and this is kind of worth noting,
(12:41):
all of their wealth and all of their luxury items
are alive. This is a wealthy family, but they primarily
think of their wealth in terms of like material goods.
They basically have what they make. They don't go out
and buy stuff. They don't have a ton of ready
cash necessarily, but they own people, which are worth way
more than just about any other commodity you can own.
And they own horses in livestock. Right, that's what makes
(13:02):
them rich. That's what makes you rich in this day,
right in the South, is that you have human beings.
In the first few dozen pages of her autobiography, she
refers to the people her family owned exclusively as nurses, servants,
and help. In one passage describing a great feast held
in her plantation, she writes, white farmers came with their
colored men. So it's interesting she seems to be almost
(13:25):
hiding or trying to avoid, even maybe unconsciously describing these
people as slaves and what her family's doing as slaving
for a weirdly long time. Now, that doesn't keep up
the whole book. She finally makes a direct and open
reference to slavery, the first that I found on page
fifty three, and it's a lot more common after that.
It's just weird how long it takes her to use
that word. I thought that was kind of worth noting.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
So she may have subconsciously understood a this is kind
of bad because this is a person, because she refers
to them as people.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yes, And she also is writing this decades later, after
the Civil War or after freedom in the twentieth century.
Right the early twentieth centuries when this book gets written.
So some of this is certainly her referring to these
people more by the modern terms than by you know
what she would have called them at the time. Her
first and direct open reference to slavery, at least that
(14:16):
I found was, came when discussing a woman she admired
whose husband had passed away early and left her to
manage an entire plantation and family. Quote, there were slaves,
but nobody to direct but the anxious woman who had
this large family black and white to provide for. And
you see this a lot in like Southern narratives before
the Civil War, where they will both refer to the
people they own as family and as you know, property.
(14:41):
And that's also literally true in most of these cases, right,
most of these slaves people are related to the people
who own them, or not most, but a lot of
them are.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
It's very common.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
I mean, that's what companies do today. We're family, right,
or do this because we love the job, not because
we have to be paid.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah, it's a bit.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Here's we're literally family because I own you and raping
in order to make more people that I own.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Yeah, and then I'd discard you if you were no
longer more selues. Yeah, horrifying, Yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Rebecca's very aware of that dimension of it too as
she gets older. Now, Rebecca is open about the fact
that most wealthy Southern women were raised to be ornaments
in this period of time. They're made for early marriage
and child rearing. They're not supposed to make decisions about
anything too important. In her book, Crystal Feimster ads from
a young age, Rebecca was integrated into a hierarchical social
(15:35):
order that sanctioned male dominance that discouraged female autonomy. Because
Southern white women were legally subordinated to and he economically
dependent on their fathers and husbands, they had little choice
but to accept paternalistic domination in exchange for male protection
and a measure of discrete power within the household. As
an obedient and dutiful daughter, Rebecca could count on her
father's care. It was he who came to a rescue
(15:56):
when she found a drunken man hanging on their front gate,
shouting the most awful things. The man served as a
reminder of the dangers that lay outside the sheltered security
of the plantation, and her father's protective and watchful eye.
Rebecca and the other young women of her class were
always closely guarded and never traveled without male chaperones.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
She's a owned as well, like she is property. Yeah,
she's so close.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
She comes to understand very quickly that women can't have
a cap on their ambitions and a cap on what
they can do, no matter how smart and capable they are.
And she's going to gradually understand that. And this this
understanding starts when she's a girl, which is that like, well,
it's a dangerous world out there for me a girl,
I need the protection of a man, my father and
(16:42):
then my husband, right, and then if I don't have that,
I feel naked and unprotected to the world. That's how
she's raised to feel from being a very little girl.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
And so there's other men, by the way, fear from other.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Men, and it's it's never explicitly stated as such, but
there's a social contract she comes to understand, which is
that women in the South do what they're supposed to
and make themselves small, and in exchange, they get protection
and they don't have to work. Right, That's that's the
promise for rich women, right, there's plenty of poor lady,
white ladies in the South.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Who have to work because they know not tony people.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
And technically the women that she admires work a lot
in they do giving the household.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
But they're working at it managing the work of people
they own. That is also a big part of it, right,
So there are accounts, I mean, and again that's also
not always what happens, because not all of these, especially
the higher you get in wealth, these these white like
mistresses of the plantation, it's almost the more money you have,
the less you're expected to do. And in fact, there
(17:42):
are accounts by white women and extremely wealthy plantation households
from like letters where we see them talking about panicking
when their husbands and sons are away and they have
to be in charge of the help themselves. This isn't
the overwhelming norm, but it wasn't uncommon, and it gives
you an idea of how much agency high status women
in the Old South are expected to seed. In Southern Horrors,
Finster quotes a South Carolina matron named Emily Harrison who
(18:04):
wrote in her diary, I shall never get used to
being left as the head of the of affairs at
home I am constituted so as to crave a guide
and protect her. I am not an independent woman, no,
nor ever shall be. That's a woman writing it's like
a rich woman.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
You know.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
That is not what Margaret Mitchell told me about the
Antebell himself. So I'm really.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Turns out some of it that might have getten glorified
it just a little bit. Turns out Gone with the
Wind wasn't a perfect recollection. Rebecca's story is a lot
like Scarlett O'Hara is. Honestly, they have a lot of
comparisons to make.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
I'm starting to wonder if Margaret Mitchell actually knew her,
because she was from Georgia's well, so.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
I mean almost very good chance Rebecca's and Rebecca's very
famous after the war too, like knew of her, certainly.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
I don't know if they were social. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
As a girl, Rebecca attended multiple slave weddings on the plantation.
She was candle holder for quote, one big Negro wedding
at her grandmother's house. Through this reminiscence rose colored as
it is in her words, we still see glimpses of
the brutality of the slave system. And this is you're
talking about like, what is a fond memory of her girlhood.
The girl was a housemaid, but the groom lived several
miles away and came to his wife's home every Saturday
(19:17):
to stay until Monday morning daylight. The patrol system was
still enforced throughout the South. Colored men going to the
wife's house were given a pass, and it was a
wise precaution. Slaves were too valuable to allow one of
them to be beaten if he did not have a pass.
So she's talking about this because of like the fear
of slave uprisings. You can't go around even if you're
like heading over to your fiance's place for the night
(19:37):
without a pass. And she's like, it was a good
precaution because otherwise, you know, they're too valuable to just
like beat them because they don't have a pass. So
that's the only thing she thinks about, Like the wisdom
of the slave system is, Oh, it stops the property
from getting damaged.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Oh right, Like I can't lose those because my money
is my currents.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Yeah, yeah, it would be really bad if this got hurt.
So she describes the courtship process of this enslaved couple
in a way that's still sent her own experience, which
I also find quite telling. Quote The colored boy came
one night after supper to ask for the girl, and
I was present at the asking. I was very fond
of the bride to be, and I became a close listener. Now,
because this young woman was Rebecca's family's property, the man
(20:14):
wound up asking Rebecca for permission, and she relates that
whole conversation. Will you treat your wife decent if I
allow you to marry her? Will you act the dog
and beat my good darkie when you get mad with her?
He gladly answered no. Now, I expect you to behave yourself.
If you come here to live. It's my house you
will live in with your wife, but you are welcome
to if you behave yourself. Do you like see again,
(20:35):
she doesn't see this as like she says, this is
I think a fundamentally like natural and good relationship, Like
she's working out looking out for this girl because she
cares about her. But you also see like that casual
use of a slur that she doesn't even I'm sure
it would say like, oh, that was just what we
called them, you know, that wasn't like a term a
hurtful term, and it's like, yeah, I mean it's pretty racist, Rebecca.
(20:55):
It's all like and I'm sure you used worse terms
actually in eighteen fifty or whatever the hell this was.
But you see this like she is really invested in
depicting this as like a familial relationship. This is someone
I care about, But this woman is not allowed to
get married without this random teenage girl saying it's okay,
and like harranguing her adult husband who can't go there
(21:16):
without a pass otherwise he'll get beaten and murdered by
random guys on horses anyway, the South.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
No, this really is like the way Gone with a
win wants to tell you that they wanted to be enslaved.
They were tweeted, well, they were more basically who happened.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
There's definitely a bunch of articles that compare Scarlett O'Hair,
I mean, like Scarlet.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Too to yeah, Rebecca Felt, very Rebecca.
Speaker 4 (21:40):
Felton, you know, I mean they're like they're like, yeah,
the real Scarlet.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Is Rebecca Felt.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
There's a bunch of articles like.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Pretty much definitely like and this is like Scarlett O'Hair.
The character probably would have gotten into politics after the war, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
He absolutely would her husband right right.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
I wouldn't call Rebecca's autobiography good, but it is legiti
be fascinating because of the glimpse it gives us of
pre war southern plantation life. This is not just true
of horrible things. And I want to read you one
of my favorite paragraphs, just for like color about daily
life back then. This is her talking about when she
was a little kid and rural schools of my earliest days.
Nearly all of us wore a cord around our necks
with a little wallet of brimstone and esphodia tied on
(22:18):
as an itch preventative, and the warts my mind, how
to get rid of the itch and warts on their
hands occupied so much of general conversation at recess time,
and a surprising part of the whole thing was the
imparent indifference to both itch and warts and the rude
homes with the majority of the pupils were domiciled. Just
a little like, look into this rich girl is still
going to a school that her dad has built indicators,
(22:38):
so like the poor kids come there too, and all
of them are constantly wearing all this stuff on them
because they're itchy, they're filled with lice, and like anyone
who's not growing up like Rebecca rich On a plantations
just covered in warts all the time. That's just normal
life in like the fucking countryside for poor people, just
little bits like that, Like they don't even notice the
itch anymore because it's just their normal life is being
(22:59):
so completely fucking covered in warts. Anyway, it's awful. It's
good not to live in the past.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
So when we're saying warts, it's obviously not just warts, right,
Like if it's itchy and callouses maybe and then yeah,
these type of things and.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
All sorts of shit.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
I'm sure, okay, all right, people's skin was fucked up
back then.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
I'm like, what has happened?
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, Well we'll get back to more
of Rebecca's life and more skincare tips from the pre
war South, but first here's ads and we're back so
(23:40):
you can find yourself at times forgetting that Rebecca's book
is the account of an unapologetic bigot, because whole pages
go by where she just like writes about weird little
details of farm life in this period of time that
I do find interesting. So when she's an adolescent, her
parents buy a separate home indicator away from the plantation
so she can attend a fancy private academy. The teacher
there was one John S. Wilson, and he hated dancing
(24:02):
more than the town from Footloose did. He banned any
of his students from dancing, not just at school events,
but recreationally on their own time. You'd like sign a
contract that if you're there as a pupil, you will
never dance in or out of school, and if you dance, it.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Gets to expel you.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
And Rebecca writes that at the time, she's like an
adolescent twelve or thirteen, this terrified her because I love
to dance like I loved Candy. There's not much else
to do for a little girl in the eighteen fifties,
and she really wants to dance.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
What's what's job problem?
Speaker 3 (24:32):
What the fuck?
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Bro a weird religious thing? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (24:37):
I have to ask, did y'all is this just a
Southern thing? And this is gonna be horrifying And I'm
gonna be like really embarrassed that I told y'all this.
Did y'all have a Civil War ball in your school?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Not in tech, not in Plano, Texas in the ninth
have it.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
In Texas nineties history outside of time I was in
the nineties.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
Don't even don't even ask about Los Angeles, you know
the answers.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
No, Yeah, well, like we literally had to dress up,
find dresses that were antebellum mine was brightened away, and
then do the dances, the traditional dances, sell them.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
My god, so really was it just me?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
And imagine being the only person of color. Literally there
was two Asian people actually doing this. No, y'all didn't
experiences none of the learned the dances.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
No. I went to a huge school district where like
fucking half the kids in my school district were like
from Southeast Because there's so much of like Texas instruments
and stuff, and there half of my school was from
like Southeast Asia. It would be really weird dress that
would would not have gone over you think of.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
Okay, so really, like y'all didn't have any of the
real like retelling of these.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
I definitely got got some lost cause narrative in my education. Sure,
but we never like dressed up like Texas.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
I was told by someone who lived in Texas that
we didn't study history outside of Texas. History like that
was our.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
We have a Texas history class, but we sure had
other history. The schools where I went to in North
Texas were pretty good. Uh, it's just that you know,
you get it filmed. No, it was a public school.
I only ever went to public school. There's really good
public schools in North Texas because there's a there's like
a lot of businesses and stuff there.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
We only had one school, high school. So you're going
to tell me about it.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Yeah, it's I mean when I grew up in a
in like rural Oklahoma, like my school there was one
school in the entire town and it was tiny. But
North Texas is very densely populated.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
That's fair.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
That's fair.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
So okay, my, yeah, it's I got it.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
She goes to this school and this teacher who doesn't
want her dancing, and her parents are eventually say like, look,
this is the right thing for you. We'll dance when
you graduate, right. She's very upset, and she's particularly upset
that she has to stop dancing for a while because
there's a big dance coming up into Catur and she
has the hots for the town judge, the Honorable Edward
young Hill. Now she's twelve or thirteen at the judge.
(27:01):
He's got to be thirty or something right or more,
but she describes it as one of the handsomest men
she ever knew, and notes that at several previous dances
quote several times the judge would ask me to dance
with him, and he was a splendid dancer. Now, I
don't know if this judge was grooming her or if
this was really innocent. She's twelve or thirteen. It's really
(27:22):
not weird for girls of her status to get married
at like fourteen or fifteen. They get sold off, so
this isn't super weird. That said, her parents are clearly
they're not. Is like, if her parents are aware that
this judge might be making the moves on here, they
don't see him as a good enough match to have
it worth her not graduating from this private school, So
(27:44):
she's not allowed to go to the dance, and she
graduate graduates from school, at which point her parents throw
her a dance party to celebrate. She's a rich girl,
and she writes lovingly of plantation life, but she also
complains about the role of women in southern culture at
the time. She noticed early on that many of her
teachers and governesses were northern women who had moved to
the South for work. Quote no Southern woman of means
(28:05):
ever proposed to work at anything outside of home. Rapid
marriage was the goal as early as fourteen or fifteen,
and it was seen as a stigma to not have
received at least one marriage offer by the time you
had advanced into long dresses as a girl. She don't
have to accept your first marriage offer. But you're kind
of scene as like fucked up if by the time
you're wearing like long dresses, someone's not trying to get
with you.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
So, perhaps the most sympathetic thing about Rebecca is that
she clearly just naturally paid attention anytime a woman in
her world was allowed to act with the slightest bit
of autonomy. You can just kind of catch that from
bits like this. In her autobiography, she writes about an
unforgettable church service where quote, I heard a woman pray
in meeting for the first time. It came like a
clap out of a clear sky. She had been talking
(28:49):
to a bunch of mourners and broke loose in the
fervor of her pleadings. It was the talk of the
town for a good while. Some said it would not
do at all. Others said she was so good that
she must be forgiven, but the majority said she should
have silent. And this lady is like famous in town
because she keeps praying aloud at these big public prayer meetings,
but she's the only woman who does it, and it's
noted as being really weird. And Rebecca can't not pay
(29:13):
attention to this as a little girl, because this is
like the one woman who's bucking the system even a
little bit and showing that like no women can do,
like at least something like at least pray in public.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
That's props because even the Southern Baptists today wouldn't allow that.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
So yeah, yeah, that's tough in certain denominations to this day.
So what we see from a RecA noticing this stuff
is that this is a girl who is smart and
who from a young age knows that her society is
only going to allow her to marry and produce children.
The most autonomy she's ever going to exercise is managing
a household. By her own accounts, she doesn't really start
(29:47):
to chafe under this load until after the fact, after
the Civil War, because the comfort and security and convenience
of her privileged life owning slaves protected by her father
meant more than any ambition she might have nursed. In
other words, once things start to get hard, she realizes
how unfair this is, but she doesn't seem to when
it's working properly, because it's just really nice to have
(30:09):
everything taken.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Care of for you. Yeah, oh comfy, This is so
nice and cozy.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Yeah, nice and cozy. When she was halfway between fifteen
and sixteen, Rebecca went to college in Madison, Georgia. The
location had been picked because it was close enough that
she could return home in less than two days if
she took ill, which tells you something about the priorities
of the time. Now, this is not a college like
we have today. The goal was to train upper class
girls to be interesting and useful wives, not to nourish
(30:35):
their individual gifts or allow them to pursue dreams. So
this isn't a college like we'd call it, right. This
is just a college to try to make everyone the
same kind of wife, more or less.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
I think that's out of the University of Georgia today.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not bad.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
I bet they still got this wife's school going, so
she gets her diploma and being married an eighteen fifty
two and a year or so later, right after she
turns eighteen, right, she marries William Harrold Felton, a thirty
year old former doctor who'd quit medicine to become a
state legislator and then a preacher. They'd met in an
almost ludicrously storybook fashion when she's she's the valedictorian of
(31:12):
her college, and he also speaks at her graduation ceremony,
and they both kind of wind up speaking about like
their differing their beliefs about what makes a good Christian
wife and mother, and they have the same opinion about that,
and so they hit it off afterwards and wind up
getting engaged and then married.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
And today we would.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Say a thirty year old doctor hitting on an eighteen
year old who just graduated college's pretty gross, right, It's
not great.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Leo would be like, I'm not illegal, but not ideal.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Yeah, we'd call this a little odd, but it's not
weird for the time, right, eighteen thirty is not like
an insane split at the time. And more importantly, they
do they have a super long and committed partnership like
it's kind of evil. But they're together and seem to
really love each other. There is such a they're kind
of together, but they're seem to be really happy together.
(32:07):
So I don't know, like they're some people. Being a
good partner to someone isn't a moral term. You could
be your wife to and shitty.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Yeah, they are together, are villains and they're okay with it.
Their love is y an.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Evil power couple. Yeah, so at this point Rebecca couldn't
have been living a more normal life for a girl
of her class an era, the couple moved to a
plant after getting married, they moved to a plantation near Cartersville,
and they Rebecca starts putting out babies. She spends the
next years several years caring for her first children and
managing what she described as a considerable number of slaves.
In her book, Crystal Feinster puts the number of enslaved
(32:44):
people they start with at fifty, which shows you how
wealthy the Latimer family was. Yeah, right, Like, if you
got five or six slaves, you're doing vet way better
than most white families. Like fifty as soon as you
get married means that your family is rich. She would
ultimately give birth to five children, a girl and four boys.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
But only one.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Well none of her sons actually lived to adulthood, so yeah,
this doesn't go Childhood is not is not going to
be great for her. It's not great for a lot
of women in this era. But so far, it's nice.
She's having her kids, she's starting her farm. You know.
The Civil War doesn't start brewing until she's like twenty five,
right when she's already a young mother, and one of
(33:25):
her sons has already died of some weird illness as
it is, that's when kind of things get started and
people really start ramping up. Talk about secession. Now, Rebecca
claims that she and her family did not support secession.
As an older woman. Decades later, she would write if
there had been no slaves, there would have been no war,
as a direct counter to the lost cause myth, which
she despised. That's another interesting thing about Rebecca. She hates
(33:48):
the lost cause myth because, among other things, it's like
slavery was not and she's like, no, of course, slavery
was literally why we did it. I was there and
right right lived right Therely.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
She was honest, I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
She would later add to fight for the perpetuation of
domestic slavery was a mistake. The time had come in
the United States to wipe out this evil. The South
had to suffer. And even when our preachers were leading
in prayer for victory during the war, and black robed
mothers and wives were weeping for their dead ones who
perished in the field of battle, I had questions in
my own mind as to what would be the end
of it. And I don't Again, she doesn't condemn slavery
(34:25):
and succession secession while it's happening, but she clearly I think,
and I don't have trouble believing. At the time, she's
not excited about it. She thinks it's going to be
a really bad idea that's going to endanger everything she loves.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
So was she calling slavery evil or the war evil?
Speaker 1 (34:43):
She's calling slavery evil there, But that's again, much later,
she doesn't call it at the time. She just thinks
that is a really bad idea. This is a bad
idea because it's risking her comfort, it's risking everybody's comfort
for the sake of in guaranteeing that you can spread slavery.
And it's it's not weird. We have accounts for a
(35:03):
lot of slave owners and a lot of people related
to slave owners who later fought for the Confederacy who
never thought secession was.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
A good idea.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
A ton of the men who died fighting for the
Confederacy did not support secession until it happened.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
That doesn't reduce anyone's moral culpability. They still chose to
fight for the Confederacy. It's just true that plenty of people,
even who supported the Confederacy were like, I don't know
if we can pull this off. Guys, I don't know
if this is meant work. Yeah, Like I just I
got my worries. So one of the most yeah I
got some issues with this. One of the most disturbing
(35:36):
experiences for her in the lead up to and start
to the war, and this would have been disturbing for
millions of Southerners besides her, was that it began with
a disruption to the source of all of their comfort. Right,
all of the comfort for rich Southerners is provided by
enslaved black people. Gossip spreads rapidly on plantations, and among
other things, you've got poor white workers there too, who
(35:58):
often talk with their enslaves colleagues, and the slaves talk
to themselves about the coming war and what it might
mean to them. Because they're also people, and because gossip
spreads both ways, quite a few white owners and white
overseers overhear slaves talking about the war, and they reported
back to the owners. They talk about it amongst themselves,
and a lot of these enslaved people are talking about like, well, shit,
we might get to be free right now. This panics
(36:21):
a lot of these owners. And you have to understand,
prior to the kind of rays of hostilities, the dominant
belief among women like Rebecca is that they truly loved
the people that they owned and were loved by them.
In turn, Rebecca really did think she treated Mammy, who
is like her nanny who raises her as a second mother,
even though she slaps Mammy at one point, she has
(36:42):
to apologize, but like.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
She doesn't see that.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
The fact that she would even think to do that
shows she not treating this woman really like a mother,
and the fact that her family owned this woman means
that it's not really That kind of relationship does not
occur to Rebecca or rich ladies like her. The wealthy
women of the South are weighted on hand and foot
by an slaved black women who are very often their
primary sources of emotional comfort too. Now, I'm not asking
(37:05):
you to sympathize with these ladies because they're all awful,
but you do need to try to understand what it
would do to a person to go to bed one
night feeling like I'm surrounded by these people who I
consider family, who take care of my every need, and
then you overhear one of them say something and suddenly realize, oh,
these people might not care about me. They might murder
(37:27):
me for a chance to escape to the Union lines.
It completely shatters some people's minds. That switch flipping is
the first panic that runs through the South before any
shots are fired, because people are like, wait a second,
especially after John Brown's raid, Wait a second, they might
not be happy, like right, Obviously, a lot of especially
the owners and the men and whatnot, the overseers, they're
(37:50):
beating these people to keep them in lying they're running
slave patrols. But women like Rebecca, who are mostly interacting
with the women in their house, it's easier to lie
to yourself about that. Showing up at the weddings, you're
calling these people your family, your mam right, And there's
this sudden realization like, oh, these people and I don't
have the same interests, and things might just have gotten
(38:12):
a lot more dangerous for me.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
They don't benefit the same way I do from them
constantly working to the point that they almost die. That's odd. Yeah,
I don't understand.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
It's so crazy.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Rebecca writes about one of these panics. We had a
Methodist campground on our plantation in eighteen sixty. Immense crowds
were in attendance on Sunday exercises, among them the governor
of the state. The crowd was so great that I
could not leave our tent as we were cooking and
feeding people the most of the day. On Sunday night,
while the mourner's bench was crowded and people shouting down
into the auditorium, there were neighbors and friends inside our tent,
(38:43):
armed to the teeth, waiting for midnight to go out
and quietly suppress a rising that had been reported to
them late in the afternoon. The dread of Negro insurrection
and social equality with negroes at the ballot box held
the Southern whites together in war or peace. That rising
was a false alarm, but the terror of these risings
made the sun fathers and husbands desperate as to remedies.
It is the secret of lynching instead of as a
(39:04):
legal remedy. It was born in the blood and bred
in the bone, and a result of domestic slavery in
the Southern States. That's again her making a point about
later that lynching in the post war period comes out
of the same thing that these these slave raids and
slave patrols came out, which is this fear of a
social equality with black people. And she's not going to
(39:26):
accept that later in her life as a lynching advocate.
Only at the end of it will she write that, like, oh,
you know what, lynching is just another example of white
people trying to stop social equality.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
She's not going to see that her whole life. But
it's interesting that she can write it out that clearly
in her autobiography.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Horrific and she's so close to the point, but so
far Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
According to Feinster, this was a near universe kind of
these kind of panics where a New Year's universal experience
in the South. After John Brown's eighteen fifty nine rate
on Harper's Ferry, which acted as a forced reminder that
the people they owned are not, in fact chill with
the status quo from Southern Horrors quote as far away
as Florida, Susan Bradford's side, we feel we can trust
none of the dear black folk. I am afraid to
(40:08):
say a word, for fear it will prove to be
just what should have been left unsaid. In eighteen sixty one,
a widow moaned in a letter to her sister, can
we cope with an enemy abroad and one at home?
Negroes are fully live to the state of things and
are much more sensible than one would suppose. I can
imagine all sorts of noise at night and sometimes think
they are right at my door. I really there's a
degree of satisfaction in that of like this woman finally
(40:32):
being like, oh, I don't even know if I can
ask them if they're thinking about freedom, because then they
might say they are, and I'm scared about what they're
not willing to tell me. Right, there's a little bit
of payback, just and these ladies starting to realize how
wrong they've been about the community they've grown up.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
In, all right, essentially realizing these are human beings who
have the same intellect as everyone else and has probably
already thought of how to escape those this moment and
maybe the vengeance that they deserve.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Possibly, Yeah, you would have had it coming. You know
who else has it coming? The sponsors of this podcast.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
And it's just a dick pill ad mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Let's hope and we're back.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
So.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
Felton does not write about her own fear of a
slave insurrection in her autobiography, but she does discuss a
letter from her mom, who was home alone at the
family plantation one night. This is part of why many
Georgians were leery of war. The men knew that they
were going to have to leave their wives at home
to fight, and the women knew they were going to
be left at home by their husbands, possibly forever. Still,
after the war started, Rebecca and the Felton family were
(41:48):
as patriotic as any Southerners. She diverted production from of
cotton to corn in order to help feed her starving country,
and her husband volunteered as a doctor for injured soldiers.
These people's reservations did nothing to stop them from volunteering
to help the fight for slavery and the fall of
eighteen sixty one, a few months after the Battle of
Fort Sumter, a woman named Betsy Witherspoon, who lived as
(42:08):
the sole white person in the society Hill Plantation, was
murdered by her slaves. This sparked a panic. Feinster quotes
one woman who wrote her mother in law not to
touch the soup their slaves had cooked for them. Her
recipient replied, hitherto, I have never thought of being afraid
of negroes. I had never injured any of them. Why
would they want to hurt me? I feel that all
the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why
(42:29):
should they treat me any better than they have done?
Cousin Betsy?
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Right?
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Why should they you own them?
Speaker 1 (42:34):
Like? Right?
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Right?
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Is this like direct realization of like, oh shit, why
wouldn't they kill me? I'm like, yeah, they got no
reason not to.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
So the war went on still, and you know, as
terrifying as cases like this were, and as much as
this fear of slave uprising and fear of violence is
kind of baked into the Southern psyche after this point,
violence by.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Black people.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
We would say liberatory justified violence, but that's not how
these people think of it. This is going to stay
rooted in their minds long after the war. Right, and
despite that, the vast majority of enslaved people in the
Confederacy either escaped without doing any violence or remained shockingly
loyal to the people who had owned them. Rebecca Felton
herself credited the black enslaved women that she and other
(43:21):
white people owned across the Confederacy for stopping a mass insurrection.
As Feiinster summarizes, Felton specifically argued that the fidelity and
general excellence of colored women scattered all over the Southland
had prevented slaves from turning on their masters. Southerners, she explained,
own their security of Confederate homes to their faithful female slaves.
Now that's her take. Now, this is a phenomenon, a
(43:44):
documented one.
Speaker 4 (43:45):
Right.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Most of the people who were enslaved in the South
don't try to commit like a violent uprising to escape.
If they escape, they just leave. And a large, a
weird number of them like don't leave until it's over right.
They they a weird number of people do kind of
stay with these families and again or run away, but
without doing any kind of violence. And there's a couple
(44:07):
reasons for that, right. One of them is that, as
I said, many of these people are related. They are
often the children and grandchildren of the people who own them. Now,
these family relationships are sometimes hidden from the outside, but
they're often, if not always, widely known to members of
the household. And that makes things fucking complicated, right, even
(44:28):
if they own you, even if it's fucked up and unfair,
if that guy's like your dad or your uncle biologically
and you were raised, or if you're one of these
women that Rebecca like credits with calming you know, everyone
else down from violence. Maybe part of why you're doing
that is you nursed a bunch of these young white
kids when you were when they were babies, and you
just can't square yourself with murdering them because as evil
(44:50):
as these people are, you're not. And you recognize that
this person was a baby that you held at your
breast and you don't want to see them killed. Like
it's hard, it's complicated, Like the relationships that are created
by this abominable system are really complex, and the way
people react as the war pushes more pressure on them
are complex and multifaceted. Right, Yep, The morality of slavery
(45:12):
isn't complicated, but what it does to people's heads is
very complicated.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
For example, as Rebecca Felton almost never reports a bad
memory of her childhood or even young adult life, she
lived a charmed existence and only grew more racist over
the course of her life. But I think you could
argue she was at her least bigoted or least openly
bigoted when she owned people, right, because there's this weird
(45:37):
degree of paternalism where she only kind of expresses positive
opinions of the black people that she owns when she
doesn't own them.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
She's really racist.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
And that's also very interesting, right in terms of her
psychology and what's going on in this lady's head.
Speaker 3 (45:52):
Like mind blowing, because she really dissects these levels of
understanding the enslaved people in such a way that it
kind of feels like she could have been a heroine
in this story.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
But instead it's weird, and there are pieces where I
think she has things very right. For example, she's very
racist and racism is going to be a major motivating
factor in her life, but I actually think the motivation
behind her main racism in life and the motivation for
her activism later is because the Civil War makes her
(46:26):
hate Southern white men. That is a huge part of
all of her belief system and everything that comes afterwards.
What's forming right now is a deep anger in her
at the society she was raised and at the lies
she was raised with, and at the men who told
her it'll be fine if you just let us control
everything and led their society to ruin, and she is
(46:47):
the failure of southern white men is going to be
like the main thing that motivates everything she does as
an adult. And I think that's also very interesting.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Okay, And it feels like like I don't understand because
I should not lead to racism.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yeah, she's I mean, she's racist before, but the motivation
for the racist activism, like the white racist activism, is
motivated by the fact that she thinks that white men
have failed to protect white women, right, So that's where
she becomes pro lynching is because she's like, we white
women need to take a responsibility for our own defense
(47:20):
on ourselves because these white men are fucking useless. That's
a big part of why she believes in the vote
is what white women need the vote in order to
enforce white supremacy because white men are too weak to
do it on their own. That's Rebecca Felton's ideology, and
it's forming right now because when.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
He's saying white men just didn't do it right.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
We didn't do it right. You didn't.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Well, clearly you didn't. We gave you the chance. When
I was a girl, the rule was we give up
our autonomy for permanent safety and comfort, and you guys
threw that away because you wouldn't compromise with the rest
of the union even a little bit about slavery. And
because you wouldn't compromise, not only did we lose slavery,
but we lose lost all of our wealth and comfort
and have to work for a living now. So I
(48:01):
don't trust you anymore. That's her justification later for why
women need the vote.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
Right.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
First of all, white women fucking suck, White men fucking
suck sorr.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (48:10):
First of all, never trust men. Second of all, that
is not what you to do with this girlfriend.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Oh yeah, I mean, I'm not calling it good logic.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
I'm just saying that it is really interesting to me
that I do think the motivation for her, more even
than the racism, is that she's like, well, fucking white
dudes are useless, and that's really really interesting. Is a
justification for lynching.
Speaker 4 (48:33):
Yeah, not a justification for lynching, but like.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
No, but it's weird.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
Her hostilities pointed in the wrong area.
Speaker 4 (48:41):
Yeah, the call is coming from inside the how Yeah,
what are you?
Speaker 1 (48:45):
We're gonna tell this whole story is like how she gets.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
There, right, okay, okay?
Speaker 1 (48:49):
So yeah, you know, after the war, which they lose,
the Felton family has to sell their plantation and things
go very much downhill for them. And more than the recklessness,
she came to blame southern men for what she saw
as the chief evil of slavery missagen nation. Something she recognizes,
I think she sees it at the time and she
speaks out about it after the war, is that you
(49:11):
can't stop white men from raping their slaves and impregnating
many of them, and many do this, in fact, for
the economic benefit as much as anything, because a new
slave is a new slave. Now it's a later scientific.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
We need to take a pause. What the fuck?
Speaker 1 (49:25):
Yeah, she hates the miss the inbreeding. That's a big
part of her Again, it's white men she's pissed at,
but it's not white men who pay the price.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
She kind of like a girl catches her man cheating,
she goes after the woman instead of the man. Right,
this kind of scenario.
Speaker 4 (49:42):
With all the schools she went to, did she never
take basic math because she's like basically going, She's going
one plus one equal seven?
Speaker 1 (49:51):
What are we doing worth noting Other women of her
class and time are able to recognize this and take
the right conclusion. The Grimkey sisters, who are very prominent
abolition activists in the period of time where she's a
young woman grew up on plantations owning people realized it
was evil, left and became activist against it. And part
of one of the reasons they said it was evil
is that all these white men are raping these slaves. Now,
(50:13):
they didn't think miscegenation was evil. They thought it was
evil to rape a white woman or to rape a
black woman, right, and they believed it was rape either way,
and they were And that's part of what the grim
Keys were saying, is that, like, this is wrong. Because
of that, Felton recognizes that it is really fucked up
that these men are doing this, but she does not
think it's fucked up for the same reason she thinks
(50:35):
it's fucked up because race mixing is wrong, right, And
while she does acknowledge that sometimes unfortunate enslaved women are
raped by their brutish masters, she's also vocal in her
belief that a lot of these enslaved women are willing
partners to scandal.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
Right.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
This is easy to ignore if you just skim over
her work. You can miss it and think that, like, oh,
she's saying some pretty good stuff here, but that's not
really what's going on. One of the strangest things about
reading Felton is that the language she uses around slavery,
she calls it a curse or an abomination, sounds appropriate,
and her disgust with Southern men and the Confederacy almost
(51:09):
seem woke. When she's talking about what idiots these white
guys are. She does better than even a lot of
the abolitionists because she knew these fuckers right, She knew
them as men, and she knows how fucking wrong they
were right, And so it is kind of satisfying to
read for that. But the core of it, her real
issue with them is race mixer, and that so you
can never forget that, right, she writes in her philmography.
(51:31):
As a rule, slave owners were careful of the health
of their slaves. The profit in it made them careful.
There were bad masters, many of them, but the increase
of slave property before the Civil War attests to the
good breeding and housing of slaves. The crime that made
slavery a curse lies in the fact that unbridled lust
placed the children of bad white men and slave pins
on auction blocks, and no regard was shown to parentage
or parental responsibility in such matters. Now again, you can
(51:54):
just read that last bit and be like, Yeah, it's
really fucked up to put your own kids in auction blocks.
Speaker 2 (51:59):
I get it.
Speaker 1 (51:59):
She's not saying that's the fucked up thing. She's saying
slavery was great except for this. She's saying, we took
really good care of them, except for the rape. You
can see how good we took a care of them
by how many more of them there were, you know,
over the years.
Speaker 2 (52:12):
But also rape.
Speaker 1 (52:14):
Yeah, yeah, And you can really get a feel for
her beliefs when you understand that while Rebecca thought violent
rape was pretty bad, would upset her far more were
the male slave owners who claimed to have consensual relationships
with black women they owned, because a lot of these
guys will describe, at least in like small gatherings, some
of these women as like their wives. That's the thing
that happens all throughout slavery. There's always white dudes who
(52:35):
will marry quote unquote women that they own. And yeah,
here's here's Rebecca. I remember well a noted home in
middle Georgia where a rich man lived in open alliance
with a colored woman, and where governors and congressmen were
often invited to dine, and where they were glad to
go in his will. There were other men of distinction
in Georgia who also defied the marriage law of the
state by keeping up to two households on the same plantation,
(52:56):
one white and the other colored. And both women were
afraid to make the matter outcry, make the public outcry.
They're in lie the curse of slavery. And I don't
think that's where the.
Speaker 2 (53:05):
Curse of slavery.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
I think actually these are like arguably these cases where
some weird guy decides that, like, this person he owns
is his wife, probably some of the less abusive.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Than some lot of the other relationships.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
But she's like, no, this is the great evil is
because they're breeding and treating each other like equals and
they're not. We wouldn't say, but that's how she sees it, right.
Speaker 3 (53:26):
Except a person is owned and the coersion is the
most likely like they are not more more than consented.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
So okay, anyway, that's part one.
Speaker 3 (53:35):
How you feeling wonderful? Wonderful?
Speaker 2 (53:39):
Excellent?
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Well, you want to plug your pluggables.
Speaker 3 (53:44):
I'm Samantha. You can find me on the podcast stuff
Mom Never Told You with my co host Annie. We
also wrote a book, same titles, Stuff Mom Never Told You.
It's been out for a minute. He's also on like
audiobook so you can listen to us try to read
our books in a weird man yay. Also, I'm on Instagram. Haha.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
Awesome.
Speaker 1 (54:05):
Well, check out that on Instagram and check out the
next episode of this podcast where we'll have Samantha back
in a day or so.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
Good night, Whoo Whoo.
Speaker 4 (54:17):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video
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you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older
(54:38):
episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube
dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about
forty percent of you, statistically speaking,
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
where we tell you everything you don't know about the
very worst people in all of history. And we have
quite a special episode for everybody this week. And to
tell that special episode, we have a special guest, the
great Samantha McVeigh, host of Stuff Your Mom Never Told
(00:22):
You in the podcast and the book Stuff your Mom
Never Told You. I should say, Samantha, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
To the show. I don't know he.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Either way, you did, Jesus stuff Mom never told you.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
It's it's early morning for me, you know.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
It's one friends.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yeah, yeah, well I haven't slept o'clock my time, So there.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
You go, speaking of friend.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Hi Sam, Hi, how is everybody?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
I'm good, Sam. I wanted to know, do you know
anything about the first female senator?
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Uh? First, not the see Now I'm confused because I
remember the pantsuit senator, which we do talk about.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Huh, And I have to go back.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
To my book.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
This is the first female senator, right, This is the
lady who was technically the first female senator. She didn't
actually do the job of a senator really, but she
was an activist who kind of got it as an
award late in life after women got the vote because
she was She was also a major suffragette activist. Her
name was Rebecca Felton, and she was technically the first
female US senator. Now that all sounds great, right, That
(01:30):
doesn't sound like the subject for a buy in the
Bastard's episode. Unfortunately, Rebecca wasn't just a suffragette, right. She
wasn't just someone who was an activist for that. She
was an activist for a lot of things, including lynching.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
And yeah, I was gonna say she was racist. Wasn't
she racist?
Speaker 2 (01:47):
She was a plantation racist.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Georgia, Georgia.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Oh, this is a Georgia story.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
The actual first senator I was thinking about was a
black woman. But maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
I don't I don't know the elected first senator off
the top of my head right now. I read about
her when I was doing the research for this. But
I'm purely focusing on the mod the white technically because
she fits for our purposes here on behind the Bastards.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Right, I'm so excited to talk about racist. I love
talking about racist. This is one of my favorite hobbies.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Let's go, all right, So, Rebecca an Latimer was born
on June tenth, eighteen thirty five, somewhere near Decatur, Georgia.
Felton's family was rich.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Oh okay, cool well, such a it's such a local story.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
This is too close to home.
Speaker 4 (02:39):
This is full on a Samantha McVay episode.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
It is literally my home, guys.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
I think the first female senator was Hattie I forget
her last name. She finished her husband's after he died.
She finished her husband's term because it was.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
It was after Rebecca, after Rebecca Felton, there was a
senator who actually got to do some of the work,
but it was because she taken over for her husband.
And then the first elected female senator was some time
after that. Yeah, Felton was the first technical female senator. Right,
She's a Decatur girl. Her family is rich as hell,
and she was going to be raised and spend all
(03:14):
of her early life living on a seven hundred and
twenty five acre plantation with a big white mansion that
is still around to this day. Sam since your indicator,
you could go see the Latimer home or I's just
until pretty recently. Yeah, this is where she would have
been raised and obviously a seven hundred and twenty five
Acre plantation. They owned a lot of people, right The
Latimer family own a huge number of enslaved people. It
(03:37):
will not surprise you to hear that Rebecca's family had
been rich basically as long as there had been white
people on the East coast of North America. Her ancestors
had been early settlers and had fought in the Revolutionary War.
So they had been prominent Americans in pre Revolutionary times
and after the war. They're kind of part of the
first elite class in this new country.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Right Now.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Her family, at the time of her birth lives in Georgia,
but they'd initially lived in the far East coast. They'd
been on the Potomac right like literally, they'd had a
huge estate on the Potomac for like two hundred years,
and not long before Rebecca was born. When her dad
was like seven years old, the family left for Decatur.
She would later write of this move, quote, the family
left behind them the splendid brick residents, the capacious barn
(04:22):
and outbuildings, all built of brick, perfectly sound and useful
at this present time, a home of former wealth and luxury,
to adventure life, fortunate and happiness, and a sparsely settled country,
fully half of which was still inhabited by Red Indians.
So this is like her dad's generations is still what
she's being raised to feel about, like what the family's doing.
Why we left the Northeast for Georgia, right, is because
(04:43):
there was more adventure there, It was more open, there
was more space. It was only inhabited by these natives.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Right, I was gonna say, So she was there before
the Trail of tears, like she helped you outations.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
The trailft tears happens as she's a girl, basically, right,
Like that's an early early things she would have been
aware of, right, is the Trail of tears, And in
her autobiography, by the way she writes about it is
like a horrifying thing. Like she at least as an
adult after the war, doesn't see as this is good.
But she's also she's very critical of her family and
the South as an adult decades later. So don't take
(05:18):
that to mean that as a kid growing up in
this rich family that's like colonizing this region, She's not
necessarily feeling like it's wrong while she's living it. Right,
this is something she'll come to recognize later in life.
So I don't know why the Latimers left the Potomac
for Georgia other than you know what they said, more adventure.
I think probably the real reason was that by selling
(05:40):
that land and the more crowded East, they were able
to afford to buy a much larger plot of land
in a place with a better growing climate. One of
my sources for these episodes is the exceedingly good history
books Southern Horrors by Crystal Feimster, and she writes that
by the time Rebecca was born, the Latimer family owned
not just their vast plantation, but a flour mill, a
blacksmith shop, a wood shop, tavern, general store, and post office.
(06:02):
They ran Decatur. Really, they owned Decatur pretty much. The
Latimer family runs Decatur in its early Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
Our theme is come to Decatur where it's greater. So
maybe they are the ones that placed that there. That's
why they did that.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
That is more or less why why she seems to
think that they gave now the Latimer fa Latimer's East
Coast family land had was sold to the Potomac Boat
Company and made into a park outside of DC that
I think still exists today. So I don't know that's
cool Anyway, Rebecca did not write that autobiography that I
get some of this info from until she was like
in her eighties, And so again we shouldn't assume that
(06:38):
her thoughts in it always reflect your thoughts at the time.
For example, in her autobiography, she writes extensively about the
reason her family was able to buy land in Georgia
in the first place, which was something called the Yazoo
Land fraud. The New Georgia Encyclopedia describes this as the
quote bizarre climax to a decade of fringely speculation in
the state's public lands. See In the immediate wake of
(06:59):
the American Revolution, the state of Georgia, like many states,
was broke and running low of young men. It was
unable to defend its claims to the western Yazoo Land,
so named after the river, So the legislature solicited pitches
from speculators who wanted to create new settlements in the
unsettled areas, and this led to a series of failed
attempts to create communities in the seventeen eighties. But it's
(07:20):
really hard to do that out there, right, So after
those kind of go bunk, Georgia tries to seed the
land to Congress. They're like, well, make this federal land.
I don't want to deal with this shit anymore. And
Congress says, wait, why we don't want to deal with
what are you talking about? And so then in the
seventeen nineties, after a bunch of back and forth public pressure,
the governor transfers thirty five million acres to four companies
(07:42):
that had paid a total of about half a million dollars. Now,
the only way to actually do this transaction was for
the governor to bribe a huge number of people, because
most of what they were doing to kind of force
this through was technically illegal. His I think his assumption
was just, well, this is such a pain to everybody
having this land that if I have to break the
law to get onto someone else's hands so the Georgia
doesn't have to deal with it, it'll be worth it
(08:03):
for everybody. But then the news finds out, and the
news finds out that this guy has basically like bribed
away a huge chunk of the collectively owned like land
of Georgia. As you know, the white people in Georgia
see it, and so there's years and years of lawsuits
and countersuits and the Yazoo fraud kind of dominates Georgia
state politics for around twenty years now. The Native American
(08:24):
tribes in the area also get involved and start in,
you know, counter suing and whatnot, because it's their land
being sold and they have some issues with it, right.
Some of them are like, we should at least get
some money for this, right. So there's a lot of
court fights over this. The land eventually gets seated finally
to the federal government in eighteen oh two, like Georgia
had wanted to do originally, and the federal government pays
(08:45):
Georgia one point twenty five million dollars to extinguish the
remaining claims on the territory. That means they're supposed to
pay off, for example, a lot of these tribes who
say they have claims to this area and then for
the New Georgia Encyclopedia. As cotton culture spread across Georgia,
the national government proved unable to extinguish Creek and Cherokee
claims to land quickly enough for white Georgians who were
(09:06):
rapidly laying claim to inland at tracks through the land
lottery system. Anger over this matter fueled the development of
the state's rites philosophy for which George's leaders became notorious
in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties. Is they continually
proud of the United States to complete the process of
Indian removal. In a sense, the Yazu land fraud helped
lead to the Cherokee Trail of Tears in eighteen thirty eight.
So purpose, Yeah, the purpose is horror, but like that
(09:30):
that's this is Rebecca's understanding of like how her family
gets to Georgia later, which is she realizes it's because
of this fraud that like violently displaced these people, and
she has very early memories of the Trail of Tears.
It's a thing that I think is upsetting to her
even from a young age before she fully understands it.
So I suspect that's kind of why she spends so
much time as an adult trying to understand what had
(09:51):
caused it. But this is something she writes about a lot,
so she knows, my comfortable family life in Georgia only
was possible because these people were robbed and because of
this fast fraud, like we should never have been there,
which is something she's going to like talk about pretty
openly later, but again, isn't really thinking about at the time, Right,
We shouldn't assume she knew any of this as a
little girl.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
You're starting to build her up like she's actually like
human and kind, so I'm really the interested in ware
the story goes.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
The tough thing about Rebecca is she says the right
thing like sixty percent of the time, but if you
interrogate it, like most of the time when she says
the right thing, it's for a really bad reason, and
we get we'll get to all of that. She does
sound weirdly woke at points.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Like this is like the white women's hears those that
that we were like, yeah, we definitely need that intersection
because without it it's very one sided. So this is
where we're at with her, right, Okay, okay, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
So from an early age, Rebecca is aware of how
much of her daily comfort and security is provided for
by the women in her family, and most of her
like most interesting recollections of her childhood is her talking
about how much she admired the older women in her family,
These who are in charge of these huge households and
plantations and are kind of organizing the affairs of all
(11:06):
of these workers and enslaved people. She really admires like
the ladies in her family more than it because that
in part because that's who she has direct contact with.
But she also sees very accurately that a lot of
Southern culture is held up by the labor of these women, right,
even though they don't get a lot of credit for it.
And one of these women that she admires as a
girl is missus Lucy Talbot Swift, who Rebecca described as
(11:28):
the mother of eleven children, all reaching maturity except two
that live to eleven and twelve years. Her industry, her management,
and her executive ability and caring for and carrying on
household affairs are still wonderful memories. So this is like,
this is who she's raised to idolize. This is the
best woman you can be in the South, Right, Is
this like Lucy Swift? You know this lady who has
eleven kids, nine of them make it to adulthood, and
(11:50):
she's really good at managing a household. Right, that's a
successful woman.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
And that's what we call leaning.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
In exactly exactly. And so Rebecca is raised to idolize
that kind of woman all her clothing. All of Rebecca's clothing,
every blanket, and every pillow she ever used were all
handmade and all crafted by her female relatives or by
enslaved people, usually by enslaved people being like watched over
by your female relatives, right. One of Rebecca's first specific
(12:18):
recollections about her own life is that she was given
a pony at a very young age. So this was
her pet, which again shows that she's a very wealthy girl,
but it's also a practical tool for the farm. She writes, quote,
the Negro boys learned to plow with him, and he
was the dependence for going on mill with a sack
of corn on his back for more than a dozen years.
And her family also owns a bunch of race horses.
So all of their and this is kind of worth noting,
(12:41):
all of their wealth and all of their luxury items
are alive. This is a wealthy family, but they primarily
think of their wealth in terms of like material goods.
They basically have what they make. They don't go out
and buy stuff. They don't have a ton of ready
cash necessarily, but they own people, which are worth way
more than just about any other commodity you can own.
And they own horses in livestock. Right, that's what makes
(13:02):
them rich. That's what makes you rich in this day,
right in the South, is that you have human beings.
In the first few dozen pages of her autobiography, she
refers to the people her family owned exclusively as nurses, servants,
and help. In one passage describing a great feast held
in her plantation, she writes, white farmers came with their
colored men. So it's interesting she seems to be almost
(13:25):
hiding or trying to avoid, even maybe unconsciously describing these
people as slaves and what her family's doing as slaving
for a weirdly long time. Now, that doesn't keep up
the whole book. She finally makes a direct and open
reference to slavery, the first that I found on page
fifty three, and it's a lot more common after that.
It's just weird how long it takes her to use
that word. I thought that was kind of worth noting.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
So she may have subconsciously understood a this is kind
of bad because this is a person, because she refers
to them as people.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yes, And she also is writing this decades later, after
the Civil War or after freedom in the twentieth century.
Right the early twentieth centuries when this book gets written.
So some of this is certainly her referring to these
people more by the modern terms than by you know
what she would have called them at the time. Her
first and direct open reference to slavery, at least that
(14:16):
I found was, came when discussing a woman she admired
whose husband had passed away early and left her to
manage an entire plantation and family. Quote, there were slaves,
but nobody to direct but the anxious woman who had
this large family black and white to provide for. And
you see this a lot in like Southern narratives before
the Civil War, where they will both refer to the
people they own as family and as you know, property.
(14:41):
And that's also literally true in most of these cases, right,
most of these slaves people are related to the people
who own them, or not most, but a lot of
them are.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
It's very common.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
I mean, that's what companies do today. We're family, right,
or do this because we love the job, not because
we have to be paid.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah, it's a bit.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Here's we're literally family because I own you and raping
in order to make more people that I own.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Yeah, and then I'd discard you if you were no
longer more selues. Yeah, horrifying, Yeah, yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Rebecca's very aware of that dimension of it too as
she gets older. Now, Rebecca is open about the fact
that most wealthy Southern women were raised to be ornaments
in this period of time. They're made for early marriage
and child rearing. They're not supposed to make decisions about
anything too important. In her book, Crystal Feimster ads from
a young age, Rebecca was integrated into a hierarchical social
(15:35):
order that sanctioned male dominance that discouraged female autonomy. Because
Southern white women were legally subordinated to and he economically
dependent on their fathers and husbands, they had little choice
but to accept paternalistic domination in exchange for male protection
and a measure of discrete power within the household. As
an obedient and dutiful daughter, Rebecca could count on her
father's care. It was he who came to a rescue
(15:56):
when she found a drunken man hanging on their front gate,
shouting the most awful things. The man served as a
reminder of the dangers that lay outside the sheltered security
of the plantation, and her father's protective and watchful eye.
Rebecca and the other young women of her class were
always closely guarded and never traveled without male chaperones.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
She's a owned as well, like she is property. Yeah,
she's so close.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
She comes to understand very quickly that women can't have
a cap on their ambitions and a cap on what
they can do, no matter how smart and capable they are.
And she's going to gradually understand that. And this this
understanding starts when she's a girl, which is that like, well,
it's a dangerous world out there for me a girl,
I need the protection of a man, my father and
(16:42):
then my husband, right, and then if I don't have that,
I feel naked and unprotected to the world. That's how
she's raised to feel from being a very little girl.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
And so there's other men, by the way, fear from other.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Men, and it's it's never explicitly stated as such, but
there's a social contract she comes to understand, which is
that women in the South do what they're supposed to
and make themselves small, and in exchange, they get protection
and they don't have to work. Right, That's that's the
promise for rich women, right, there's plenty of poor lady,
white ladies in the South.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Who have to work because they know not tony people.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
And technically the women that she admires work a lot
in they do giving the household.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
But they're working at it managing the work of people
they own. That is also a big part of it, right,
So there are accounts, I mean, and again that's also
not always what happens, because not all of these, especially
the higher you get in wealth, these these white like
mistresses of the plantation, it's almost the more money you have,
the less you're expected to do. And in fact, there
(17:42):
are accounts by white women and extremely wealthy plantation households
from like letters where we see them talking about panicking
when their husbands and sons are away and they have
to be in charge of the help themselves. This isn't
the overwhelming norm, but it wasn't uncommon, and it gives
you an idea of how much agency high status women
in the Old South are expected to seed. In Southern Horrors,
Finster quotes a South Carolina matron named Emily Harrison who
(18:04):
wrote in her diary, I shall never get used to
being left as the head of the of affairs at
home I am constituted so as to crave a guide
and protect her. I am not an independent woman, no,
nor ever shall be. That's a woman writing it's like
a rich woman.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
You know.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
That is not what Margaret Mitchell told me about the
Antebell himself. So I'm really.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Turns out some of it that might have getten glorified
it just a little bit. Turns out Gone with the
Wind wasn't a perfect recollection. Rebecca's story is a lot
like Scarlett O'Hara is. Honestly, they have a lot of
comparisons to make.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
I'm starting to wonder if Margaret Mitchell actually knew her,
because she was from Georgia's well, so.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
I mean almost very good chance Rebecca's and Rebecca's very
famous after the war too, like knew of her, certainly.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
I don't know if they were social. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
As a girl, Rebecca attended multiple slave weddings on the plantation.
She was candle holder for quote, one big Negro wedding
at her grandmother's house. Through this reminiscence rose colored as
it is in her words, we still see glimpses of
the brutality of the slave system. And this is you're
talking about like, what is a fond memory of her girlhood.
The girl was a housemaid, but the groom lived several
miles away and came to his wife's home every Saturday
(19:17):
to stay until Monday morning daylight. The patrol system was
still enforced throughout the South. Colored men going to the
wife's house were given a pass, and it was a
wise precaution. Slaves were too valuable to allow one of
them to be beaten if he did not have a pass.
So she's talking about this because of like the fear
of slave uprisings. You can't go around even if you're
like heading over to your fiance's place for the night
(19:37):
without a pass. And she's like, it was a good
precaution because otherwise, you know, they're too valuable to just
like beat them because they don't have a pass. So
that's the only thing she thinks about, Like the wisdom
of the slave system is, Oh, it stops the property
from getting damaged.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
Oh right, Like I can't lose those because my money
is my currents.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Yeah, yeah, it would be really bad if this got hurt.
So she describes the courtship process of this enslaved couple
in a way that's still sent her own experience, which
I also find quite telling. Quote The colored boy came
one night after supper to ask for the girl, and
I was present at the asking. I was very fond
of the bride to be, and I became a close listener. Now,
because this young woman was Rebecca's family's property, the man
(20:14):
wound up asking Rebecca for permission, and she relates that
whole conversation. Will you treat your wife decent if I
allow you to marry her? Will you act the dog
and beat my good darkie when you get mad with her?
He gladly answered no. Now, I expect you to behave yourself.
If you come here to live. It's my house you
will live in with your wife, but you are welcome
to if you behave yourself. Do you like see again,
(20:35):
she doesn't see this as like she says, this is
I think a fundamentally like natural and good relationship, Like
she's working out looking out for this girl because she
cares about her. But you also see like that casual
use of a slur that she doesn't even I'm sure
it would say like, oh, that was just what we
called them, you know, that wasn't like a term a
hurtful term, and it's like, yeah, I mean it's pretty racist, Rebecca.
(20:55):
It's all like and I'm sure you used worse terms
actually in eighteen fifty or whatever the hell this was.
But you see this like she is really invested in
depicting this as like a familial relationship. This is someone
I care about, But this woman is not allowed to
get married without this random teenage girl saying it's okay,
and like harranguing her adult husband who can't go there
(21:16):
without a pass otherwise he'll get beaten and murdered by
random guys on horses anyway, the South.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
No, this really is like the way Gone with a
win wants to tell you that they wanted to be enslaved.
They were tweeted, well, they were more basically who happened.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
There's definitely a bunch of articles that compare Scarlett O'Hair,
I mean, like Scarlet.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Too to yeah, Rebecca Felt, very Rebecca.
Speaker 4 (21:40):
Felton, you know, I mean they're like they're like, yeah,
the real Scarlet.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
Is Rebecca Felt.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
There's a bunch of articles like.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Pretty much definitely like and this is like Scarlett O'Hair.
The character probably would have gotten into politics after the war, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
He absolutely would her husband right right.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
I wouldn't call Rebecca's autobiography good, but it is legiti
be fascinating because of the glimpse it gives us of
pre war southern plantation life. This is not just true
of horrible things. And I want to read you one
of my favorite paragraphs, just for like color about daily
life back then. This is her talking about when she
was a little kid and rural schools of my earliest days.
Nearly all of us wore a cord around our necks
with a little wallet of brimstone and esphodia tied on
(22:18):
as an itch preventative, and the warts my mind, how
to get rid of the itch and warts on their
hands occupied so much of general conversation at recess time,
and a surprising part of the whole thing was the
imparent indifference to both itch and warts and the rude
homes with the majority of the pupils were domiciled. Just
a little like, look into this rich girl is still
going to a school that her dad has built indicators,
(22:38):
so like the poor kids come there too, and all
of them are constantly wearing all this stuff on them
because they're itchy, they're filled with lice, and like anyone
who's not growing up like Rebecca rich On a plantations
just covered in warts all the time. That's just normal
life in like the fucking countryside for poor people, just
little bits like that, Like they don't even notice the
itch anymore because it's just their normal life is being
(22:59):
so completely fucking covered in warts. Anyway, it's awful. It's
good not to live in the past.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
So when we're saying warts, it's obviously not just warts, right,
Like if it's itchy and callouses maybe and then yeah,
these type of things and.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
All sorts of shit.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
I'm sure, okay, all right, people's skin was fucked up
back then.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
I'm like, what has happened?
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, Well we'll get back to more
of Rebecca's life and more skincare tips from the pre
war South, but first here's ads and we're back so
(23:40):
you can find yourself at times forgetting that Rebecca's book
is the account of an unapologetic bigot, because whole pages
go by where she just like writes about weird little
details of farm life in this period of time that
I do find interesting. So when she's an adolescent, her
parents buy a separate home indicator away from the plantation
so she can attend a fancy private academy. The teacher
there was one John S. Wilson, and he hated dancing
(24:02):
more than the town from Footloose did. He banned any
of his students from dancing, not just at school events,
but recreationally on their own time. You'd like sign a
contract that if you're there as a pupil, you will
never dance in or out of school, and if you dance, it.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Gets to expel you.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
And Rebecca writes that at the time, she's like an
adolescent twelve or thirteen, this terrified her because I love
to dance like I loved Candy. There's not much else
to do for a little girl in the eighteen fifties,
and she really wants to dance.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
What's what's job problem?
Speaker 3 (24:32):
What the fuck?
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Bro a weird religious thing? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (24:37):
I have to ask, did y'all is this just a
Southern thing? And this is gonna be horrifying And I'm
gonna be like really embarrassed that I told y'all this.
Did y'all have a Civil War ball in your school?
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Not in tech, not in Plano, Texas in the ninth
have it.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
In Texas nineties history outside of time I was in
the nineties.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
Don't even don't even ask about Los Angeles, you know
the answers.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
No, Yeah, well, like we literally had to dress up,
find dresses that were antebellum mine was brightened away, and
then do the dances, the traditional dances, sell them.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
My god, so really was it just me?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
And imagine being the only person of color. Literally there
was two Asian people actually doing this. No, y'all didn't
experiences none of the learned the dances.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
No. I went to a huge school district where like
fucking half the kids in my school district were like
from Southeast Because there's so much of like Texas instruments
and stuff, and there half of my school was from
like Southeast Asia. It would be really weird dress that
would would not have gone over you think of.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
Okay, so really, like y'all didn't have any of the
real like retelling of these.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
I definitely got got some lost cause narrative in my education. Sure,
but we never like dressed up like Texas.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
I was told by someone who lived in Texas that
we didn't study history outside of Texas. History like that
was our.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
We have a Texas history class, but we sure had
other history. The schools where I went to in North
Texas were pretty good. Uh, it's just that you know,
you get it filmed. No, it was a public school.
I only ever went to public school. There's really good
public schools in North Texas because there's a there's like
a lot of businesses and stuff there.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
We only had one school, high school. So you're going
to tell me about it.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Yeah, it's I mean when I grew up in a
in like rural Oklahoma, like my school there was one
school in the entire town and it was tiny. But
North Texas is very densely populated.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
That's fair.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
That's fair.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
So okay, my, yeah, it's I got it.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
She goes to this school and this teacher who doesn't
want her dancing, and her parents are eventually say like, look,
this is the right thing for you. We'll dance when
you graduate, right. She's very upset, and she's particularly upset
that she has to stop dancing for a while because
there's a big dance coming up into Catur and she
has the hots for the town judge, the Honorable Edward
young Hill. Now she's twelve or thirteen at the judge.
(27:01):
He's got to be thirty or something right or more,
but she describes it as one of the handsomest men
she ever knew, and notes that at several previous dances
quote several times the judge would ask me to dance
with him, and he was a splendid dancer. Now, I
don't know if this judge was grooming her or if
this was really innocent. She's twelve or thirteen. It's really
(27:22):
not weird for girls of her status to get married
at like fourteen or fifteen. They get sold off, so
this isn't super weird. That said, her parents are clearly
they're not. Is like, if her parents are aware that
this judge might be making the moves on here, they
don't see him as a good enough match to have
it worth her not graduating from this private school, So
(27:44):
she's not allowed to go to the dance, and she
graduate graduates from school, at which point her parents throw
her a dance party to celebrate. She's a rich girl,
and she writes lovingly of plantation life, but she also
complains about the role of women in southern culture at
the time. She noticed early on that many of her
teachers and governesses were northern women who had moved to
the South for work. Quote no Southern woman of means
(28:05):
ever proposed to work at anything outside of home. Rapid
marriage was the goal as early as fourteen or fifteen,
and it was seen as a stigma to not have
received at least one marriage offer by the time you
had advanced into long dresses as a girl. She don't
have to accept your first marriage offer. But you're kind
of scene as like fucked up if by the time
you're wearing like long dresses, someone's not trying to get
with you.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
So, perhaps the most sympathetic thing about Rebecca is that
she clearly just naturally paid attention anytime a woman in
her world was allowed to act with the slightest bit
of autonomy. You can just kind of catch that from
bits like this. In her autobiography, she writes about an
unforgettable church service where quote, I heard a woman pray
in meeting for the first time. It came like a
clap out of a clear sky. She had been talking
(28:49):
to a bunch of mourners and broke loose in the
fervor of her pleadings. It was the talk of the
town for a good while. Some said it would not
do at all. Others said she was so good that
she must be forgiven, but the majority said she should
have silent. And this lady is like famous in town
because she keeps praying aloud at these big public prayer meetings,
but she's the only woman who does it, and it's
noted as being really weird. And Rebecca can't not pay
(29:13):
attention to this as a little girl, because this is
like the one woman who's bucking the system even a
little bit and showing that like no women can do,
like at least something like at least pray in public.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
That's props because even the Southern Baptists today wouldn't allow that.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
So yeah, yeah, that's tough in certain denominations to this day.
So what we see from a RecA noticing this stuff
is that this is a girl who is smart and
who from a young age knows that her society is
only going to allow her to marry and produce children.
The most autonomy she's ever going to exercise is managing
a household. By her own accounts, she doesn't really start
(29:47):
to chafe under this load until after the fact, after
the Civil War, because the comfort and security and convenience
of her privileged life owning slaves protected by her father
meant more than any ambition she might have nursed. In
other words, once things start to get hard, she realizes
how unfair this is, but she doesn't seem to when
it's working properly, because it's just really nice to have
(30:09):
everything taken.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
Care of for you. Yeah, oh comfy, This is so
nice and cozy.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Yeah, nice and cozy. When she was halfway between fifteen
and sixteen, Rebecca went to college in Madison, Georgia. The
location had been picked because it was close enough that
she could return home in less than two days if
she took ill, which tells you something about the priorities
of the time. Now, this is not a college like
we have today. The goal was to train upper class
girls to be interesting and useful wives, not to nourish
(30:35):
their individual gifts or allow them to pursue dreams. So
this isn't a college like we'd call it, right. This
is just a college to try to make everyone the
same kind of wife, more or less.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
I think that's out of the University of Georgia today.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not bad.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
I bet they still got this wife's school going, so
she gets her diploma and being married an eighteen fifty
two and a year or so later, right after she
turns eighteen, right, she marries William Harrold Felton, a thirty
year old former doctor who'd quit medicine to become a
state legislator and then a preacher. They'd met in an
almost ludicrously storybook fashion when she's she's the valedictorian of
(31:12):
her college, and he also speaks at her graduation ceremony,
and they both kind of wind up speaking about like
their differing their beliefs about what makes a good Christian
wife and mother, and they have the same opinion about that,
and so they hit it off afterwards and wind up
getting engaged and then married.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
And today we would.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Say a thirty year old doctor hitting on an eighteen
year old who just graduated college's pretty gross, right, It's
not great.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Leo would be like, I'm not illegal, but not ideal.
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Yeah, we'd call this a little odd, but it's not
weird for the time, right, eighteen thirty is not like
an insane split at the time. And more importantly, they
do they have a super long and committed partnership like
it's kind of evil. But they're together and seem to
really love each other. There is such a they're kind
of together, but they're seem to be really happy together.
(32:07):
So I don't know, like they're some people. Being a
good partner to someone isn't a moral term. You could
be your wife to and shitty.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Yeah, they are together, are villains and they're okay with it.
Their love is y an.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Evil power couple. Yeah, so at this point Rebecca couldn't
have been living a more normal life for a girl
of her class an era, the couple moved to a
plant after getting married, they moved to a plantation near Cartersville,
and they Rebecca starts putting out babies. She spends the
next years several years caring for her first children and
managing what she described as a considerable number of slaves.
In her book, Crystal Feinster puts the number of enslaved
(32:44):
people they start with at fifty, which shows you how
wealthy the Latimer family was. Yeah, right, Like, if you
got five or six slaves, you're doing vet way better
than most white families. Like fifty as soon as you
get married means that your family is rich. She would
ultimately give birth to five children, a girl and four boys.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
But only one.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Well none of her sons actually lived to adulthood, so yeah,
this doesn't go Childhood is not is not going to
be great for her. It's not great for a lot
of women in this era. But so far, it's nice.
She's having her kids, she's starting her farm. You know.
The Civil War doesn't start brewing until she's like twenty five,
right when she's already a young mother, and one of
(33:25):
her sons has already died of some weird illness as
it is, that's when kind of things get started and
people really start ramping up. Talk about secession. Now, Rebecca
claims that she and her family did not support secession.
As an older woman. Decades later, she would write if
there had been no slaves, there would have been no war,
as a direct counter to the lost cause myth, which
she despised. That's another interesting thing about Rebecca. She hates
(33:48):
the lost cause myth because, among other things, it's like
slavery was not and she's like, no, of course, slavery
was literally why we did it. I was there and
right right lived right Therely.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
She was honest, I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
She would later add to fight for the perpetuation of
domestic slavery was a mistake. The time had come in
the United States to wipe out this evil. The South
had to suffer. And even when our preachers were leading
in prayer for victory during the war, and black robed
mothers and wives were weeping for their dead ones who
perished in the field of battle, I had questions in
my own mind as to what would be the end
of it. And I don't Again, she doesn't condemn slavery
(34:25):
and succession secession while it's happening, but she clearly I think,
and I don't have trouble believing. At the time, she's
not excited about it. She thinks it's going to be
a really bad idea that's going to endanger everything she loves.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
So was she calling slavery evil or the war evil?
Speaker 1 (34:43):
She's calling slavery evil there, But that's again, much later,
she doesn't call it at the time. She just thinks
that is a really bad idea. This is a bad
idea because it's risking her comfort, it's risking everybody's comfort
for the sake of in guaranteeing that you can spread slavery.
And it's it's not weird. We have accounts for a
(35:03):
lot of slave owners and a lot of people related
to slave owners who later fought for the Confederacy who
never thought secession was.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
A good idea.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
A ton of the men who died fighting for the
Confederacy did not support secession until it happened.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
That doesn't reduce anyone's moral culpability. They still chose to
fight for the Confederacy. It's just true that plenty of people,
even who supported the Confederacy were like, I don't know
if we can pull this off. Guys, I don't know
if this is meant work. Yeah, Like I just I
got my worries. So one of the most yeah I
got some issues with this. One of the most disturbing
(35:36):
experiences for her in the lead up to and start
to the war, and this would have been disturbing for
millions of Southerners besides her, was that it began with
a disruption to the source of all of their comfort. Right,
all of the comfort for rich Southerners is provided by
enslaved black people. Gossip spreads rapidly on plantations, and among
other things, you've got poor white workers there too, who
(35:58):
often talk with their enslaves colleagues, and the slaves talk
to themselves about the coming war and what it might
mean to them. Because they're also people, and because gossip
spreads both ways, quite a few white owners and white
overseers overhear slaves talking about the war, and they reported
back to the owners. They talk about it amongst themselves,
and a lot of these enslaved people are talking about like, well, shit,
we might get to be free right now. This panics
(36:21):
a lot of these owners. And you have to understand,
prior to the kind of rays of hostilities, the dominant
belief among women like Rebecca is that they truly loved
the people that they owned and were loved by them.
In turn, Rebecca really did think she treated Mammy, who
is like her nanny who raises her as a second mother,
even though she slaps Mammy at one point, she has
(36:42):
to apologize, but like.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
She doesn't see that.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
The fact that she would even think to do that
shows she not treating this woman really like a mother,
and the fact that her family owned this woman means
that it's not really That kind of relationship does not
occur to Rebecca or rich ladies like her. The wealthy
women of the South are weighted on hand and foot
by an slaved black women who are very often their
primary sources of emotional comfort too. Now, I'm not asking
(37:05):
you to sympathize with these ladies because they're all awful,
but you do need to try to understand what it
would do to a person to go to bed one
night feeling like I'm surrounded by these people who I
consider family, who take care of my every need, and
then you overhear one of them say something and suddenly realize, oh,
these people might not care about me. They might murder
(37:27):
me for a chance to escape to the Union lines.
It completely shatters some people's minds. That switch flipping is
the first panic that runs through the South before any
shots are fired, because people are like, wait a second,
especially after John Brown's raid, Wait a second, they might
not be happy, like right, Obviously, a lot of especially
the owners and the men and whatnot, the overseers, they're
(37:50):
beating these people to keep them in lying they're running
slave patrols. But women like Rebecca, who are mostly interacting
with the women in their house, it's easier to lie
to yourself about that. Showing up at the weddings, you're
calling these people your family, your mam right, And there's
this sudden realization like, oh, these people and I don't
have the same interests, and things might just have gotten
(38:12):
a lot more dangerous for me.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
They don't benefit the same way I do from them
constantly working to the point that they almost die. That's odd. Yeah,
I don't understand.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
It's so crazy.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Rebecca writes about one of these panics. We had a
Methodist campground on our plantation in eighteen sixty. Immense crowds
were in attendance on Sunday exercises, among them the governor
of the state. The crowd was so great that I
could not leave our tent as we were cooking and
feeding people the most of the day. On Sunday night,
while the mourner's bench was crowded and people shouting down
into the auditorium, there were neighbors and friends inside our tent,
(38:43):
armed to the teeth, waiting for midnight to go out
and quietly suppress a rising that had been reported to
them late in the afternoon. The dread of Negro insurrection
and social equality with negroes at the ballot box held
the Southern whites together in war or peace. That rising
was a false alarm, but the terror of these risings
made the sun fathers and husbands desperate as to remedies.
It is the secret of lynching instead of as a
(39:04):
legal remedy. It was born in the blood and bred
in the bone, and a result of domestic slavery in
the Southern States. That's again her making a point about
later that lynching in the post war period comes out
of the same thing that these these slave raids and
slave patrols came out, which is this fear of a
social equality with black people. And she's not going to
(39:26):
accept that later in her life as a lynching advocate.
Only at the end of it will she write that, like, oh,
you know what, lynching is just another example of white
people trying to stop social equality.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
She's not going to see that her whole life. But
it's interesting that she can write it out that clearly
in her autobiography.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Horrific and she's so close to the point, but so
far Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
According to Feinster, this was a near universe kind of
these kind of panics where a New Year's universal experience
in the South. After John Brown's eighteen fifty nine rate
on Harper's Ferry, which acted as a forced reminder that
the people they owned are not, in fact chill with
the status quo from Southern Horrors quote as far away
as Florida, Susan Bradford's side, we feel we can trust
none of the dear black folk. I am afraid to
(40:08):
say a word, for fear it will prove to be
just what should have been left unsaid. In eighteen sixty one,
a widow moaned in a letter to her sister, can
we cope with an enemy abroad and one at home?
Negroes are fully live to the state of things and
are much more sensible than one would suppose. I can
imagine all sorts of noise at night and sometimes think
they are right at my door. I really there's a
degree of satisfaction in that of like this woman finally
(40:32):
being like, oh, I don't even know if I can
ask them if they're thinking about freedom, because then they
might say they are, and I'm scared about what they're
not willing to tell me. Right, there's a little bit
of payback, just and these ladies starting to realize how
wrong they've been about the community they've grown up.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
In, all right, essentially realizing these are human beings who
have the same intellect as everyone else and has probably
already thought of how to escape those this moment and
maybe the vengeance that they deserve.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Possibly, Yeah, you would have had it coming. You know
who else has it coming? The sponsors of this podcast.
Speaker 4 (41:12):
And it's just a dick pill ad mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Let's hope and we're back.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
So.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
Felton does not write about her own fear of a
slave insurrection in her autobiography, but she does discuss a
letter from her mom, who was home alone at the
family plantation one night. This is part of why many
Georgians were leery of war. The men knew that they
were going to have to leave their wives at home
to fight, and the women knew they were going to
be left at home by their husbands, possibly forever. Still,
after the war started, Rebecca and the Felton family were
(41:48):
as patriotic as any Southerners. She diverted production from of
cotton to corn in order to help feed her starving country,
and her husband volunteered as a doctor for injured soldiers.
These people's reservations did nothing to stop them from volunteering
to help the fight for slavery and the fall of
eighteen sixty one, a few months after the Battle of
Fort Sumter, a woman named Betsy Witherspoon, who lived as
(42:08):
the sole white person in the society Hill Plantation, was
murdered by her slaves. This sparked a panic. Feinster quotes
one woman who wrote her mother in law not to
touch the soup their slaves had cooked for them. Her
recipient replied, hitherto, I have never thought of being afraid
of negroes. I had never injured any of them. Why
would they want to hurt me? I feel that all
the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why
(42:29):
should they treat me any better than they have done?
Cousin Betsy?
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Right?
Speaker 2 (42:32):
Why should they you own them?
Speaker 1 (42:34):
Like? Right?
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Right?
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Is this like direct realization of like, oh shit, why
wouldn't they kill me? I'm like, yeah, they got no
reason not to.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
So the war went on still, and you know, as
terrifying as cases like this were, and as much as
this fear of slave uprising and fear of violence is
kind of baked into the Southern psyche after this point,
violence by.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Black people.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
We would say liberatory justified violence, but that's not how
these people think of it. This is going to stay
rooted in their minds long after the war. Right, and
despite that, the vast majority of enslaved people in the
Confederacy either escaped without doing any violence or remained shockingly
loyal to the people who had owned them. Rebecca Felton
herself credited the black enslaved women that she and other
(43:21):
white people owned across the Confederacy for stopping a mass insurrection.
As Feiinster summarizes, Felton specifically argued that the fidelity and
general excellence of colored women scattered all over the Southland
had prevented slaves from turning on their masters. Southerners, she explained,
own their security of Confederate homes to their faithful female slaves.
Now that's her take. Now, this is a phenomenon, a
(43:44):
documented one.
Speaker 4 (43:45):
Right.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Most of the people who were enslaved in the South
don't try to commit like a violent uprising to escape.
If they escape, they just leave. And a large, a
weird number of them like don't leave until it's over right.
They they a weird number of people do kind of
stay with these families and again or run away, but
without doing any kind of violence. And there's a couple
(44:07):
reasons for that, right. One of them is that, as
I said, many of these people are related. They are
often the children and grandchildren of the people who own them. Now,
these family relationships are sometimes hidden from the outside, but
they're often, if not always, widely known to members of
the household. And that makes things fucking complicated, right, even
(44:28):
if they own you, even if it's fucked up and unfair,
if that guy's like your dad or your uncle biologically
and you were raised, or if you're one of these
women that Rebecca like credits with calming you know, everyone
else down from violence. Maybe part of why you're doing
that is you nursed a bunch of these young white
kids when you were when they were babies, and you
just can't square yourself with murdering them because as evil
(44:50):
as these people are, you're not. And you recognize that
this person was a baby that you held at your
breast and you don't want to see them killed. Like
it's hard, it's complicated, Like the relationships that are created
by this abominable system are really complex, and the way
people react as the war pushes more pressure on them
are complex and multifaceted. Right, Yep, The morality of slavery
(45:12):
isn't complicated, but what it does to people's heads is
very complicated.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
For example, as Rebecca Felton almost never reports a bad
memory of her childhood or even young adult life, she
lived a charmed existence and only grew more racist over
the course of her life. But I think you could
argue she was at her least bigoted or least openly
bigoted when she owned people, right, because there's this weird
(45:37):
degree of paternalism where she only kind of expresses positive
opinions of the black people that she owns when she
doesn't own them.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
She's really racist.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
And that's also very interesting, right in terms of her
psychology and what's going on in this lady's head.
Speaker 3 (45:52):
Like mind blowing, because she really dissects these levels of
understanding the enslaved people in such a way that it
kind of feels like she could have been a heroine
in this story.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
But instead it's weird, and there are pieces where I
think she has things very right. For example, she's very
racist and racism is going to be a major motivating
factor in her life, but I actually think the motivation
behind her main racism in life and the motivation for
her activism later is because the Civil War makes her
(46:26):
hate Southern white men. That is a huge part of
all of her belief system and everything that comes afterwards.
What's forming right now is a deep anger in her
at the society she was raised and at the lies
she was raised with, and at the men who told
her it'll be fine if you just let us control
everything and led their society to ruin, and she is
(46:47):
the failure of southern white men is going to be
like the main thing that motivates everything she does as
an adult. And I think that's also very interesting.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Okay, And it feels like like I don't understand because
I should not lead to racism.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yeah, she's I mean, she's racist before, but the motivation
for the racist activism, like the white racist activism, is
motivated by the fact that she thinks that white men
have failed to protect white women, right, So that's where
she becomes pro lynching is because she's like, we white
women need to take a responsibility for our own defense
(47:20):
on ourselves because these white men are fucking useless. That's
a big part of why she believes in the vote
is what white women need the vote in order to
enforce white supremacy because white men are too weak to
do it on their own. That's Rebecca Felton's ideology, and
it's forming right now because when.
Speaker 3 (47:36):
He's saying white men just didn't do it right.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
We didn't do it right. You didn't.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Well, clearly you didn't. We gave you the chance. When
I was a girl, the rule was we give up
our autonomy for permanent safety and comfort, and you guys
threw that away because you wouldn't compromise with the rest
of the union even a little bit about slavery. And
because you wouldn't compromise, not only did we lose slavery,
but we lose lost all of our wealth and comfort
and have to work for a living now. So I
(48:01):
don't trust you anymore. That's her justification later for why
women need the vote.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
Right.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
First of all, white women fucking suck, White men fucking
suck sorr.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (48:10):
First of all, never trust men. Second of all, that
is not what you to do with this girlfriend.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Oh yeah, I mean, I'm not calling it good logic.
Speaker 1 (48:19):
I'm just saying that it is really interesting to me
that I do think the motivation for her, more even
than the racism, is that she's like, well, fucking white
dudes are useless, and that's really really interesting. Is a
justification for lynching.
Speaker 4 (48:33):
Yeah, not a justification for lynching, but like.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
No, but it's weird.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
Her hostilities pointed in the wrong area.
Speaker 4 (48:41):
Yeah, the call is coming from inside the how Yeah,
what are you?
Speaker 1 (48:45):
We're gonna tell this whole story is like how she gets.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
There, right, okay, okay?
Speaker 1 (48:49):
So yeah, you know, after the war, which they lose,
the Felton family has to sell their plantation and things
go very much downhill for them. And more than the recklessness,
she came to blame southern men for what she saw
as the chief evil of slavery missagen nation. Something she recognizes,
I think she sees it at the time and she
speaks out about it after the war, is that you
(49:11):
can't stop white men from raping their slaves and impregnating
many of them, and many do this, in fact, for
the economic benefit as much as anything, because a new
slave is a new slave. Now it's a later scientific.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
We need to take a pause. What the fuck?
Speaker 1 (49:25):
Yeah, she hates the miss the inbreeding. That's a big
part of her Again, it's white men she's pissed at,
but it's not white men who pay the price.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
She kind of like a girl catches her man cheating,
she goes after the woman instead of the man. Right,
this kind of scenario.
Speaker 4 (49:42):
With all the schools she went to, did she never
take basic math because she's like basically going, She's going
one plus one equal seven?
Speaker 1 (49:51):
What are we doing worth noting Other women of her
class and time are able to recognize this and take
the right conclusion. The Grimkey sisters, who are very prominent
abolition activists in the period of time where she's a
young woman grew up on plantations owning people realized it
was evil, left and became activist against it. And part
of one of the reasons they said it was evil
is that all these white men are raping these slaves. Now,
(50:13):
they didn't think miscegenation was evil. They thought it was
evil to rape a white woman or to rape a
black woman, right, and they believed it was rape either way,
and they were And that's part of what the grim
Keys were saying, is that, like, this is wrong. Because
of that, Felton recognizes that it is really fucked up
that these men are doing this, but she does not
think it's fucked up for the same reason she thinks
(50:35):
it's fucked up because race mixing is wrong, right, And
while she does acknowledge that sometimes unfortunate enslaved women are
raped by their brutish masters, she's also vocal in her
belief that a lot of these enslaved women are willing
partners to scandal.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
Right.
Speaker 1 (50:48):
This is easy to ignore if you just skim over
her work. You can miss it and think that, like, oh,
she's saying some pretty good stuff here, but that's not
really what's going on. One of the strangest things about
reading Felton is that the language she uses around slavery,
she calls it a curse or an abomination, sounds appropriate,
and her disgust with Southern men and the Confederacy almost
(51:09):
seem woke. When she's talking about what idiots these white
guys are. She does better than even a lot of
the abolitionists because she knew these fuckers right, She knew
them as men, and she knows how fucking wrong they
were right, And so it is kind of satisfying to
read for that. But the core of it, her real
issue with them is race mixer, and that so you
can never forget that, right, she writes in her philmography.
(51:31):
As a rule, slave owners were careful of the health
of their slaves. The profit in it made them careful.
There were bad masters, many of them, but the increase
of slave property before the Civil War attests to the
good breeding and housing of slaves. The crime that made
slavery a curse lies in the fact that unbridled lust
placed the children of bad white men and slave pins
on auction blocks, and no regard was shown to parentage
or parental responsibility in such matters. Now again, you can
(51:54):
just read that last bit and be like, Yeah, it's
really fucked up to put your own kids in auction blocks.
Speaker 2 (51:59):
I get it.
Speaker 1 (51:59):
She's not saying that's the fucked up thing. She's saying
slavery was great except for this. She's saying, we took
really good care of them, except for the rape. You
can see how good we took a care of them
by how many more of them there were, you know,
over the years.
Speaker 2 (52:12):
But also rape.
Speaker 1 (52:14):
Yeah, yeah, And you can really get a feel for
her beliefs when you understand that while Rebecca thought violent
rape was pretty bad, would upset her far more were
the male slave owners who claimed to have consensual relationships
with black women they owned, because a lot of these
guys will describe, at least in like small gatherings, some
of these women as like their wives. That's the thing
that happens all throughout slavery. There's always white dudes who
(52:35):
will marry quote unquote women that they own. And yeah,
here's here's Rebecca. I remember well a noted home in
middle Georgia where a rich man lived in open alliance
with a colored woman, and where governors and congressmen were
often invited to dine, and where they were glad to
go in his will. There were other men of distinction
in Georgia who also defied the marriage law of the
state by keeping up to two households on the same plantation,
(52:56):
one white and the other colored. And both women were
afraid to make the matter outcry, make the public outcry.
They're in lie the curse of slavery. And I don't
think that's where the.
Speaker 2 (53:05):
Curse of slavery.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
I think actually these are like arguably these cases where
some weird guy decides that, like, this person he owns
is his wife, probably some of the less abusive.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Than some lot of the other relationships.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
But she's like, no, this is the great evil is
because they're breeding and treating each other like equals and
they're not. We wouldn't say, but that's how she sees it, right.
Speaker 3 (53:26):
Except a person is owned and the coersion is the
most likely like they are not more more than consented.
Speaker 2 (53:32):
So okay, anyway, that's part one.
Speaker 3 (53:35):
How you feeling wonderful? Wonderful?
Speaker 2 (53:39):
Excellent?
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Well, you want to plug your pluggables.
Speaker 3 (53:44):
I'm Samantha. You can find me on the podcast stuff
Mom Never Told You with my co host Annie. We
also wrote a book, same titles, Stuff Mom Never Told You.
It's been out for a minute. He's also on like
audiobook so you can listen to us try to read
our books in a weird man yay. Also, I'm on Instagram. Haha.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
Awesome.
Speaker 1 (54:05):
Well, check out that on Instagram and check out the
next episode of this podcast where we'll have Samantha back
in a day or so.
Speaker 2 (54:12):
Good night, Whoo Whoo.
Speaker 4 (54:17):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video
episodes that behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix,
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you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older
(54:38):
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Behind the Bastards News
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