July 30, 2026 • 42 mins
After the Civil War takes everything from her, Rebecca blames her woes on rich white planters, which weirdly causes her to become a pro-lynching activist.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cools Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you're
currently listening to about our first female senator, technically Rebecca Felton,
who we ended part one just did the whole Scarlett o'
hara thing standing in the ruins of her the home
that she loved. Right. We actually have a little bit
more of the war years to talk about here, but
we'll we'll, we'll, we'll get through all of that. But first,
(00:27):
our guest Samantha McVay. Sam, you want to plug your
pluckles up at the top.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yes, I am the host, one of the hosts of
Stuff Mom Never Told You, also part of the iHeart Network.
We have a book, Stuff I've Never Told You. We
have an account on Instagram and Blue Sky. I believe
he says mom stuff sweet. Unlike what the title says,
we don't talk about moms or mom's stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's good. I just so you know, it's not my
strong suit either. So yeah, let's let's let's get into
the Civil War. Right. Anyway, The War years initially spared
the first Felton plantation, right. It quickly, though, turned out
that the flower of Southern manhood was somewhat less suited
(01:09):
to warfare than they had anticipated, and so in short
order the Feltons were ripping up their fine clothing and
carpets to make uniforms in cold weather gear. Eventually they
fled ahead of the Union army to a shack near Macon.
Re Becca later wrote this of her feelings upon leaving
the home that she had built and buried the first
of her children at When I reached the gate, I
picked up the springs that had been a part of
my dead child's fine baby carriage, also the arm of
(01:31):
a large parlor mahogany chair that had also been burned.
Desolation and destruction everywhere, bitter grinding, poverty, poverty, slaves all
gone money also, we certainly paid the price while we
were in refugee condition. Right, So very soon she loses
almost everything. The slaves aren't actually gone. She leaves behind
like fifteen for them to manage her farm and Decatur.
(01:53):
But they're not going to have like a lot of
people around them past this point for the war years.
They're kind of like actually now living like poor people
right there there there. Their circumstances changed immediately, right, as
did a lot of very wealthy families.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Okay, so this reminds me of the scene with Scarlet
O'Hara going, I'll never go hungry again.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
We haven't had yet that point, but we will, we
will soon. So the fact that they moved to make
and does not protect them. The war brings disease which
hits the Felton family like a machine gun. After the
fall of Atlanta, a measles epidemic ravage is the state,
and it kills her five year old son and six
of the people that she still owned. Not long after
their farm was ransacked by Confederate soldiers fleeing their defeat
(02:38):
at the hands of General Sherman. Rebecca was enraged. She
saw this as evidence of the mass failure of Southern
Manhood warriors, who had been so boastful before now looting
their own people as they fled in despair. And as
this is happening, there's a terrible fear building among elite
white women of rape right at the hands of Union soldiers,
at the fans of Confederate soldiers, and at the hands
(02:59):
of new free or escaped slaves. Right there's a lot
of the and these panic are being stalked by the
Confederate media, who's saying that like, well, if the lines fail,
if the Union gets here, here's what'll happen to all
your women. Right, They are being told that too. This
isn't just something that they're making up now. Late in
the war, Union soldiers occupy and raid Rebecca's making property.
(03:21):
And while the Feltons get by without being subjected to
any physical harm themselves, not all of the people on
the farm are so lucky. If you ask a body
of soldiers to occupy an enemy farm or town or whatever,
some of them are going to rape the civilians there.
No military in history has ever occupied a defeated enemy
and avoided this. In fact, US soldiers on bases in
(03:43):
Japan today commit rape on locals regularly enough that it
is a well known type of news item in Okinawa, right,
this happens like every year up there, sometimes more than
once a year.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
In South Korea too.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
It's yes, South Korea. It's why it's again, be real
careful when you put soldiers places, because this happens. This,
this is just a side effect. Now, this whole of
Southern womanhood recoiled at stories of wealthy plantation ladies being
raped by white or black soldiers, with stories true and
false of the latter spreading particularly rapidly in late eighteen
(04:15):
sixty three as Union soldiers near Cartersville, Confederate propaganda warned
civilians about widespread atrocities, particularly those that would surely be
committed by black soldiers. Rebecca wrote, the conduct of the
enemy has been destitute of that forbearance and magnanimity which
civilization and Christianity have introduced. Clothing of women and infants
is stripped from their persons. Helpless women have been exposed
(04:35):
to the most cruel outrages and to that dishonor, which
is infinitely worse than death. That's how she's referring to rape,
because it's worse than death. It's like worse than murder,
because that's your only valuable asset as a woman.
Speaker 5 (04:45):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Obviously it's okay when it happens to the enslave, but
oh my god, it's not okay women.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is before she'd even had
a lot of real contact with enemy soldiers, certainly before
her bowerm was plundered, So we can see this as
her mostly repeating things other people had told her. And again,
when she's actually captured and actually exposed to the Union army.
She's never harmed herself, but she is forced to stand
by while Union troops rape some of the women that
(05:13):
she had previously owned. They do that, right. Now, here's
a reality we don't talk about at the end of
the Civil War often enough, which is that there were
a ton of rapes by Union soldiers. The reality is
that the vast majority of the women in the Confederacy
who were raped after the war were black. Rich white
women still enjoyed higher status than formerly enslaved black women,
(05:35):
and even General Sherman made occasional efforts to protect specific
Southern ladies he knew and admired. Meanwhile, newly freed black
women rarely enjoyed powerful patrons. However, they did take advantage
of one benefit that was new to them, the right
to press charges against their assailants. Now that doesn't sound
like much to modern ears when we're talking about a
(05:56):
bunch of women who have been raped by soldiers in
a fucking war zone. Necessarily right, Maybe not sound like
much consolation. And we all know how flawed the legal
system is and how particularly bad it isn't gaining justice
today for rape victims. But you have to remember something,
which is that prior to emancipation, there was no law
at all that said these women had a right to
say no. So there is something important in the horror
(06:18):
of all of these postwar rapes, because this cannot have
been the first time many of those women were raped.
Rebecca herself writes about how common it was for white
masters to do that, But it was the first time
any of these women had the ability to report their
rape to someone and actually see the rapist punished. And
as is always the case, we must assume that the majority,
(06:39):
almost surely the vast majority of such rapes went unreported
and thus unpunished. But by this end of the Civil War,
more than four hundred Union soldiers had been court martialed
after committing sexual crimes. Their victims included both white and
black women, and both women and girls, and the youngest
was five. I want to quote now, yeah, I want
to quote now from an article in the Yearsuropean Journal
(07:00):
of American Studies by Susan Barber and Charles Ritter. Procedurally,
Union judge advocates the men who prosecuted cases before the
court's martial were instructed to follow the law in the
state where the crime took place. Since most of the
crimes occurred in Southern territory. This meant that black women
could be prohibited from bringing sexual assault charges against a
white assainblant and barred from testifying against him in court,
since this was the law in all Southern states. However,
(07:23):
US court martial panels never prevented blacks from testifying against
whites or blacks on the basis of race, thus giving
black women for the first time a legal voice with
which to accuse whitemen of sexual violation. This was an
extremely progressive policy to establish, and it was sanctioned at
the highest levels of the United States government. And this
is another really interesting story that we don't tell enough.
(07:44):
In her books Southern Horror, Crystal Finster relates the story
of Lieutenant Andrew Smith of the eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry who
raped a young black girl. General Benjamin Butler, who read
the verdict when he went to court, summarized the case
with an admirable degree of rage. A female Negro child
quits slavery and comes into the protection of the federal government,
and upon first reaching the limits of the federal lines,
(08:05):
receives the brutal treatment from an officer himself, a husband
and a father, a violation of her person. He sentences
Smith to ten years hard labor and said the man
was lucky not to be executed. After Macon was captured,
the war was over for the Feltons, Rebecca declared, I
can run no further. I have nowhere to go. The
people she and her husband owned counted for most of
her property, and without them, she was nearly broke, with
(08:27):
just enough props left in the field to survive the winter.
Southern defeat had been so total, so humbling, that Rebecca
reacted to it in an undeniably appropriate way by blaming
all of the men in her society. And it was
totally her fault. Southern women didn't vote. Like say what
you will about how morally complicit they are. They didn't
have a choice in the secession. Really right, right? She
(08:49):
knew all along, she said, she yeah. And the way
Rebecca saw it, they'd broken the social contract. I want
to quote from a piece in the Smithsonian Magazine by
Lauren Maloney. According to his story in Leanne Whites, Felton
believed upper class women had kept their end of the
antibellum gender bargain by minding their place in society, while
their husbands had broken theirs by refusing to compromise on
slavery and engineering secession. These men had triggered a series
(09:11):
of events that would forever undermine their ability to offer
protection to their dependents, rights whites and gender matters, Civil War, reconstruction,
and the making of the New South. As a result,
elite women were exposed to forces that had long molded
the lives of most Southern women, a change in fortune
Felton was eager to reverse. And yeah, I think that's
a really fascinating way to look at it for her,
(09:32):
like running into some of the right ideas for the
completely wrong reason.
Speaker 5 (09:37):
Right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
In her own book, Feinster points out something I think
is worth adding. Southern men, especially the planter elite, Felton argued,
had put the profit of slavery before the protection of
Southern womanhood, whereas elite white women had held up their
int to the bargain to the point of unsexing themselves.
Southern manhood had failed miserably. White women all over the
South had been left unprotected, and some had even suffered rape.
And when she talks about unsexing themselves once the men
(10:02):
go away, the women running these plantations start carrying guns
and weapons they're not supposed to. They think it's gross
that it's uncomfortable to them. They're unsexing themselves. And we
did it to help the war effort, and you still
couldn't beat the fucking North and you fail. How dare you?
And a bunch of us got raped? Right? That is this,
(10:22):
this rage is going to is going to like directly
fuel a big chunk of the post reconstruction lynching epidemic.
This is where a lot of it starts. And a
lot of these like rich white women and these men
who feel also really angry and furious that themselves for
not having been able to stop any of it, and
not at themselves. They blame a specific group of people.
But a lot of anger is building here and that's
(10:44):
really that's going to get led out very soon. Immediately
after the South lost and the Civil War ended, a
wave of malaria hit Georgia and that it touched the
Felton family particularly hard. It killed the last of her
five born children, leaving her with only a step daughter
and her husband wasty years old. So at age thirty,
she has had five children and they have all died.
She has lost her houses, call her money. Things are
(11:07):
not well.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
She is peoples, okay, Oliver, all right.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah yeah. And her husband, you know, goes back to
work after the war. She has to get a job
after the war, and they slowly struggle to rebuild their lives.
And as she is like working and finding ways to
make money for the first time and try helping to
support her family, she gets angrier and angrier at these
planters who had thrown not just their wealth but their children,
her children away for nothing. Right. They didn't just throw
(11:33):
away the slaves and the money in the houses. They
threw away her kids, as she sees it, right, and
she's not wrong to see it that way. Despite the
dire circumstances, after the war, the Felton slowly but surely
began to thrive in the newly Reunited States. In seventeen
eighty four, William Felton ran for Congress and was elected
as a Democrat. He would be re elected twice. His
constituents were the small farmers he called neighbor and his
(11:55):
campaign manager was Rebecca Felton. Her hatred of southern elitemen
did not into her husband, who had, like her, thought
the war a terrible idea and who generally genuinely respected
her ideas. Right, that's amazing.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
She's like, hey, fuck white man, but not my husband.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Not on my husband.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
It's not all men tofie.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
No, it's not all men. No, because she has a
good relationship with her husband, and I think he respects
her mind, Like he lets her do stuff, so she
keep our opinions. Yeah, he lets her. They become kind
of a power couple after this, right, Rebecca and William
kind of defy the odds and seems to have been
a perfect This might be the most functional relationship we've
ever covered on Behind the bastards.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
They support each other. We love a good supportive couple.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
They really do. Rebecca travels with her husband to DC
and access as secretary. She also writes his speeches for him,
and over time she gets to consult and help draft
actual legislation, so she's actually helping to write laws because
she's her husband's in Congress. She grows more and more
confident over these years, and the idea that women ought
to be able to have a say in the affair
(13:00):
of the nation and her involvement did not go unnoticed.
For the Smithsonian Magazine, After William won his third campaign,
one newspaper announced, Missus Felton and doctor reappointed? Is it
doing that founder of Reddit and Serena Williams thing or whatever?
Oh yeah, here yeah, mister missus Felton and doctor reelected,
(13:22):
Oh I like it. William's opponents attacked his wife's involvement
after she appeared in an eighteen seventy six rally, and
editor dubbed her attendants a disgusting spectacle. Her promotion of
a prison reform bill in eighteen eighty seven caused one
legislator to christen her the political She of Georgia, a
reference to the sorceress queen who dominates men in h
Writer Haggard's eighteen eighty six novel She Musache haunted her
(13:46):
even in death. In his nineteen sixty biography of Felton,
historian John Talmadge described her as a belligerent feminist, though
he admitted he wouldn't dare to write a word about
her if she were still living. You gotta respect that.
You gotta respect that.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
That's iconic.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
I would talk shit if she was still alive.
Speaker 5 (14:04):
Thought belligerate feminist, hot right, you know what, it's not
going to be quite as hot as you're thinking.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Oh yeah, no, no, no, no, she sucks, she sucks.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Parts of it are going to be good parts of it,
but being scary. But yeah, she's undeniably got some mojo.
So the whole time her husband's in Congress, William was
engaging with American politics and culture pretty much the only
way a woman could while still maintaining any degree of agency.
She wrote, if you wanted to influence the culture, that
(14:40):
was your way as a woman in this period of time.
You know, fiction, letters in the magazine, articles, whatnot. She
puts out hundreds and hundreds of letters to the editor
and articles in magazine, and she's she's writing every day
columns on the issues of the day and just sending
them off. And she attracts a fan base and launches
a newspaper with her husband. After loses his fourth re
(15:01):
election campaign, Rebecca joins the Women's Christian Temperance Union and
starts campaigning on her own for prohibition. She'd made the
choice not to become a drinker as a girl, perhaps
spurred on by scary memories of drunken Southern men. She
saw prohibition, like many did, as a way to protect
women and women of all races. Right, Drunkenness is the
enemy of women, because all these men are getting hammered
(15:22):
at bars and they're coming back and they're beating the
shed out of us and doing other terrible things. They're
not able to work, they're not able to take care
of their families. That's the attitude of a lot of
these prohibitionists. And Felton is a prohibitionist because she sees
alcohol as harming women. Right.
Speaker 4 (15:36):
I'm seeing a lot of parallels between this power couple
and like meet bell Ron Ron de Santis and his
wife Kasy because yeah, because like you know, Casey was
such a big part of his campaign and part of
his career and she was like an ex journalist.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
It's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah, yeah, you get these power and this is kind
of going in the reverse direction where once his political
career fades out, Rebecca gets more famous. Actually, right, so
she's you know, getting to be an activist. She likes
her early activism in favor of prohibition. She enjoys organizing people,
she's good at it. So she finds another issue to
(16:16):
fight for and decides she's going to become an activist,
pushing for reform of George's convict leasing system. Now, thankfully
this is not around still, but it existed much longer
than it should have. George's convict leasing system was a
particularly hideous bit of postwar fuckery by rich whites in
order to replace lost slave labor without paying, Georgian's pioneered
(16:36):
using prison labor to recreate the good old days. From
the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Some Georgians saw the prisoners at
the state's penitentiary in Millageville as the solution to their problems,
a workforce that could be formally controlled. Georgia leaders were
also concerned about costs associated with operating a penitentiary as
the prison population increased and included many more African Americans.
In an effort to resolve these issues, officials during reconstruction
(16:58):
eighteen sixty seven to seventies approved the leasing of prisoners
to private citizens. Of course, and so like this is
just slavery with extra steps, right.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Right, the still happening today we do this labor that
comes from prison.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, this was just even more direct where you're just
you're just renting them, like you're just getting handed these
people who have to work for you, and the old
evils reasserted themselves at once. Although it was agreed that
the convicts would be treated humanly, reports to then Governor
Rufus Bullock indicated that least convicts were being overworked, brutally whipped,
and killed. So that's great.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
So I'm assuming this leads to the chain gang type
of narrative this.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yes, chain gangs are a descendant from this. Yes, And
the reason why the convict leasing system comes to an
end and it gets replaced by the chain gang system
has a lot to do with Rebecca Felton. Because this
system is such an abomination, Rebecca was correct to battle
against it. Felton had once considered slavery justified by God,
and she was still a huge racist. So perhaps she
(18:00):
fought so hard against this system not because it was
right to do so, but because she hated the rich
white planters that benefited from it more than anything, even
more than she was racist. I kind of wonder that, like,
is this it was at all the that this is unjusted?
Was it just that like, no, fuck you, guys, but
I lost everything. You don't get to sneak your way
into having it back back.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Dare you start over and do that? Again.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah, how dare you fucking try again after all you
put my family and I through? Absolutely not.
Speaker 5 (18:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I maybe I'm not giving Rebecca enough credit here, but
I have to kind of wonder how much of the
case that was. And you know what else I have
to wonder, Samantha, what whether or not the products and
services at the support this podcast are involved in human trafficking? Robert,
no way to know. And we're back. So Rebecca's becoming
(18:55):
a big activist now. She's trying to get rid of
this convict leasing system. She galvanized the Women's Christian Temperance
Union against this horror, and she whips up support via
petitions and articles. She gets thousands of women engaged involved
in protesting this, and she applies all of her political
connections and plays central role in launching a crusade to
abolish convict leasing. Now, the end doesn't come rapidly, but
(19:17):
as time goes on, a mix of changing economic conditions
and relentless media attention by Rebecca and other activists build
support for legislation that gets that abolishes convict leasing in
nineteen oh eight, and obviously, again, the chain gang system
kind of proceeds from this. You know, and there's an
argument that they really mostly stopped because it wasn't economically
viable anymore. But we'll give Felton like a qualified thumbs
(19:43):
up for that piece of activism. Right, it's still the
right fight.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Yeah, sure, I mean it was helpful, but for why why?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
And it would also prove to be her last entirely
good turn. On August eleventh, eighteen ninety seven, Rebecca gave
a speech in Savannah on the struggles poor white women
faced on farms. These included rape, she insisted, and pointed
out that just last week, three black men had been
lynched after being accused of rape. This had become increasingly
common after the war as a reaction to the freedom
of black men in fears of violation that had rooted
(20:13):
in the South since the war's end. Rebecca traced lynching
back to slavery, and she was right on that, but
she also saw lynching as justified because she viewed blackmail
rapists as a plague. Now eighteen ninety two, journalist Ida B.
Wells Barnett had published an investigation into lynching called Southern
Horrors Lynch Law in all its phases. Wells points out
(20:35):
that less than a third of lynching victims were ever
actually accused of rape. Regardless of what the mob said.
Most lynchings were complete farces of justice, often carried on
with economic motivations. And this is a long quote from
Ida B. Wells, but I think it's really worth reading.
And this is her kind of making the case against
lynching making any sort of sense. On March ninth, eighteen
(20:56):
ninety two, there were lynched in this same city, and
she's talking about Memphis. Three of the best specimens of
young since the War Afro American manhood. They were peaceful,
law abiding citizens and energetic businessmen. They believed the problem
was to be solved by aeschewing politics and putting money
in the purse. They owned a flourishing grocery business in
a thickly populated suburb of Memphis, and a white man
named Barrett had won on the opposite corner after a
(21:17):
personal difficulty, which Barrett sought by going into the people's
grocery drawing out a pistol and was thrashed by Calvin McDowell.
He Barrett threatened to clean them out. These men were
a mile beyond the city limits and police protection. Hearing
that Barrett's crowd was coming back to attack them Saturday night.
They mustered forces and prepared to defend themselves against the attack.
When Barrett came, he led a posse of officers twelve
in number, who afterwards claimed to be hunting a man
(21:38):
from whom they had a warrant that twelve in citizens
clothes should think it was necessary to go into the
night to hunt one man who had never before been
arrested or made any record as a criminal. Has never
been explained. When they entered the back door, the young
men thought the threatened attack was on and fired into them.
Three of the officers were wounded, and when the defending
party found it was of officers of the law upon
which they had fired, they ceased and got away. Thirty
(21:59):
one men were jailed and thrown in jail as conspirators,
although they were all declared more than once that they
did not know any they were firing on officers. Excitement
was at a fever beat until the morning papers two
days later announced that the wounded deputy sheriffs were out
of danger. This hindered, rather than help the plans of
the whites. There was no law on the statute books
which would execute an Afro American for wounding a white man.
But the unwritten law did three of these men, the president,
(22:22):
the manager, and clerk of the grocery, the leaders of
the conspiracy, were secretly taken from jail and lynched in
a shockingly brutal manner. The negroes are getting too independent,
they say, we must teach them a lesson, right, and
that iow wells at pointing out the real motivation for
lynching isn't there's all these crimes that have to be
stopped when are in danger. No, it's some guy wants
(22:43):
something a black man has or a black family has,
and just screaming rape and then murdering them or dragging
them out of a jail and murdering them way easier
than anything else, right, by far, the best move to
go to. You know, That's what this is all about.
Rebecca Felton doesn't agree with that, though she thinks she
knows what better than I to be wells, because Rebecca
(23:04):
is terrified constantly of being assaulted, like many women of
her station, because they've got fucking PTSD, both from being
assaulted and from having to have armed themselves during the war,
and constantly live in fear of being raped or viotilated. Right,
this is part of why rape worked so well as
an excuse for lynch mobs. Confederate propaganda had drilled people's
(23:24):
heads full of stories of free black Union soldiers committing
wanton rape in places like Memphis and Macon. No woman
like Rebecca would doubt a cry of rape aimed at
a free black man, as that Peace in the Smithsonian
explains it. Felton blamed the lynchings on Democratic politicians who
plied black men with liquor at the polls, as well
as on the failure of religion and the courts to
prevent crime and deliver justice. If white men couldn't protect
(23:47):
women's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts, Felton said,
then I say lynch a thousand times a week if necessary.
That is the key Rebecca quote. Yep. Because white men
are not protecting us from being raped, and we're mostly
being raped by white men. We need to have lynch
mobs go out and kill these people. That's that's where
(24:08):
she lines on, and you can see how her previous
life led her here.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Right, So is she assuming like she's just ignoring the
fact that a chunk of the PTSD came from white men. Like,
I know, she's mad at them, so she just lashed down.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Everything can go.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Yeah, so she has to lash out in men, right
and against white men, so might as well.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, do this. She's angry at all of them, but
only one type of man is going to face lethal
consequences for her anger. So it's cool when Rebecca, she's cool. Oh,
she's so cool with it. Now. When Rebecca had railed
against drunkenness and spousal violence and convict leasing and argued
in favor of the vote for women, she had attracted
a following. As a pro lynching advocate, she drew an
(24:52):
even more dedicated following because feeding fear and anger is
one of the fastest ways to get famous, especially if
the fear you stir is against the subject your society
already despises.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
It's just like a pro lynching advocate is such an
insane thing to be.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
That is, Yeah, one lynch forever. That's the Rebecca Felton attitude. Yeah,
so this all comes to a terrible head in eighteen
ninety eight in the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Wilmington
was one of those communities where after the war, black
people had been enormously successful in creating businesses and jobs
(25:30):
for themselves. Right, think about Black Wall Street and somewhere
in Oklahoma. Since Wilmington was mostly black and they could
vote now, they also started getting elected to local government
and came to dominate it, in fact, which enraged some
of the white citizens. So most people in this town
are black. They're starting to organize and they're starting to
(25:51):
win election and take over local government because they make
up the majority of people. Now, they are not hostile
to the white community, and not all of the white
communities hostile to them. In fact, there's a chunk that
they're organizing with because the black community in Wilmington has
no beef with their neighbors. In fact, white and black
working class populists in Wilmington had created a new political
(26:12):
movement that they called Fusion. Right, it's one of those fascinating,
really hopeful stories in the post war period that has
a tragic end. But the Fusion movement in Willington is
a really interesting case. And I want to quote from
an article in Humanities, the magazine for the National Endowment
for the Humanities by Jeanine Lattis in twenty twenty five.
Here's how she explains the Fusion movement. White populists and
(26:33):
black and white Republicans formed joint electoral tickets on shared priorities.
Black men served on the board of aldermen as city treasurer,
city jailer, and city coroner. Ten of Wilmington's twenty six
police were black. So they're not just because most people
in town are black taking up all of the winning
most of the elections. They built an electoral compromise with
(26:55):
poor whites, and they are getting elected based on shared priorities. Right,
It's it's exactly what politics ought to be, you know.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
So did they call it fusion because that's like unchil
like contemporary word to me, that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Yeah, that's the term that a lattice uses for and
that's the only term I've heard used for it, So
I have to assume that you can hear some like
writing about it. I think that's just like, yeah, they didn'
wouldn't have meant it in the nuclear sense, obviously, yeah,
oh yeah. And it's a fucking amazing story, right, but obviously,
because this is a reconstruction era story, we also know
it's going to end badly. And Rebecca's a big part
of why. But the short story is that while things
(27:33):
are going pretty well for most people there, there's a
bunch of rich and formally rich white men who were like,
wait a second, I have to listen to a black man. Now,
we don't have all the power. Let's do a coup
atta right, Let's coo this out. So they start practicing
to form mobs with the goal of forcing black officials
out of office and making anyone with any wealth and
power leave in order to break the black communities back
(27:56):
so that they can rule the ashes. They start doing
this in the summer of eighteen ninety eight. The inciting
incident is a speech that Rebecca Felton gives earlier that year,
in which she attacks white men for failing to stop
quote the Black Beast rapist. She expressly argues that lynching
is necessary to protect white women, and it was up
to those failed white men to found their courage and
(28:17):
do it. If it needs lynching to protect women's possession
from the ravening human beasts, then I say lynch, right,
this is where that comes from. Now her words are reprinted,
as they often were, all over white supremacist newspapers, that
had started popping up in Wilmington. To fight back, Alex Manley,
the editor of the city's most influential black paper, The
Daily Record, published an article and wrote, the black Beast rapist.
(28:39):
You mean all the white people rape and black women basically,
Like That's a big part of his article is that,
like you're talking about like rapists, Like y'all like the
rape is coming from one direction here, right, you're the
real rapist. Right. That's kind of Manly's starting point. But
he also addresses Felton directly. Quote A Felton from Georgia
makes a speech before the Agricultural Society at Tybee, Georgia,
in which the account advocates lynching as an extreme measure.
(29:02):
This woman makes a strong plea for womanhood, and if
the alleged crimes of rape were half so frequent as
has Oftimes reported, her plea would be worthy of consideration.
Missus Felton begins, well, for she admits that education will
better protect the girls on the farm from the assaulter.
This we admit, and it should not be confined to
the white anymore than to the colored girls. The papers
are also filled often with reports of rapes of white
women and subsequent lynchings of the alleged rapists. The editors
(29:25):
pour volumes of aspersions against all Negroes because of the
few who may be guilty. If the papers and speakers
of the other race would condemn the condition of crime
because it is crime, and not try to make it
appear that the Negroes were the only criminals, they would
find their strongest allies in the intelligent Negros themselves, and
together the whites and blacks would root out the evil
of both races. So Manly is saying, hey, instead of
(29:46):
just like blaming us for all of this, we know
you're doing the most of the rape of like your women,
what if we all get together as a community to
stop all of the rapists in our mix, you know,
white and Blackcause rape is just like a problem that
we have as a society and we should deal with
it together.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
He's a very reasonable guy. This Manly, this drives people insane.
Among other things, he's just said that, like, hey, it's
fine if white and black people have sex and it's
not rape. And he's also saying that, like, what if
we work together to fix this problem that is clearly
something we both have, That is all so offensive to
these white supremacists.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Yes, yeah, he already said all the things to work with.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
How dare yeah, how fucking dare you? Yeah? Uh So
this drives people crazy. As Janine Lattis writes, his editorial
was reprinted throughout the South, further enraging the white elite,
with threats against man and threats against Manley's life poured in.
All that summer, Rebecca Felton continued to beat the drum
about the necessity of lynching to protect white women from
black rapists. She gave speech after speech and wrote her
(30:43):
customary blizzard of articles, contributed to an already feverish pace
of white supremacist press on the same subject. So the
business leaders, the white leaders of Wilmington, had their own paper,
News and Observer, which they used to print a bunch
of white supremacists propaganda. They also started buying up and
hoarding a shitloit of guns. They started making calls to
burn barns. They started bringing in racists from surrounding states,
(31:05):
particularly a bunch of racists from South Carolina who called
themselves Red Shirts. These guys would pull black men out
of their homes, torture them, threaten to kill them do
anything they could to stop them from voting, and basically say, hey,
you need to get the fuck out of town if
you want to be safe. On November seventh, at the
county courthouse, Confederate Civil War veteran Alfred Moore Waddell gave
an incendiary speech. Men, the crisis is upon us. You
(31:28):
must do your duty. The city, country, and state shall
be rid of Negro domination once in forever. You are
the sons of noble ancestry. You are Anglo Saxons. Go
to the polls tomorrow, and if you find a Negro
out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if
he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks.
So cool, horrible. Yeah, this is a bad place for
(31:49):
an ad but here it is we and we're back.
So on election day, red shirted mobs roared through the
town of Wilmington, threatening black men and tossing out ballots,
(32:11):
destroying ballot drops. They also burnt down businesses, including Manly's newspaper.
They like, burnt that whole newspaper office down, and they
beat and shot and murdered dozens. After the election went
their way, because no other votes were countered, they issued
a white declaration of independence and announced that they would
never be ruled by black men again. And unfortunately, the
Wilmington Coup has a long standing effect. Before the coup,
(32:35):
Wilmington was fifty six percent black. Today it's something like
fifteen percent black. Newspapers referred to it as a black
uprising or riot until the nineteen fifties, and the death
toll is generally excited between sixty and three hundred. We
will never know for sure, Right, this is a night
the loss of so much wealth and community. It's one
of the things that's still affecting people to this day
(32:57):
is the destruction. And this isn't the only town that
gets to destroyed like this by racists.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
Sixty and three hundred is such a wide range.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Right, Yeah, well they're not keep a note of how
many they're killing, right, that's not their business. Yeah. So
Felton herself celebrated the massacre afterwards, telling a journalist the
slanderer manly should be made to fear a reaper's rope
rather than occupy a place in New York skyscrapers. Basically,
that guy shouldn't gotten away. We should have hung him,
(33:27):
you know, if he ever comes down here again. Make
sure you do that. She kept on advocating for lynching
for years, although in time it became grew obvious that
even her lynching didn't do anything to stop white women
from being raped. She never apologized. She just kept advocating
for the vote for white women. In fact, as the
cause of suffrage grew more popular in the early nineteen hundreds,
(33:48):
she argued that white men should support suffrage so that
white women could use their vote to maintain white power
and supremacy. William died her husband in nineteen oh nine,
but Rebecca kept going. By nineteen twenty two, she was
a very old woman and very widely respected in Georgia politics.
Women had the vote now, and Rebecca started insisting that
the first female elected leaders were inevitable. If not something
(34:10):
she expected to see. Then nineteen twenty two comes along, right,
and this is going to be like this moment of
kismet for Rebecca. The junior senator from Georgia who's going
to be running in that election gets sick and dies
very suddenly, and the governor, Thomas Hardwick has to appoint
a replacement until there can be an election. And since
(34:33):
Hardwick is going to run in that election. He knows
he needs a political advantage, right. He wants number one,
he wants to appoint someone to that job who won't
run for governor against him. And he also wants to
get votes from women who can just now vote, right,
So he's trying to get the female vote. And he
figures that, like, even if I oppose the nineteenth Amendment,
if I appoint this lady Felton to like a kind
(34:56):
of symbolic position, then that that'll burnish my reputation with
the lady voters. If I make her technically a congresswoman
for like a day, then maybe I'll get the ladies vote. Unfortunately,
the Senate wasn't expected to be in session before the
election that would replace the Felton, and she didn't bother
(35:17):
traveling to Washington to take the oath of office. But then, like,
she's not really planning to do anything about this. It
doesn't sound very interesting. But then the President calls for
a special session of Congress to work on a ship's
subsidy bill, and Hardwick loses his election. So first off,
he's not really worried about competing against anyone anymore. And
second there's going to be a session through which Rebecca
(35:37):
might actually get a chance to speak. So she starts
lobbying to everyone who listened to her of like, hey,
if you really want to get the ladies vote, if
you really want to show that you're serious about this,
make me a senator for a day. It'll mean something
to all the women out there who know what's going
to happen eventually, right, And she's very good at this,
she's very good at campaigning. She's very good at like
(35:58):
getting people, you know, to come around to her point
of view on things. There were a lot of objections
at the time, and according to a newspaper coverage, at
the moment like when this is all happening, if a
single senator had objected to her being given that job
for a day, it would have all failed. And a
bunch of people had said like, yeah, i'll I'll vote
against letting a woman be on the Senate floor. But
(36:20):
when it actually happens, none of them do fuck all
to stop anything, like they're not actually it just says
something there too, And she gets inaugurated as a Senate
gallery and there's just tons of women watching there. There's
thunderous applause. I'm gonna quote from Smithsonian Magazine discussing this
moment the next morning. Moments before she stepped down, she
addressed her senate colleagues, thanking them for their chivalric welcome
(36:43):
and telling them that though she was just now a
remnant of the old South, she was the happiest woman
in the United States. As Gidlow explains, after the nineteen
Amendment became law, black women were subjected to humiliating literacy tests,
made to stand in line until poles closed, and even
told that election officials wouldn't register them. The history Attempt
has identified at least one woman in Alabama who is
sexually assaulted for attempting to vote. Black activists like Mary
(37:06):
Church Terrell and Fanny lou Hamer organized to fight voter suppression,
but both loss. Prohibiting voter discrimination on the basis of
race weren't passed until nineteen sixty five. The first black
woman Senator, Carol Moseley Brawn of Illinois, was elected only
in nineteen ninety two. So Felton gets to have her
great moment and be the first female senator and go
down in the history books, but it is a long
(37:27):
time before that kind of even that possibility exists for
a black woman, right, but it does come finally In
ninety two, Felton, after her brief period of time in Congress,
goes back to Georgia and dies of pneumonia ninety four
years old, January twenty fourth, nineteen thirty. Yes, ninety four.
This lady never died the long long life.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
The floor evil fed into her body. Yeah, she ate
the souls of others obviously, Yeah, yeah, kind kind of
maybe liked the lynching. She needed those souls to live.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Oh my god, that's the first female senator. Rebecca felt,
how are you feeling.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
So a wonderful? Like she massacred? She loved a good massacre.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Who she did love a good massacre? Come on, who
doesn't like a good man? I liked as she liked
a bad massacre. I'll say that.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
I'm just saying I feel like it was a bad
day for me to wear my Root for Women's shirt
because I'm not.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Not always, not always, nor should you one hundred percent
of the time trust them in politics. Sometimes they're Rebecca Felton.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
I mean, we have many, many of women that were
like no, no, no, no, no, no no no no.
How does that just baffling? That she ate the soul.
Speaker 4 (38:50):
She gets so many things wrong when foundationally, she had
so many things right.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
That's because she's a very complex.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
She's smart and observant enough that she can't not see
who the real fault lies with. Right she knows it's
the white men, and she never disagrees with that. But
once the white men are gone, she also is going
to look and blame at this group of people, particularly
black men, who are really upsetting the status quo around
her that she values and her own position in it,
(39:21):
you know. And I think kind of that's what's going
on here. And I think also there's just this this
sense of the reason why she's so violently in support
of lynching, as she believes it's someone has to do
something because of how badly the white men failed in
protected these women. Right now, it's my job, I think
is kind of her attitude in general.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
I feel like she's like, I have to punish someone men.
It's definitely men. I know that I can't. I can't
do white men because they're too powerful for me. Like so,
as a person who's observed and knows how to gain power,
which we see in like every type of like superhero movie,
like the evil person has someone underling who kind of
understands this is wrong. But I'd rather be with you
(40:03):
and get some rewards from you than punished with them.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Yep. Yeah, I think you really pretty much perfectly nailed
it there.
Speaker 5 (40:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Yeah, yeah. It's just it's so interesting too, because obviously
the suffragette movement does break down. There is a big
chunk of it that's like I think white women should
be able to vote, and there's a chunk of it
that are like, no, we should, we should all be voting.
And it's interesting that how Felton arrives at supporting the
vote in the first place is just because like, well,
we can't trust these white men anymore, right, right, we
(40:33):
got to take this into our own hands to defend
ourselves and our whiteness.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
A big chunk of the suffragettes, the leaders were cool
with the black men. Even some of the black men.
She's like, you know what, you can be a token.
Definitely no black women though, definitely no black women.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Mm hmm. Well anyway, plug almost to plug.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
Okay, Well, I love yay, Yes, I all want stuff.
Mom never told you. We also talk about some dark
things in history. To be fair, We've had a whole
episode about ice and how awful that is, and it's
ongoing because you know it's awful, So if you want
to listen to stuff like that, we also talk about
historical things that could be a little more fun or
at least uplifting, because we know it's dark and dim
(41:15):
and oh my god.
Speaker 4 (41:15):
Why.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
We also have a book where we talk about a
lot of things about feminism and intersexual feminisms, over feminisms,
over like all of history. So yeah, you can check
that out wherever you find books. All the books indited
bookstores are best.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Though, check that out, and yeah, check out us next
week when we'll be back with someone else bad.
Speaker 4 (41:38):
And a friend of both our pods.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Bridget Todd has a new audiobook coming out Love It
First prompt AI.
Speaker 4 (41:44):
In the Future of Intimacy. It explores AI relationships from
sex and romance to friendship, grief and emotional support, and
what happens when big tech begins to commodify our most
intimate relationships.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
So check it out on our show once a month
talking about this stuff.
Speaker 4 (41:59):
We love her, Love Bridget excellent, excellent, all right, Everybody, Bae.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
Babe.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
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 a Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix,
dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me of Netflix.
You don't miss an episode. For clips in our older
(42:31):
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,
Cools Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that you're
currently listening to about our first female senator, technically Rebecca Felton,
who we ended part one just did the whole Scarlett o'
hara thing standing in the ruins of her the home
that she loved. Right. We actually have a little bit
more of the war years to talk about here, but
we'll we'll, we'll, we'll get through all of that. But first,
(00:27):
our guest Samantha McVay. Sam, you want to plug your
pluckles up at the top.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yes, I am the host, one of the hosts of
Stuff Mom Never Told You, also part of the iHeart Network.
We have a book, Stuff I've Never Told You. We
have an account on Instagram and Blue Sky. I believe
he says mom stuff sweet. Unlike what the title says,
we don't talk about moms or mom's stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's good. I just so you know, it's not my
strong suit either. So yeah, let's let's let's get into
the Civil War. Right. Anyway, The War years initially spared
the first Felton plantation, right. It quickly, though, turned out
that the flower of Southern manhood was somewhat less suited
(01:09):
to warfare than they had anticipated, and so in short
order the Feltons were ripping up their fine clothing and
carpets to make uniforms in cold weather gear. Eventually they
fled ahead of the Union army to a shack near Macon.
Re Becca later wrote this of her feelings upon leaving
the home that she had built and buried the first
of her children at When I reached the gate, I
picked up the springs that had been a part of
my dead child's fine baby carriage, also the arm of
(01:31):
a large parlor mahogany chair that had also been burned.
Desolation and destruction everywhere, bitter grinding, poverty, poverty, slaves all
gone money also, we certainly paid the price while we
were in refugee condition. Right, So very soon she loses
almost everything. The slaves aren't actually gone. She leaves behind
like fifteen for them to manage her farm and Decatur.
(01:53):
But they're not going to have like a lot of
people around them past this point for the war years.
They're kind of like actually now living like poor people
right there there there. Their circumstances changed immediately, right, as
did a lot of very wealthy families.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Okay, so this reminds me of the scene with Scarlet
O'Hara going, I'll never go hungry again.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
We haven't had yet that point, but we will, we
will soon. So the fact that they moved to make
and does not protect them. The war brings disease which
hits the Felton family like a machine gun. After the
fall of Atlanta, a measles epidemic ravage is the state,
and it kills her five year old son and six
of the people that she still owned. Not long after
their farm was ransacked by Confederate soldiers fleeing their defeat
(02:38):
at the hands of General Sherman. Rebecca was enraged. She
saw this as evidence of the mass failure of Southern
Manhood warriors, who had been so boastful before now looting
their own people as they fled in despair. And as
this is happening, there's a terrible fear building among elite
white women of rape right at the hands of Union soldiers,
at the fans of Confederate soldiers, and at the hands
(02:59):
of new free or escaped slaves. Right there's a lot
of the and these panic are being stalked by the
Confederate media, who's saying that like, well, if the lines fail,
if the Union gets here, here's what'll happen to all
your women. Right, They are being told that too. This
isn't just something that they're making up now. Late in
the war, Union soldiers occupy and raid Rebecca's making property.
(03:21):
And while the Feltons get by without being subjected to
any physical harm themselves, not all of the people on
the farm are so lucky. If you ask a body
of soldiers to occupy an enemy farm or town or whatever,
some of them are going to rape the civilians there.
No military in history has ever occupied a defeated enemy
and avoided this. In fact, US soldiers on bases in
(03:43):
Japan today commit rape on locals regularly enough that it
is a well known type of news item in Okinawa, right,
this happens like every year up there, sometimes more than
once a year.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
In South Korea too.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
It's yes, South Korea. It's why it's again, be real
careful when you put soldiers places, because this happens. This,
this is just a side effect. Now, this whole of
Southern womanhood recoiled at stories of wealthy plantation ladies being
raped by white or black soldiers, with stories true and
false of the latter spreading particularly rapidly in late eighteen
(04:15):
sixty three as Union soldiers near Cartersville, Confederate propaganda warned
civilians about widespread atrocities, particularly those that would surely be
committed by black soldiers. Rebecca wrote, the conduct of the
enemy has been destitute of that forbearance and magnanimity which
civilization and Christianity have introduced. Clothing of women and infants
is stripped from their persons. Helpless women have been exposed
(04:35):
to the most cruel outrages and to that dishonor, which
is infinitely worse than death. That's how she's referring to rape,
because it's worse than death. It's like worse than murder,
because that's your only valuable asset as a woman.
Speaker 5 (04:45):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Obviously it's okay when it happens to the enslave, but
oh my god, it's not okay women.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is before she'd even had
a lot of real contact with enemy soldiers, certainly before
her bowerm was plundered, So we can see this as
her mostly repeating things other people had told her. And again,
when she's actually captured and actually exposed to the Union army.
She's never harmed herself, but she is forced to stand
by while Union troops rape some of the women that
(05:13):
she had previously owned. They do that, right. Now, here's
a reality we don't talk about at the end of
the Civil War often enough, which is that there were
a ton of rapes by Union soldiers. The reality is
that the vast majority of the women in the Confederacy
who were raped after the war were black. Rich white
women still enjoyed higher status than formerly enslaved black women,
(05:35):
and even General Sherman made occasional efforts to protect specific
Southern ladies he knew and admired. Meanwhile, newly freed black
women rarely enjoyed powerful patrons. However, they did take advantage
of one benefit that was new to them, the right
to press charges against their assailants. Now that doesn't sound
like much to modern ears when we're talking about a
(05:56):
bunch of women who have been raped by soldiers in
a fucking war zone. Necessarily right, Maybe not sound like
much consolation. And we all know how flawed the legal
system is and how particularly bad it isn't gaining justice
today for rape victims. But you have to remember something,
which is that prior to emancipation, there was no law
at all that said these women had a right to
say no. So there is something important in the horror
(06:18):
of all of these postwar rapes, because this cannot have
been the first time many of those women were raped.
Rebecca herself writes about how common it was for white
masters to do that, But it was the first time
any of these women had the ability to report their
rape to someone and actually see the rapist punished. And
as is always the case, we must assume that the majority,
(06:39):
almost surely the vast majority of such rapes went unreported
and thus unpunished. But by this end of the Civil War,
more than four hundred Union soldiers had been court martialed
after committing sexual crimes. Their victims included both white and
black women, and both women and girls, and the youngest
was five. I want to quote now, yeah, I want
to quote now from an article in the Yearsuropean Journal
(07:00):
of American Studies by Susan Barber and Charles Ritter. Procedurally,
Union judge advocates the men who prosecuted cases before the
court's martial were instructed to follow the law in the
state where the crime took place. Since most of the
crimes occurred in Southern territory. This meant that black women
could be prohibited from bringing sexual assault charges against a
white assainblant and barred from testifying against him in court,
since this was the law in all Southern states. However,
(07:23):
US court martial panels never prevented blacks from testifying against
whites or blacks on the basis of race, thus giving
black women for the first time a legal voice with
which to accuse whitemen of sexual violation. This was an
extremely progressive policy to establish, and it was sanctioned at
the highest levels of the United States government. And this
is another really interesting story that we don't tell enough.
(07:44):
In her books Southern Horror, Crystal Finster relates the story
of Lieutenant Andrew Smith of the eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry who
raped a young black girl. General Benjamin Butler, who read
the verdict when he went to court, summarized the case
with an admirable degree of rage. A female Negro child
quits slavery and comes into the protection of the federal government,
and upon first reaching the limits of the federal lines,
(08:05):
receives the brutal treatment from an officer himself, a husband
and a father, a violation of her person. He sentences
Smith to ten years hard labor and said the man
was lucky not to be executed. After Macon was captured,
the war was over for the Feltons, Rebecca declared, I
can run no further. I have nowhere to go. The
people she and her husband owned counted for most of
her property, and without them, she was nearly broke, with
(08:27):
just enough props left in the field to survive the winter.
Southern defeat had been so total, so humbling, that Rebecca
reacted to it in an undeniably appropriate way by blaming
all of the men in her society. And it was
totally her fault. Southern women didn't vote. Like say what
you will about how morally complicit they are. They didn't
have a choice in the secession. Really right, right? She
(08:49):
knew all along, she said, she yeah. And the way
Rebecca saw it, they'd broken the social contract. I want
to quote from a piece in the Smithsonian Magazine by
Lauren Maloney. According to his story in Leanne Whites, Felton
believed upper class women had kept their end of the
antibellum gender bargain by minding their place in society, while
their husbands had broken theirs by refusing to compromise on
slavery and engineering secession. These men had triggered a series
(09:11):
of events that would forever undermine their ability to offer
protection to their dependents, rights whites and gender matters, Civil War, reconstruction,
and the making of the New South. As a result,
elite women were exposed to forces that had long molded
the lives of most Southern women, a change in fortune
Felton was eager to reverse. And yeah, I think that's
a really fascinating way to look at it for her,
(09:32):
like running into some of the right ideas for the
completely wrong reason.
Speaker 5 (09:37):
Right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
In her own book, Feinster points out something I think
is worth adding. Southern men, especially the planter elite, Felton argued,
had put the profit of slavery before the protection of
Southern womanhood, whereas elite white women had held up their
int to the bargain to the point of unsexing themselves.
Southern manhood had failed miserably. White women all over the
South had been left unprotected, and some had even suffered rape.
And when she talks about unsexing themselves once the men
(10:02):
go away, the women running these plantations start carrying guns
and weapons they're not supposed to. They think it's gross
that it's uncomfortable to them. They're unsexing themselves. And we
did it to help the war effort, and you still
couldn't beat the fucking North and you fail. How dare you?
And a bunch of us got raped? Right? That is this,
(10:22):
this rage is going to is going to like directly
fuel a big chunk of the post reconstruction lynching epidemic.
This is where a lot of it starts. And a
lot of these like rich white women and these men
who feel also really angry and furious that themselves for
not having been able to stop any of it, and
not at themselves. They blame a specific group of people.
But a lot of anger is building here and that's
(10:44):
really that's going to get led out very soon. Immediately
after the South lost and the Civil War ended, a
wave of malaria hit Georgia and that it touched the
Felton family particularly hard. It killed the last of her
five born children, leaving her with only a step daughter
and her husband wasty years old. So at age thirty,
she has had five children and they have all died.
She has lost her houses, call her money. Things are
(11:07):
not well.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
She is peoples, okay, Oliver, all right.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah yeah. And her husband, you know, goes back to
work after the war. She has to get a job
after the war, and they slowly struggle to rebuild their lives.
And as she is like working and finding ways to
make money for the first time and try helping to
support her family, she gets angrier and angrier at these
planters who had thrown not just their wealth but their children,
her children away for nothing. Right. They didn't just throw
(11:33):
away the slaves and the money in the houses. They
threw away her kids, as she sees it, right, and
she's not wrong to see it that way. Despite the
dire circumstances, after the war, the Felton slowly but surely
began to thrive in the newly Reunited States. In seventeen
eighty four, William Felton ran for Congress and was elected
as a Democrat. He would be re elected twice. His
constituents were the small farmers he called neighbor and his
(11:55):
campaign manager was Rebecca Felton. Her hatred of southern elitemen
did not into her husband, who had, like her, thought
the war a terrible idea and who generally genuinely respected
her ideas. Right, that's amazing.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
She's like, hey, fuck white man, but not my husband.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Not on my husband.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
It's not all men tofie.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
No, it's not all men. No, because she has a
good relationship with her husband, and I think he respects
her mind, Like he lets her do stuff, so she
keep our opinions. Yeah, he lets her. They become kind
of a power couple after this, right, Rebecca and William
kind of defy the odds and seems to have been
a perfect This might be the most functional relationship we've
ever covered on Behind the bastards.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
They support each other. We love a good supportive couple.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
They really do. Rebecca travels with her husband to DC
and access as secretary. She also writes his speeches for him,
and over time she gets to consult and help draft
actual legislation, so she's actually helping to write laws because
she's her husband's in Congress. She grows more and more
confident over these years, and the idea that women ought
to be able to have a say in the affair
(13:00):
of the nation and her involvement did not go unnoticed.
For the Smithsonian Magazine, After William won his third campaign,
one newspaper announced, Missus Felton and doctor reappointed? Is it
doing that founder of Reddit and Serena Williams thing or whatever?
Oh yeah, here yeah, mister missus Felton and doctor reelected,
(13:22):
Oh I like it. William's opponents attacked his wife's involvement
after she appeared in an eighteen seventy six rally, and
editor dubbed her attendants a disgusting spectacle. Her promotion of
a prison reform bill in eighteen eighty seven caused one
legislator to christen her the political She of Georgia, a
reference to the sorceress queen who dominates men in h
Writer Haggard's eighteen eighty six novel She Musache haunted her
(13:46):
even in death. In his nineteen sixty biography of Felton,
historian John Talmadge described her as a belligerent feminist, though
he admitted he wouldn't dare to write a word about
her if she were still living. You gotta respect that.
You gotta respect that.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
That's iconic.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
I would talk shit if she was still alive.
Speaker 5 (14:04):
Thought belligerate feminist, hot right, you know what, it's not
going to be quite as hot as you're thinking.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Oh yeah, no, no, no, no, she sucks, she sucks.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Parts of it are going to be good parts of it,
but being scary. But yeah, she's undeniably got some mojo.
So the whole time her husband's in Congress, William was
engaging with American politics and culture pretty much the only
way a woman could while still maintaining any degree of agency.
She wrote, if you wanted to influence the culture, that
(14:40):
was your way as a woman in this period of time.
You know, fiction, letters in the magazine, articles, whatnot. She
puts out hundreds and hundreds of letters to the editor
and articles in magazine, and she's she's writing every day
columns on the issues of the day and just sending
them off. And she attracts a fan base and launches
a newspaper with her husband. After loses his fourth re
(15:01):
election campaign, Rebecca joins the Women's Christian Temperance Union and
starts campaigning on her own for prohibition. She'd made the
choice not to become a drinker as a girl, perhaps
spurred on by scary memories of drunken Southern men. She
saw prohibition, like many did, as a way to protect
women and women of all races. Right, Drunkenness is the
enemy of women, because all these men are getting hammered
(15:22):
at bars and they're coming back and they're beating the
shed out of us and doing other terrible things. They're
not able to work, they're not able to take care
of their families. That's the attitude of a lot of
these prohibitionists. And Felton is a prohibitionist because she sees
alcohol as harming women. Right.
Speaker 4 (15:36):
I'm seeing a lot of parallels between this power couple
and like meet bell Ron Ron de Santis and his
wife Kasy because yeah, because like you know, Casey was
such a big part of his campaign and part of
his career and she was like an ex journalist.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
It's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah, yeah, you get these power and this is kind
of going in the reverse direction where once his political
career fades out, Rebecca gets more famous. Actually, right, so
she's you know, getting to be an activist. She likes
her early activism in favor of prohibition. She enjoys organizing people,
she's good at it. So she finds another issue to
(16:16):
fight for and decides she's going to become an activist,
pushing for reform of George's convict leasing system. Now, thankfully
this is not around still, but it existed much longer
than it should have. George's convict leasing system was a
particularly hideous bit of postwar fuckery by rich whites in
order to replace lost slave labor without paying, Georgian's pioneered
(16:36):
using prison labor to recreate the good old days. From
the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Some Georgians saw the prisoners at
the state's penitentiary in Millageville as the solution to their problems,
a workforce that could be formally controlled. Georgia leaders were
also concerned about costs associated with operating a penitentiary as
the prison population increased and included many more African Americans.
In an effort to resolve these issues, officials during reconstruction
(16:58):
eighteen sixty seven to seventies approved the leasing of prisoners
to private citizens. Of course, and so like this is
just slavery with extra steps, right.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Right, the still happening today we do this labor that
comes from prison.
Speaker 4 (17:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, this was just even more direct where you're just
you're just renting them, like you're just getting handed these
people who have to work for you, and the old
evils reasserted themselves at once. Although it was agreed that
the convicts would be treated humanly, reports to then Governor
Rufus Bullock indicated that least convicts were being overworked, brutally whipped,
and killed. So that's great.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
So I'm assuming this leads to the chain gang type
of narrative this.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Yes, chain gangs are a descendant from this. Yes, And
the reason why the convict leasing system comes to an
end and it gets replaced by the chain gang system
has a lot to do with Rebecca Felton. Because this
system is such an abomination, Rebecca was correct to battle
against it. Felton had once considered slavery justified by God,
and she was still a huge racist. So perhaps she
(18:00):
fought so hard against this system not because it was
right to do so, but because she hated the rich
white planters that benefited from it more than anything, even
more than she was racist. I kind of wonder that, like,
is this it was at all the that this is unjusted?
Was it just that like, no, fuck you, guys, but
I lost everything. You don't get to sneak your way
into having it back back.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Dare you start over and do that? Again.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Yeah, how dare you fucking try again after all you
put my family and I through? Absolutely not.
Speaker 5 (18:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I maybe I'm not giving Rebecca enough credit here, but
I have to kind of wonder how much of the
case that was. And you know what else I have
to wonder, Samantha, what whether or not the products and
services at the support this podcast are involved in human trafficking? Robert,
no way to know. And we're back. So Rebecca's becoming
(18:55):
a big activist now. She's trying to get rid of
this convict leasing system. She galvanized the Women's Christian Temperance
Union against this horror, and she whips up support via
petitions and articles. She gets thousands of women engaged involved
in protesting this, and she applies all of her political
connections and plays central role in launching a crusade to
abolish convict leasing. Now, the end doesn't come rapidly, but
(19:17):
as time goes on, a mix of changing economic conditions
and relentless media attention by Rebecca and other activists build
support for legislation that gets that abolishes convict leasing in
nineteen oh eight, and obviously, again, the chain gang system
kind of proceeds from this. You know, and there's an
argument that they really mostly stopped because it wasn't economically
viable anymore. But we'll give Felton like a qualified thumbs
(19:43):
up for that piece of activism. Right, it's still the
right fight.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Yeah, sure, I mean it was helpful, but for why why?
Speaker 2 (19:51):
And it would also prove to be her last entirely
good turn. On August eleventh, eighteen ninety seven, Rebecca gave
a speech in Savannah on the struggles poor white women
faced on farms. These included rape, she insisted, and pointed
out that just last week, three black men had been
lynched after being accused of rape. This had become increasingly
common after the war as a reaction to the freedom
of black men in fears of violation that had rooted
(20:13):
in the South since the war's end. Rebecca traced lynching
back to slavery, and she was right on that, but
she also saw lynching as justified because she viewed blackmail
rapists as a plague. Now eighteen ninety two, journalist Ida B.
Wells Barnett had published an investigation into lynching called Southern
Horrors Lynch Law in all its phases. Wells points out
(20:35):
that less than a third of lynching victims were ever
actually accused of rape. Regardless of what the mob said.
Most lynchings were complete farces of justice, often carried on
with economic motivations. And this is a long quote from
Ida B. Wells, but I think it's really worth reading.
And this is her kind of making the case against
lynching making any sort of sense. On March ninth, eighteen
(20:56):
ninety two, there were lynched in this same city, and
she's talking about Memphis. Three of the best specimens of
young since the War Afro American manhood. They were peaceful,
law abiding citizens and energetic businessmen. They believed the problem
was to be solved by aeschewing politics and putting money
in the purse. They owned a flourishing grocery business in
a thickly populated suburb of Memphis, and a white man
named Barrett had won on the opposite corner after a
(21:17):
personal difficulty, which Barrett sought by going into the people's
grocery drawing out a pistol and was thrashed by Calvin McDowell.
He Barrett threatened to clean them out. These men were
a mile beyond the city limits and police protection. Hearing
that Barrett's crowd was coming back to attack them Saturday night.
They mustered forces and prepared to defend themselves against the attack.
When Barrett came, he led a posse of officers twelve
in number, who afterwards claimed to be hunting a man
(21:38):
from whom they had a warrant that twelve in citizens
clothes should think it was necessary to go into the
night to hunt one man who had never before been
arrested or made any record as a criminal. Has never
been explained. When they entered the back door, the young
men thought the threatened attack was on and fired into them.
Three of the officers were wounded, and when the defending
party found it was of officers of the law upon
which they had fired, they ceased and got away. Thirty
(21:59):
one men were jailed and thrown in jail as conspirators,
although they were all declared more than once that they
did not know any they were firing on officers. Excitement
was at a fever beat until the morning papers two
days later announced that the wounded deputy sheriffs were out
of danger. This hindered, rather than help the plans of
the whites. There was no law on the statute books
which would execute an Afro American for wounding a white man.
But the unwritten law did three of these men, the president,
(22:22):
the manager, and clerk of the grocery, the leaders of
the conspiracy, were secretly taken from jail and lynched in
a shockingly brutal manner. The negroes are getting too independent,
they say, we must teach them a lesson, right, and
that iow wells at pointing out the real motivation for
lynching isn't there's all these crimes that have to be
stopped when are in danger. No, it's some guy wants
(22:43):
something a black man has or a black family has,
and just screaming rape and then murdering them or dragging
them out of a jail and murdering them way easier
than anything else, right, by far, the best move to
go to. You know, That's what this is all about.
Rebecca Felton doesn't agree with that, though she thinks she
knows what better than I to be wells, because Rebecca
(23:04):
is terrified constantly of being assaulted, like many women of
her station, because they've got fucking PTSD, both from being
assaulted and from having to have armed themselves during the war,
and constantly live in fear of being raped or viotilated. Right,
this is part of why rape worked so well as
an excuse for lynch mobs. Confederate propaganda had drilled people's
(23:24):
heads full of stories of free black Union soldiers committing
wanton rape in places like Memphis and Macon. No woman
like Rebecca would doubt a cry of rape aimed at
a free black man, as that Peace in the Smithsonian
explains it. Felton blamed the lynchings on Democratic politicians who
plied black men with liquor at the polls, as well
as on the failure of religion and the courts to
prevent crime and deliver justice. If white men couldn't protect
(23:47):
women's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts, Felton said,
then I say lynch a thousand times a week if necessary.
That is the key Rebecca quote. Yep. Because white men
are not protecting us from being raped, and we're mostly
being raped by white men. We need to have lynch
mobs go out and kill these people. That's that's where
(24:08):
she lines on, and you can see how her previous
life led her here.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Right, So is she assuming like she's just ignoring the
fact that a chunk of the PTSD came from white men. Like,
I know, she's mad at them, so she just lashed down.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Everything can go.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Yeah, so she has to lash out in men, right
and against white men, so might as well.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, do this. She's angry at all of them, but
only one type of man is going to face lethal
consequences for her anger. So it's cool when Rebecca, she's cool. Oh,
she's so cool with it. Now. When Rebecca had railed
against drunkenness and spousal violence and convict leasing and argued
in favor of the vote for women, she had attracted
a following. As a pro lynching advocate, she drew an
(24:52):
even more dedicated following because feeding fear and anger is
one of the fastest ways to get famous, especially if
the fear you stir is against the subject your society
already despises.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
It's just like a pro lynching advocate is such an
insane thing to be.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
That is, Yeah, one lynch forever. That's the Rebecca Felton attitude. Yeah,
so this all comes to a terrible head in eighteen
ninety eight in the port of Wilmington, North Carolina. Wilmington
was one of those communities where after the war, black
people had been enormously successful in creating businesses and jobs
(25:30):
for themselves. Right, think about Black Wall Street and somewhere
in Oklahoma. Since Wilmington was mostly black and they could
vote now, they also started getting elected to local government
and came to dominate it, in fact, which enraged some
of the white citizens. So most people in this town
are black. They're starting to organize and they're starting to
(25:51):
win election and take over local government because they make
up the majority of people. Now, they are not hostile
to the white community, and not all of the white
communities hostile to them. In fact, there's a chunk that
they're organizing with because the black community in Wilmington has
no beef with their neighbors. In fact, white and black
working class populists in Wilmington had created a new political
(26:12):
movement that they called Fusion. Right, it's one of those fascinating,
really hopeful stories in the post war period that has
a tragic end. But the Fusion movement in Willington is
a really interesting case. And I want to quote from
an article in Humanities, the magazine for the National Endowment
for the Humanities by Jeanine Lattis in twenty twenty five.
Here's how she explains the Fusion movement. White populists and
(26:33):
black and white Republicans formed joint electoral tickets on shared priorities.
Black men served on the board of aldermen as city treasurer,
city jailer, and city coroner. Ten of Wilmington's twenty six
police were black. So they're not just because most people
in town are black taking up all of the winning
most of the elections. They built an electoral compromise with
(26:55):
poor whites, and they are getting elected based on shared priorities. Right,
It's it's exactly what politics ought to be, you know.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
So did they call it fusion because that's like unchil
like contemporary word to me, that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
Yeah, that's the term that a lattice uses for and
that's the only term I've heard used for it, So
I have to assume that you can hear some like
writing about it. I think that's just like, yeah, they didn'
wouldn't have meant it in the nuclear sense, obviously, yeah,
oh yeah. And it's a fucking amazing story, right, but obviously,
because this is a reconstruction era story, we also know
it's going to end badly. And Rebecca's a big part
of why. But the short story is that while things
(27:33):
are going pretty well for most people there, there's a
bunch of rich and formally rich white men who were like,
wait a second, I have to listen to a black man. Now,
we don't have all the power. Let's do a coup
atta right, Let's coo this out. So they start practicing
to form mobs with the goal of forcing black officials
out of office and making anyone with any wealth and
power leave in order to break the black communities back
(27:56):
so that they can rule the ashes. They start doing
this in the summer of eighteen ninety eight. The inciting
incident is a speech that Rebecca Felton gives earlier that year,
in which she attacks white men for failing to stop
quote the Black Beast rapist. She expressly argues that lynching
is necessary to protect white women, and it was up
to those failed white men to found their courage and
(28:17):
do it. If it needs lynching to protect women's possession
from the ravening human beasts, then I say lynch, right,
this is where that comes from. Now her words are reprinted,
as they often were, all over white supremacist newspapers, that
had started popping up in Wilmington. To fight back, Alex Manley,
the editor of the city's most influential black paper, The
Daily Record, published an article and wrote, the black Beast rapist.
(28:39):
You mean all the white people rape and black women basically,
Like That's a big part of his article is that,
like you're talking about like rapists, Like y'all like the
rape is coming from one direction here, right, you're the
real rapist. Right. That's kind of Manly's starting point. But
he also addresses Felton directly. Quote A Felton from Georgia
makes a speech before the Agricultural Society at Tybee, Georgia,
in which the account advocates lynching as an extreme measure.
(29:02):
This woman makes a strong plea for womanhood, and if
the alleged crimes of rape were half so frequent as
has Oftimes reported, her plea would be worthy of consideration.
Missus Felton begins, well, for she admits that education will
better protect the girls on the farm from the assaulter.
This we admit, and it should not be confined to
the white anymore than to the colored girls. The papers
are also filled often with reports of rapes of white
women and subsequent lynchings of the alleged rapists. The editors
(29:25):
pour volumes of aspersions against all Negroes because of the
few who may be guilty. If the papers and speakers
of the other race would condemn the condition of crime
because it is crime, and not try to make it
appear that the Negroes were the only criminals, they would
find their strongest allies in the intelligent Negros themselves, and
together the whites and blacks would root out the evil
of both races. So Manly is saying, hey, instead of
(29:46):
just like blaming us for all of this, we know
you're doing the most of the rape of like your women,
what if we all get together as a community to
stop all of the rapists in our mix, you know,
white and Blackcause rape is just like a problem that
we have as a society and we should deal with
it together.
Speaker 3 (29:59):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
He's a very reasonable guy. This Manly, this drives people insane.
Among other things, he's just said that, like, hey, it's
fine if white and black people have sex and it's
not rape. And he's also saying that, like, what if
we work together to fix this problem that is clearly
something we both have, That is all so offensive to
these white supremacists.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Yes, yeah, he already said all the things to work with.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
How dare yeah, how fucking dare you? Yeah? Uh So
this drives people crazy. As Janine Lattis writes, his editorial
was reprinted throughout the South, further enraging the white elite,
with threats against man and threats against Manley's life poured in.
All that summer, Rebecca Felton continued to beat the drum
about the necessity of lynching to protect white women from
black rapists. She gave speech after speech and wrote her
(30:43):
customary blizzard of articles, contributed to an already feverish pace
of white supremacist press on the same subject. So the
business leaders, the white leaders of Wilmington, had their own paper,
News and Observer, which they used to print a bunch
of white supremacists propaganda. They also started buying up and
hoarding a shitloit of guns. They started making calls to
burn barns. They started bringing in racists from surrounding states,
(31:05):
particularly a bunch of racists from South Carolina who called
themselves Red Shirts. These guys would pull black men out
of their homes, torture them, threaten to kill them do
anything they could to stop them from voting, and basically say, hey,
you need to get the fuck out of town if
you want to be safe. On November seventh, at the
county courthouse, Confederate Civil War veteran Alfred Moore Waddell gave
an incendiary speech. Men, the crisis is upon us. You
(31:28):
must do your duty. The city, country, and state shall
be rid of Negro domination once in forever. You are
the sons of noble ancestry. You are Anglo Saxons. Go
to the polls tomorrow, and if you find a Negro
out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if
he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks.
So cool, horrible. Yeah, this is a bad place for
(31:49):
an ad but here it is we and we're back.
So on election day, red shirted mobs roared through the
town of Wilmington, threatening black men and tossing out ballots,
(32:11):
destroying ballot drops. They also burnt down businesses, including Manly's newspaper.
They like, burnt that whole newspaper office down, and they
beat and shot and murdered dozens. After the election went
their way, because no other votes were countered, they issued
a white declaration of independence and announced that they would
never be ruled by black men again. And unfortunately, the
Wilmington Coup has a long standing effect. Before the coup,
(32:35):
Wilmington was fifty six percent black. Today it's something like
fifteen percent black. Newspapers referred to it as a black
uprising or riot until the nineteen fifties, and the death
toll is generally excited between sixty and three hundred. We
will never know for sure, Right, this is a night
the loss of so much wealth and community. It's one
of the things that's still affecting people to this day
(32:57):
is the destruction. And this isn't the only town that
gets to destroyed like this by racists.
Speaker 4 (33:02):
Sixty and three hundred is such a wide range.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Right, Yeah, well they're not keep a note of how
many they're killing, right, that's not their business. Yeah. So
Felton herself celebrated the massacre afterwards, telling a journalist the
slanderer manly should be made to fear a reaper's rope
rather than occupy a place in New York skyscrapers. Basically,
that guy shouldn't gotten away. We should have hung him,
(33:27):
you know, if he ever comes down here again. Make
sure you do that. She kept on advocating for lynching
for years, although in time it became grew obvious that
even her lynching didn't do anything to stop white women
from being raped. She never apologized. She just kept advocating
for the vote for white women. In fact, as the
cause of suffrage grew more popular in the early nineteen hundreds,
(33:48):
she argued that white men should support suffrage so that
white women could use their vote to maintain white power
and supremacy. William died her husband in nineteen oh nine,
but Rebecca kept going. By nineteen twenty two, she was
a very old woman and very widely respected in Georgia politics.
Women had the vote now, and Rebecca started insisting that
the first female elected leaders were inevitable. If not something
(34:10):
she expected to see. Then nineteen twenty two comes along, right,
and this is going to be like this moment of
kismet for Rebecca. The junior senator from Georgia who's going
to be running in that election gets sick and dies
very suddenly, and the governor, Thomas Hardwick has to appoint
a replacement until there can be an election. And since
(34:33):
Hardwick is going to run in that election. He knows
he needs a political advantage, right. He wants number one,
he wants to appoint someone to that job who won't
run for governor against him. And he also wants to
get votes from women who can just now vote, right,
So he's trying to get the female vote. And he
figures that, like, even if I oppose the nineteenth Amendment,
if I appoint this lady Felton to like a kind
(34:56):
of symbolic position, then that that'll burnish my reputation with
the lady voters. If I make her technically a congresswoman
for like a day, then maybe I'll get the ladies vote. Unfortunately,
the Senate wasn't expected to be in session before the
election that would replace the Felton, and she didn't bother
(35:17):
traveling to Washington to take the oath of office. But then, like,
she's not really planning to do anything about this. It
doesn't sound very interesting. But then the President calls for
a special session of Congress to work on a ship's
subsidy bill, and Hardwick loses his election. So first off,
he's not really worried about competing against anyone anymore. And
second there's going to be a session through which Rebecca
(35:37):
might actually get a chance to speak. So she starts
lobbying to everyone who listened to her of like, hey,
if you really want to get the ladies vote, if
you really want to show that you're serious about this,
make me a senator for a day. It'll mean something
to all the women out there who know what's going
to happen eventually, right, And she's very good at this,
she's very good at campaigning. She's very good at like
(35:58):
getting people, you know, to come around to her point
of view on things. There were a lot of objections
at the time, and according to a newspaper coverage, at
the moment like when this is all happening, if a
single senator had objected to her being given that job
for a day, it would have all failed. And a
bunch of people had said like, yeah, i'll I'll vote
against letting a woman be on the Senate floor. But
(36:20):
when it actually happens, none of them do fuck all
to stop anything, like they're not actually it just says
something there too, And she gets inaugurated as a Senate
gallery and there's just tons of women watching there. There's
thunderous applause. I'm gonna quote from Smithsonian Magazine discussing this
moment the next morning. Moments before she stepped down, she
addressed her senate colleagues, thanking them for their chivalric welcome
(36:43):
and telling them that though she was just now a
remnant of the old South, she was the happiest woman
in the United States. As Gidlow explains, after the nineteen
Amendment became law, black women were subjected to humiliating literacy tests,
made to stand in line until poles closed, and even
told that election officials wouldn't register them. The history Attempt
has identified at least one woman in Alabama who is
sexually assaulted for attempting to vote. Black activists like Mary
(37:06):
Church Terrell and Fanny lou Hamer organized to fight voter suppression,
but both loss. Prohibiting voter discrimination on the basis of
race weren't passed until nineteen sixty five. The first black
woman Senator, Carol Moseley Brawn of Illinois, was elected only
in nineteen ninety two. So Felton gets to have her
great moment and be the first female senator and go
down in the history books, but it is a long
(37:27):
time before that kind of even that possibility exists for
a black woman, right, but it does come finally In
ninety two, Felton, after her brief period of time in Congress,
goes back to Georgia and dies of pneumonia ninety four
years old, January twenty fourth, nineteen thirty. Yes, ninety four.
This lady never died the long long life.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
The floor evil fed into her body. Yeah, she ate
the souls of others obviously, Yeah, yeah, kind kind of
maybe liked the lynching. She needed those souls to live.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
Oh my god, that's the first female senator. Rebecca felt,
how are you feeling.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
So a wonderful? Like she massacred? She loved a good massacre.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Who she did love a good massacre? Come on, who
doesn't like a good man? I liked as she liked
a bad massacre. I'll say that.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
I'm just saying I feel like it was a bad
day for me to wear my Root for Women's shirt
because I'm not.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Not always, not always, nor should you one hundred percent
of the time trust them in politics. Sometimes they're Rebecca Felton.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
I mean, we have many, many of women that were
like no, no, no, no, no, no no no no.
How does that just baffling? That she ate the soul.
Speaker 4 (38:50):
She gets so many things wrong when foundationally, she had
so many things right.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
That's because she's a very complex.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
She's smart and observant enough that she can't not see
who the real fault lies with. Right she knows it's
the white men, and she never disagrees with that. But
once the white men are gone, she also is going
to look and blame at this group of people, particularly
black men, who are really upsetting the status quo around
her that she values and her own position in it,
(39:21):
you know. And I think kind of that's what's going
on here. And I think also there's just this this
sense of the reason why she's so violently in support
of lynching, as she believes it's someone has to do
something because of how badly the white men failed in
protected these women. Right now, it's my job, I think
is kind of her attitude in general.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
I feel like she's like, I have to punish someone men.
It's definitely men. I know that I can't. I can't
do white men because they're too powerful for me. Like so,
as a person who's observed and knows how to gain power,
which we see in like every type of like superhero movie,
like the evil person has someone underling who kind of
understands this is wrong. But I'd rather be with you
(40:03):
and get some rewards from you than punished with them.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Yep. Yeah, I think you really pretty much perfectly nailed
it there.
Speaker 5 (40:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
Yeah, yeah. It's just it's so interesting too, because obviously
the suffragette movement does break down. There is a big
chunk of it that's like I think white women should
be able to vote, and there's a chunk of it
that are like, no, we should, we should all be voting.
And it's interesting that how Felton arrives at supporting the
vote in the first place is just because like, well,
we can't trust these white men anymore, right, right, we
(40:33):
got to take this into our own hands to defend
ourselves and our whiteness.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
A big chunk of the suffragettes, the leaders were cool
with the black men. Even some of the black men.
She's like, you know what, you can be a token.
Definitely no black women though, definitely no black women.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Mm hmm. Well anyway, plug almost to plug.
Speaker 3 (40:54):
Okay, Well, I love yay, Yes, I all want stuff.
Mom never told you. We also talk about some dark
things in history. To be fair, We've had a whole
episode about ice and how awful that is, and it's
ongoing because you know it's awful, So if you want
to listen to stuff like that, we also talk about
historical things that could be a little more fun or
at least uplifting, because we know it's dark and dim
(41:15):
and oh my god.
Speaker 4 (41:15):
Why.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
We also have a book where we talk about a
lot of things about feminism and intersexual feminisms, over feminisms,
over like all of history. So yeah, you can check
that out wherever you find books. All the books indited
bookstores are best.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Though, check that out, and yeah, check out us next
week when we'll be back with someone else bad.
Speaker 4 (41:38):
And a friend of both our pods.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Bridget Todd has a new audiobook coming out Love It
First prompt AI.
Speaker 4 (41:44):
In the Future of Intimacy. It explores AI relationships from
sex and romance to friendship, grief and emotional support, and
what happens when big tech begins to commodify our most
intimate relationships.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
So check it out on our show once a month
talking about this stuff.
Speaker 4 (41:59):
We love her, Love Bridget excellent, excellent, all right, Everybody, Bae.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
Babe.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
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 a Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix,
dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me of Netflix.
You don't miss an episode. For clips in our older
(42:31):
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,
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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