Part One: Rebecca Felton: The First Female Senator (was also a pro-lynching activist)

Rebecca Felton was a major suffragette and the first female senator. She was also, at different points, a slave owner and professional racist who became America's #1 pro-lynching advocate. (2 Part Series) Sources: https://www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Felton.htm https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-nations-first-woman-senator-was-a-virulent-white-supremacist-180981150/ https://archive.is/PpZnj#selection-1919.0-1923.192 https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10695 https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/1898/item/2278 https://www.nhcgov.com/604/Wilmington-Massacre-1898 https://www.neh.gov/article/wilmington-1898-unsupressed-history-massacre https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/when-white-supremacists-overthrew-government/ https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/apr/27 https://evhsonline.org/native-american https://archive.org/details/countrylifeingeo0000felt/page/95/mode/1up?q=slaves+caring+for+a+considerable+number+of+slaves https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674061853?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674061853?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And we have quite a special episode for everybody this week. And to tell that special episode, we have a special guest, the great Samantha McVeigh, host of Stuff Your Mom Never Told You and the podcast and the book Stuff Your Mom Never Told You, I should say. Samantha, welcome to the show, to the show.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 0:28Robert Evans?

  I don't know.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Hey, either way.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  You added a "your" to that.

• 0:31Robert Evans?

  To the.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  You did.

• 0:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I was gonna let it go.

• 0:33Robert Evans?

  Stuff Mom Never Told You, Jesus.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Stuff Mom Never Told You. Close enough.

• 0:37Robert Evans?

  It's, it's early morning for me, you know?

• 0:39Speaker 02

  It's 1:13 PM, friends.

• 0:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, well, I haven't slept in days.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  It's 4 o'clock in my time, so.

• 0:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Speaking of friends, hi, Sam.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:49Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  How is everybody?

• 0:51Robert Evans?

  Well, I'm good, Sam. I wanted to know, do you know anything about the first female senator?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Uh, first, not the, see, now I'm confused because I remember the pantsuit senator, which we do talk about.

• 1:02Robert Evans?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  And I have to go back to my book.

• 1:04Robert Evans?

  This is the technical first female senator, right? This is the lady who was technically the first female senator. She didn't actually do the job of a senator, really, but she was an activist who kind of got it as an award late in life after women got the vote because she was also a major suffragette activist. Her name was Rebecca Felton, and she was technically the first female US senator. Now, that all sounds great, right? That doesn't sound like the subject for a Behind the Bastards episode. Unfortunately, Rebecca wasn't just a suffragette, right? She wasn't just someone who was an activist for that. She was an activist for a lot of things, including lynching.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I was gonna say she was racist, wasn't she?

• 1:45Robert Evans?

  She was super racist. She was grew up on the plantation racist.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Georgia?

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Georgia.

• 1:51Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, this is a Georgia story.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  The actual first senator I was thinking about was a black woman, but maybe I'm wrong.

• 1:58Robert Evans?

  I don't, I don't know the elected first senator off the top of my head right now. I read about her when I was doing the research for this, but I'm, I'm purely focusing on the, the monster who technically claims the term because she fits for our purposes here on Behind the Bastards, right?

• 2:12Speaker 01

  I am so excited to talk about racists. I love talking about racists. This is one of my favorite hobbies. Let's go.

• 2:17Robert Evans?

  All right.

• 2:20Speaker 03

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• 2:25Robert Evans?

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• 3:24Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 3:39Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 3:44Speaker 05

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

• 4:02Speaker 07

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• 4:36Robert Evans?

  So Rebecca Ann Latimer was born on June 10th, 1835, somewhere near Decatur, Georgia. Felton's family was rich. Oh, okay, cool. Well, this is, yeah, this is such a local story.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  I told you.

• 4:48Robert Evans?

  Such a local story.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  This is too close to home.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  This is full on a Samantha McVeigh episode.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  It's literally my home.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Guys, I think the first female senator was Hattie, I forget her last name. She finished her husband's, after he died, she finished her husband's term.

• 5:04Robert Evans?

  Because it was, it was after, after Rebecca, after Rebecca Felton, there was a senator, a woman who actually got to do some of the work, but it was because she'd taken over for her husband. And then the first elected female senator was sometime after that. Felton was the first technical female senator, right? Uh, she's a Decatur girl. Her family is rich as hell, and she was going to be raised and spend all of her early life living on a 725-acre plantation with a big white mansion that is still around to this day. Sam, since you're in Decatur, you could go see the Latimer home.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  I feel like I know this name.

• 5:36Robert Evans?

  Until pretty recently, yeah. This is where she would have been raised. And obviously, a 725-acre plantation, they owned a lot of people, right? The, the Latimer family owned a huge number of enslaved people. It will not surprise you to hear that Rebecca's family had been rich basically as long as there'd been white people on the East Coast of North America. Her ancestors had been early settlers and had fought in the Revolutionary War. So they had been prominent Americans in pre-Revolutionary times, and after the war, they're kind of part of the, the, the first elite class in this new country, right?

• 6:12Robert Evans?

  Now, her family, at the time of her birth, lives in Georgia, but they'd initially lived in the far East Coast. They'd been on the Potomac, right? Like, literally, they'd had a huge estate on the Potomac for like 200 years. And not long before Rebecca was born, when her dad was like seven years old, the family left for Decatur. She would later write of this move, quote, "The family left behind them the splendid brick residence, the capacious barn and outbuildings, all built of brick, perfectly sound and useful at this present time, a home of former wealth and luxury to adventure, life, fortune, and happiness in a sparsely settled country, fully half of which was still inhabited by red Indians." So this is like her dad's generation. This is still what she's being raised to feel about, like, what the family's doing, why we left the Northeast for Georgia, right?

• 6:55Robert Evans?

  Is because there was more adventure there. It was more open, there was more space. It was only inhabited by these natives, right?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, so she was there before the Trail of Tears? Like, she, she helped drive out the Cherokee Nation?

• 7:07Robert Evans?

  The Trail of Tears happens as she's a girl, basically, right? Like, that's an early, early thing she would have been aware of, right, is the Trail of Tears. And in her, in her autobiography, by the way, she writes about it as like a horrifying thing. Like, she, at least as an adult after the war, doesn't see as this is good. But she's also, she's very critical of her family and the South as an adult decades later. So don't take that to mean that as a kid growing up in this rich family that's like colonizing this region, she's not necessarily feeling like it's wrong while she's living it, right? This is something she'll come to recognize later in life. So I don't know why the Latimers left the Potomac for Georgia, other than, you know, what they said, more adventure. I think probably the real reason was that by selling that

• 7:52Robert Evans?

  land in the more crowded East, they were able to afford to buy a much larger plot of land in a place with a better growing climate. Uh, one of my sources for these episodes is the exceedingly good history book, Southern Horrors by Crystal Feimster, and she writes that by the time Rebecca was born, the Latimer family owned not just their vast plantation, but a flour mill, a blacksmith shop, a woodshop, tavern, general store, and post office. They ran Decatur, really.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  So they owned Decatur.

• 8:17Robert Evans?

  They owned Decatur, pretty much. The Latimer family runs Decatur in its early days.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  By the way, our theme is the, come to Decatur where it's greater. So maybe they're the ones that placed that there, and that's why they came.

• 8:29Robert Evans?

  That is more or less why, why she seems to think that they came. Uh, now, the Latimer, the Latimer's East Coast family land had been, was sold to the Potomac Boat Company and made into a park outside of DC that I think still exists today. Uh, so, I don't know, that's cool. Anyway, Rebecca did not write that autobiography that I get some of this info from until she was like in her 80s. And so, again, we shouldn't assume that her thoughts in it always reflect her thoughts at the time. For example, in her autobiography, she writes extensively about the reason her family was able to buy land in Georgia in the first place, which was something called the Yazoo Land Fraud. The New Georgia Encyclopedia describes this as the, quote, "bizarre climax to a decade of frenzied speculation in the state's public lands." See, in the immediate wake of the American Revolution, the state of Georgia, like many

• 9:13Robert Evans?

  states, was broke and running low of young men. It was unable to defend its claims to the Western Yazoo lands, so named after the river. So the legislature solicited pitches from speculators who wanted to create new settlements in the unsettled areas. And this led to a, a series of failed attempts to create communities in the 1780s. But it's really hard to do that out there, right? So after those kind of go bunk, Georgia tries to cede the land to Congress. They're like, we'll make this federal land. I don't want to deal with this shit anymore. And Congress says, wait, why? We don't want to deal with? What are you talking about? And so then in the 1790s, after a bunch of back and forth public pressure, the governor transfers 35 million acres to four companies that had paid a total of about half a million

• 9:55Robert Evans?

  dollars. Now, the only way to actually do this transaction was for the governor to bribe a huge number of people, because most of what they were doing to kind of force this through was technically illegal. His, I think his assumption was just, well, this is such a pain to everybody having this land, that if I have to break the law to get it under someone else's hands, that Georgia doesn't have to deal with it, it'll be worth it for everybody. But then the news finds out. And the news finds out that this guy has basically like bribed away a huge chunk of the collectively owned, like, land of Georgia, as, you know, the white people in Georgia see it. And so there's years and years of lawsuits and countersuits. And the Yazoo fraud kind of dominates Georgia state politics for around 20 years. Now, the Native American tribes in the area also get involved and start in,

• 10:38Robert Evans?

  you know, countersuing and whatnot, because it's their land being sold. And they have some issues with it, right? Some of them are like, we should at least get some money for this, right? So there's a lot of court fights over this. The land eventually gets ceded finally to the federal government in 1802, like Georgia had wanted to do originally. And the federal government pays Georgia $1.25 million to extinguish the remaining claims on the territory. That means they're supposed to pay off, for example, a lot of these tribes who say they have claims to this area. And then, per the New Georgia Encyclopedia, "As cotton culture spread across Georgia, the national government proved unable to extinguish Creek and Cherokee claims to land quickly enough for white Georgians, who were rapidly laying claim to inland up tracks through the land lottery system. Anger over this matter

• 11:22Robert Evans?

  fueled the development of the state's rights philosophy, for which Georgia's leaders became notorious in the 1820s and 1830s, as they continually prodded the United States to complete the process of Indian removal. In a sense, the Yazoo land fraud helped lead to the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838."

• 11:36Speaker 01

  So Rebecca's-

• 11:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the purpose is hard, but like, that's, this is Rebecca's understanding of like, how her family gets to Georgia later, which is she realizes it's because of this fraud that like violently displaced these people. And she has very early memories of the Trail of Tears. It's a thing that like, I think is upsetting to her, even from a young age, before she fully understands it. So I suspect that's kind of why she spends so much time as an adult trying to understand what had caused it. But this is something she writes about a lot. So she knows, "My comfortable family life in Georgia only was possible because these people were robbed and because of this vast fraud. Like, we should never have been there," which is something she's going to like, talk about pretty openly later, but again, isn't really thinking about at the time, right? We shouldn't assume she knew any of this as a little girl.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  You're starting to build her up, like, she's actually like, human and kind. So I'm really interested in where the story goes.

• 12:31Robert Evans?

  The tough thing about Rebecca is she says the right thing like 60% of the time, but if you interrogate it, like, most of the time when she says the right thing, it's for a really bad reason. And we'll get, we'll get to all of that. She does sound weirdly woke at points.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Like, this is like the white women's tears. Those that, that we were like, "Yeah, we definitely need that intersection, because without it, it's very one-sided." So this is where we're at with her, right?

• 12:55Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 12:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So from an early age, Rebecca is aware of how much of her daily comfort and security is provided for by the women in her family. And, and most of her, like, most interesting recollections of her childhood is her talking about how much she admired the older women in her family. These women who like, are in charge of these huge households and plantations and are kind of organizing the affairs of all of these workers and enslaved people. She really admires like, the ladies in her family more than it. Because that, in part because that's who she has direct contact with, but she also sees very accurately that a lot of southern culture is held up by the labor of these women, right? Even though they don't get a lot of credit for it. And one of these women that she, she admires as a girl is Misses Lucy Talbot Swift, who

• 13:38Robert Evans?

  Rebecca described as "the mother of 11 children, all reaching maturity, except two that lived to 11 and 12 years. Her industry, her management, and her executive ability in caring for and carrying on household affairs are still wonderful memories." So this is like, this is who she's raised to idolize. This is the best woman you can be in the South, right? Is this like Lucy Swift. You know, this lady who has 11 kids, nine of them make it to adulthood, and she's really good at managing a household, right? That's a successful woman. That's a powerful woman in the world.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  That's what we call leaning in.

• 14:09Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. And so Rebecca is raised to idolize that kind of woman. All her clothing, all of Rebecca's clothing, every blanket and every pillow she ever used were all handmade and all crafted by her female relatives or by enslaved people. Usually by enslaved people being like, watched over by, by her female relatives, right?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:29Robert Evans?

  One of Rebecca's first specific recollections about her own life is that she was given a pony at a very young age. So this was her pet, which again, shows that she's a very wealthy girl, but it's also a practical tool for the farm. Uh, she writes, quote, "The Negro boys learned to plow with him, and he was the dependence for going on mill with a sack of corn on his back for more than a dozen years." And her family also owns a bunch of racehorses. So all of their, and this is kind of worth noting, all of their wealth and all of their luxury items are alive. This is a wealthy family, but they primarily think of their wealth in terms of like, material goods. They basically have what they make. They don't go out and buy stuff. They don't have a ton of ready cash necessarily, but they own people, which are worth way more than just about any other commodity you can own, and they own horses and livestock, right? That's what

• 15:14Robert Evans?

  makes them rich. That's what makes you rich in this day, right?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:17Robert Evans?

  In the South, is that you have human beings. Um, in the first few dozen pages of her autobiography, she refers to the people her family owned exclusively as nurses, servants, and help. In one passage, describing a great feast held at her plantation, she writes, "White farmers came with their colored men." So it's interesting, she, she seems to be almost hiding, or, or trying to avoid even maybe unconsciously, describing these people as slaves and what her family's doing as slaving for a weirdly long time. Now, that doesn't keep up the whole book. She finally makes a direct and open reference to slavery, the first that I found, on page 53, and it's a lot more common after that. It's just weird how long it takes her to use that word. I thought that was kind of worth noting.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  So she may have subconsciously understood, "Ay, this is kind of bad, because this is a person." Because she refers to them as people.

• 16:07Robert Evans?

  Yes. And she, she also is writing this decades later, after the Civil War, after freedom, in the 20th century, right? The early 20th century is when this book gets written. So some of this is certainly her referring to these people more by the modern terms than by, you know, what she would have called them at the time. Um, her first and direct, open reference to slavery, at least that I found, was, came when discussing a woman she admired, whose husband had passed away early and left her to manage an entire plantation and family. Quote, "There were slaves, but nobody to direct but the anxious woman who had this large family, black and white, to provide for." And you see this a lot in like, southern narratives before the Civil War, where they will both refer to the people they own as family and as, you know, property.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:52Robert Evans?

  And that's also literally true in most of these cases.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:56Robert Evans?

  Most of these enslaved people are related to the people who own them. And, or not most, but a lot of them are. It's very common.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  I mean, that's what companies do today. We're family, right? We do this because we love the job, not because we have to be paid.

• 17:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's a bit, and here it's, we're literally family, because like, I own you and I'm raping you-

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:14Robert Evans?

  -in order to make more people that I own, yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  And then I discard you if you are no longer viewed, which is-

• 17:20Robert Evans?

  Or sell you, yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  -horrifying. Okay.

• 17:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And Rebecca's aware of this.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  It went dark real quick.

• 17:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Rebecca's very aware of that dimension of it, too, as she gets older. Um, now Rebecca is open about the fact that most wealthy southern women were raised to be ornaments in this period of time. They're, they're made for early marriage and child rearing. They're not supposed to make decisions about anything too important. In her book, Kristal Feimster adds, "From a young age, Rebecca was integrated into a hierarchical social order that sanctioned male dominance and discouraged female autonomy. Because southern white women were legally subordinated to and economically dependent on their fathers and husbands, they had little choice but to accept paternalistic domination in exchange for male protection and a measure of discreet power within the household. As an obedient and dutiful daughter, Rebecca could count on her father's care. It was he who came to her rescue when she found a drunken man

• 18:09Robert Evans?

  hanging on their front gate shouting the most awful things. The man served as a reminder of the dangers that lay outside the sheltered security of the plantation and her father's protective and watchful eye. Rebecca and the other young women of her class were always closely guarded and never traveled without male chaperones." She's a hot house lily, right?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  So that she realized she's being owned as well? Like, she is property. She's, she's so close.

• 18:31Robert Evans?

  She comes to understand very quickly that women can't have a, a cap on their ambitions and a cap on what they can do, no matter how smart and capable they are. And she's going to gradually understand that, and this, this understanding starts when she's a girl, which is that like, well, it's a dangerous world out there for me, a girl. I need the protection of a man, my father and then my husband, right? And then if I don't have that, I feel naked and unprotected to the world. That's how she's raised to feel from being a very little girl. And so there's this-

• 19:02Speaker 01

  From other men, by the way. Fear of other men.

• 19:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, from other men. And it's, it's never explicitly stated as such, but there's a social contract, she comes to understand, which is that women in the South do what they're supposed to and make themselves small, and in exchange, they get protection and they don't have to work, right? That's, that's the promise for rich women, right? There's plenty of poor lady, white ladies in the South who have to work very hard, because they don't own any people.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, and technically, the women that she admires work a lot in-

• 19:30Robert Evans?

  They do work a lot.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  -keeping the household.

• 19:32Robert Evans?

  But they're working a lot at managing the work of people they own. That is also a big part of it, right?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:37Robert Evans?

  Um, so there are accounts, though. I mean, and again, that's also not always what happens, because not all of these, especially the higher you get in wealth, these, these white, like, mistresses of the plantation, it's almost, the, the more money you have, the less you're expected to do. And in fact, there are accounts by white women in extremely wealthy plantation households, from like, letters where we, we see them talking about panicking when their husbands and sons are away, and they have to be in charge of the help themselves. "This isn't the overwhelming norm, but it wasn't uncommon." And it gives you an idea of how much agency high-status women in the Old South are expected to see. In "Southern Horrors," Feimster quotes a South Carolina matron named Emily Harrison, who wrote in her diary, "I shall never get used to being left as the head of, of affairs at home. I am constituted so as to crave

• 20:22Robert Evans?

  a guide and protector. I am not an independent woman, nor ever shall be."

• 20:28Robert Evans?

  That's a woman writing. It's like a rich woman, you know?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  That is not what Margaret Mitchell told me about the antebellum self, so I'm really.

• 20:37Robert Evans?

  Turns out some stuff that might have gotten glorified. Just a little bit. Turns out Gone with the Wind wasn't a perfect recollection. Although Rebecca's story is a lot like Scarlett O'Hara's, honestly.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  That's why I connected this.

• 20:50Robert Evans?

  They have a lot of comparisons to make.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  I'm starting to wonder if Margaret Mitchell actually knew her, because she was from Georgia as well, so.

• 20:58Robert Evans?

  I mean, almost, very good chance. Rebecca's very famous after the war, too. Like, knew of her, certainly. I don't know if they were social. Yeah. "As a girl, Rebecca attended multiple slave weddings on the plantation. She was candle holder for, quote, 'one big Negro wedding at her grandmother's house.' Through this reminiscence, rose-colored as it is in her words, we still see glimpses of the brutality of the slave system. This is her talking about like what is a fond memory of her girlhood. The girl was a housemaid, but the groom lived several miles away and came to his wife's home every Saturday to stay until Monday morning daylight. The patrol system was still enforced throughout the South. Colored men going to the wife's house were given a pass, and it was a wise precaution. Slaves were too valuable to allow one of them to be beaten if he did not have a pass."

• 21:41Robert Evans?

  So she's talking about this because of like the fear of slave uprisings. You can't go around, even if you're like heading over to your fiance's place for the night without a pass. And she's like, "It was a good precaution, because otherwise, you know, they're too valuable to just like beat them because they don't have a pass." So that's the only thing she thinks about, like the wisdom of the slave system, is, "Oh, it stops the property from getting damaged."

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Right. Like, "I can't lose this, because it's my money. It's my currency."

• 22:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. It would be really bad if this got hurt. So she describes the courtship process of this enslaved couple in a way that still centers her own experience, which I also find quite telling. Quote, "The colored boy came one night after supper to ask for the girl, and I was present at the asking. I was very fond of the bride-to-be, and I became a close listener. Now, because this young woman was Rebecca's family's property, the man wound up asking Rebecca for permission." And she relates that whole conversation. "Will you treat your wife decent if I allow you to marry her? Will you act the dog and beat my good darkie when you get mad with her? He gladly answered, 'No. Now I expect you to behave yourself if you come here to live. It's my house you will live in with your wife, but you are welcome to if you behave yourself.'" Do you like see? Again, she doesn't see this as like, she sees this as, I think, a fundamentally like natural and

• 22:51Robert Evans?

  good relationship, like she's working out, looking out for this girl because she cares about her. But you also see like that casual use of a slur that she doesn't even, I'm sure would say like, "Oh, that was just what we called them, you know? That wasn't like a term, a hurtful term." And it's like, "Yeah, I mean, it's pretty racist, Rebecca." It's all like, and I'm sure you used worse terms actually in 1850 or whenever the hell this was. But you see this, like, she is really invested in depicting this as like a familial relationship. This is someone I care about, but this woman's not allowed to get married without this random teenage girl saying it's okay. And like her ringing her adult husband, who can't go there without a pass, otherwise he'll get beaten and murdered by random guys on horses. Anyway, the South.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  No, this really is like the way Gone with the Wind wants to tell you that they wanted to be enslaved. They were treated well. They were more confused when freedom happened.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  There's definitely a bunch of articles that compare Scarlett O'Hara, I mean, like Scarlett to Rebecca.

• 23:50Robert Evans?

  Very, very similar person.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, they're like, they're like, yeah, the real Scarlett is Rebecca Felton. There's a bunch of articles like that.

• 23:58Robert Evans?

  Pretty much, definitely. Like, and this is like Scarlett O'Hara, the character probably would have gotten into politics after the war, right?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, she absolutely would. Or at least control her husband.

• 24:07Robert Evans?

  Right, right. "I wouldn't call Rebecca's autobiography good, but it is legitimately fascinating because of the glimpse it gives us of pre-war Southern plantation life. This is not just true of horrible things. And I want to read you one of my favorite paragraphs, just for like color, about daily life back then. This is her talking about when she was a little kid. "In rural schools of my earliest days, nearly all of us wore a cord around our necks with a little wallet of brimstone and esophodia tied on as an itch preventative. And the warts, my, my, how to get rid of the itch and warts on their hands occupied so much of general conversation at recess time. And a surprising part of the whole thing was the apparent indifference to both itch and warts in the rude homes where the majority of the pupils were domiciled." She's a little like, look into, this rich girl is still going to a school that her dad has built in Decatur,

• 24:50Robert Evans?

  so like the poor kids come there too. And all of them are constantly wearing all this stuff on them because they're itchy, they're filled with lice. And like, anyone who's not growing up like Rebecca, rich on a plantation, is just covered in warts all the time. That's just normal life in like the fucking countryside for poor people. Just little bits like that. Like, they don't even notice the itch anymore, because it's just their normal life is being so completely fucking covered in warts. Anyway.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  It's awful.

• 25:15Robert Evans?

  It's good not to live in the past.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  So when we're saying warts, it's obviously not just warts, right? Like, if it's itchy and calluses, maybe, and then disease type of things and.

• 25:25Robert Evans?

  All sorts of shit, I'm sure, going on.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Okay, all right.

• 25:27Robert Evans?

  People's skin was fucked up back then.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  I'm like, what is hap- yeah, well, yeah, it's true.

• 25:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, we'll get back to more of Rebecca's life and more skincare tips from the pre-war South. But first, here's ads.

• 25:44Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 26:32Speaker 05

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• 26:34Speaker 02

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 26:41Speaker 05

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year.

• 27:06Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 27:12Speaker 05

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• 27:22Speaker 07

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• 27:59Speaker 04

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• 28:02Speaker 07

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now.

• 28:12Speaker 03

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• 28:23Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So you can find yourself at times forgetting that Rebecca's book is the account of an unapologetic bigot, because whole pages go by where she just like writes about weird little details of farm life in this period of time that I do find interesting. So when she's an adolescent, her parents buy a separate home in Decatur away from the plantation, so she can attend a fancy private academy. The teacher there was one John S. Wilson, and he hated dancing more than the town from Footloose did. He banned any of his students from dancing, not just at school events, but recreationally, on their own time. You'd like sign a contract that if you're there as a pupil, you will never dance in or out of school, and if you dance, he gets to expel you.

• 29:03Robert Evans?

  And Rebecca writes that at the time, she's like an adolescent, 12 or 13, this terrified her, because "I loved to dance like I loved candy." There's not much else to do for a little girl in the 1850s, and she really wants to dance.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  What's John's problem? What the fuck, bro?

• 29:20Robert Evans?

  Man, it's this weird religious thing. Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  I have to ask, did y'all, is this just a Southern thing, and this is gonna be horrifying, and I'm gonna be like, really embarrassed that I told y'all this? Did y'all have a Civil War ball in your school?

• 29:34Robert Evans?

  Not in, not in Plano, Texas in the 90s.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  You did have it in Texas? Like, Texas doesn't even teach history outside of Texas. I was in the 90s.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Don't even, don't even ask about Los Angeles. You know the answers now.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Well, like, we literally had to dress, find dresses that were antebellum. Mine was bright red, by the way. And then do the dances, the traditional dances, celebrating. So really, was it just me? And imagine being the only person of color, literally. There was two Asian people actually doing this.

• 30:07Robert Evans?

  No, see.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Y'all didn't experience this? Y'all didn't learn the dances?

• 30:11Robert Evans?

  No. I went to a huge school district where like fucking half the kids in my school district were like from Southeast, because there's so much of like Texas instruments and stuff in there. Half of my school was from like Southeast Asia. It would've been really weird to have a soccer, dressed like Confederates. That would not have gone over.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  You think of, okay, so really, like, y'all didn't have any of the re, like, retelling of the war or the battle?

• 30:35Robert Evans?

  We, I definitely got some lost cause narrative in my education, sure, but we never like dressed up like.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  I mean, Texas, I was told by someone who lived in Texas that we didn't study history outside of Texas history. Like, that was our.

• 30:48Robert Evans?

  We have a Texas history class, but we sure had other history. The schools where I went to in North Texas were pretty good. It's just that, you know, you get it filtered a little bit through. No, it was a, it was a public school. I only ever went to public schools. There's just really good public schools in North Texas, because there's a, there's like a lot of businesses and stuff there.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  We only had one school, high school, so you're gonna tell me about.

• 31:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's, I mean, when I grew up in a, in like rural Oklahoma, like my school, there was one school in the entire town, and it was tiny, but North Texas is very densely populated.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  That's fair. That's fair. So, okay, my, it's a single, I got it.

• 31:24Robert Evans?

  She goes to this school and this teacher who doesn't want her dancing and her parents are eventually say like, "Look, this is the right thing for you. We'll, we'll, we'll dance when you graduate," right?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  We'll dance when you graduate.

• 31:32Robert Evans?

  So she's very upset and she, she's particularly upset that she has to stop dancing for a while because there's a big dance coming up in Decatur and she has the hots for the town judge, the honorable Edward Young Hill. Now, she's 12 or 13 at the time.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I was like, "How old is she?"

• 31:47Robert Evans?

  And he's a judge. He's gotta be 30 or something, right?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 31:50Robert Evans?

  Or more. But she describes it as one of the handsomest men she ever knew and I, and notes that at several previous dances, quote, "Several times the judge would ask me to dance with him and he was a splendid dancer." Now, I don't know if this judge was grooming her or if this was really innocent, she's 12 or 13. It's really not weird for girls of her status to get married at like 14 or 15.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, I think that's about right. That's when they get sold off, right?

• 32:15Robert Evans?

  So this isn't super weird. That said, her parents are clearly, they're not as like, if her parents are aware that this judge might be making the moves on her, they don't see him as a good enough match to have it worth her not graduating from this private school. So she's not allowed to go to the dance and she graduates, graduates from school, at which point her parents throw her a dance party to celebrate. Um, she's a rich girl. And she writes lovingly of plantation life, but she also complains about the role of women in southern culture at the time. She noticed early on that many of her teachers and governesses were northern women who had moved to the south for work. Quote, "No southern woman of means ever proposed to work at anything outside of home. Rapid marriage was the goal as early as 14 or 15, and it was seen as a stigma to not

• 32:59Robert Evans?

  have received at least one marriage offer by the time you had advanced into long dresses as a girl." So you don't have to accept your first marriage offer, but you're kinda seen as like fucked up if by the time you're wearing like long dresses, someone's not trying to get with you, right?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 33:14Robert Evans?

  So perhaps the most sympathetic thing about Rebecca is that she clearly just naturally paid attention anytime a woman in her world was allowed to act with the slightest bit of autonomy. You can just kinda catch that from bits like this in her autobiography. She writes about an unforgettable church service where, quote, "I heard a woman pray in meeting for the first time. It came like a clap out of a clear sky. She had been talking to a bench of mourners and broke loose in the fervor of her pleadings. It was the talk of the town for a good while. Some said it would not do at all. Others said she was so good that she must be forgiven, but the majority said she should have kept silent." And this lady is like famous in town because she keeps praying aloud at these big public prayer meetings, but she's the only woman who does it. And it's noted as being really

• 33:56Robert Evans?

  weird. And Rebecca can't not pay attention to this as a little girl because this is like the one woman who's bucking the system even a little bit and showing that like, no, women can do like at least something, like at least pray in public.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  That's props because even the Southern Baptist today wouldn't allow that. So go ahead.

• 34:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's, that's tough in certain denominations to this day. So what we see from Rebecca noticing this stuff is that this is a girl who is smart and who from a young age knows that her society is only going to allow her to marry and produce children. The most autonomy she's ever going to exercise is managing a household. By her own accounts, she doesn't really start to chafe under this load until after the fact, after the Civil War, because the comfort and security and convenience of her privileged life owning slaves protected by her father meant more than any ambition she might have nursed. In other words, once things start to get hard, she realizes how unfair this is, but she doesn't seem to when it's working properly because it's just really nice to have everything taken care of for you.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Very comfortable.

• 34:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  So comfy. This is so nice and cozy.

• 35:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, nice and cozy. When she was halfway between 15 and 16, Rebecca went to college in Madison, Georgia. The location had been picked because it was close enough that she could return home in less than two days if she took ill, which tells you something about the priorities of the time. Now, this is not a college like we have today. The goal was to train upper-class girls to be interesting and useful wives, not to nourish their individual gifts or allow them to pursue dreams. So this isn't a college like we'd call it, right? This is just a college to try to make everyone the same kind of wife, more or less.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  I think that's 30 minutes outside of University of Georgia today.

• 35:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's not bad. I bet they still got this wife school going. So she gets her diploma and being married, uh, in 1852 and a year or so later, right after she turns, uh, 18, right? She marries William Harold Felton, a 30-year-old former doctor who'd quit medicine to become a state legislator and then a preacher. They'd met in an almost ludicrously storybook fashion when she's, she's the valedictorian of her college and he also speaks at her graduation ceremony. And they both kinda wind up speaking about like they're differing their beliefs about what makes a good Christian wife and mother, and they have the same opinion about that. And so they hit it off afterwards and wind up getting engaged and then married. And today, we would say, a 30-year-old doctor

• 36:18Robert Evans?

  hitting on an 18-year-old who just graduated college, it's pretty gross, right?

• 36:23Speaker 01

  I mean...

• 36:24Robert Evans?

  That's not great. That's not ideal.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Leo would be like, "I'm cool with it."

• 36:29Robert Evans?

  Not illegal, but not ideal. Yeah, yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 36:32Robert Evans?

  We'd call this a little odd, but it's not weird for the time, right? 1830 is not like an insane split at the time. And more importantly, they do, they have like a super long and committed partnership. Like it's kinda evil, but they're together and seem to really love each other.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  It's kind of evil is such a fucking crazy caveat.

• 36:51Robert Evans?

  But they seem to be really happy together. So I don't know, like they're, they're some people, being a good partner to someone isn't a moral term. You could be a great husband or wife and shitty. Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Hey, they are together are villains and they're okay with it. Their love is strong through their villainous ways.

• 37:08Robert Evans?

  That's right. They're an evil power couple. Yeah. So at this point, Rebecca couldn't have been living a more normal life for a girl of her class and era. The couple moved to a plantation, after getting married, they moved to a plantation near Cartersville and they, Rebecca starts putting out babies. She spends the next years, several years caring for her first children and managing what she described as a considerable number of slaves. In her book, Crystal Feimster puts the number of enslaved people they start with at 50, which shows you how wealthy the Latimer family was.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:36Robert Evans?

  Right? Like if you got five or six slaves, you're doing way better than most white families. Like 50, as soon as you get married, means that your family is rich. Um, she would ultimately give birth to five children, a girl and four boys, but only one, well, none of her sons actually lived to adulthood. Uh, so yeah, this doesn't go, childhood is not, is not gonna be great for her. It's not great for a lot of women in this era, but so far it's nice. She's, she's having her kids. She's starting her farm, you know? Uh, the Civil War doesn't start brewing until she's like 25, right? When she's already a young mother and one of her sons has already died of some weird illness as it is, that's when kind of things get started and people really start ramping up talk about secession. Now, Rebecca

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  claims that she and her family did not support secession. As an older woman, decades later, she would write, "If there had been no slaves, there would have been no war," as a direct counter to the lost cause myth, which she despised. That's another interesting about, thing about Rebecca. She hates the lost cause myth because among other things, it's like slavery hadn't, was not, and she's like, "No, of course slavery was literally why we did it. I was there."

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Right, right. Don't, you can't...

• 38:44Robert Evans?

  I lived right there.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  At least she was honest, I guess.

• 38:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. She would later add, "To fight for the perpetuation of domestic slavery was a mistake. The time had come in the United States to wipe out this evil. The South had to suffer, and even when our preachers were leading in prayer for victory during the war, and black-robed mothers and wives were weeping for their dead ones who perished in the field of battle, I had questions in my own mind as to what would be the end of it." And I don't, again, she doesn't condemn slavery and succession, secession while it's happening, but she clearly, I think, and I don't have trouble believing at the time, she's not excited about it. She thinks it's gonna be a really bad idea that's going to endanger everything she loves.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  So was she calling slavery evil or the war evil?

• 39:29Robert Evans?

  She's calling slavery evil there.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:33Robert Evans?

  But that's again, much later. She doesn't call, at the time, she just thinks this is a really bad idea. This is a bad idea because it's risking her comfort. It's risking everybody's comfort.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:43Robert Evans?

  For the, the sake of guaranteeing that you can spread slavery. So, and it's, it's not weird. We have accounts from a lot of slave owners and a lot of people related to slave owners who later fought for the Confederacy, who never thought secession was a good idea. A ton of the men who died fighting for the Confederacy did not support secession until it happened, right? That doesn't reduce anyone's moral culpability. They still chose to fight for the Confederacy. It's just true that plenty of people even who supported the Confederacy were like, "I don't know if we can pull this off, guys. I don't know if this is gonna work."

• 40:14Speaker 01

  This might not work.

• 40:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Like I just, I got my worries. Um, so one of the most, yeah, I got some issues with this. One of the most disturbing experiences for her in the lead up to the, and start to the war, uh, and this would have been disturbing for millions of southerners besides her, was that it began with a disruption to the source of all of their comfort, right? All of the comfort for rich southerners is provided by enslaved black people. Gossip spreads rapidly on plantations. And among other things, you've got poor white workers there too, who often talk with their enslaved colleagues and the slaves talk to themselves about the coming war and what it might mean to them because they're also people. And because gossip spreads both ways, quite a few white owners and white overseers overhear slaves talking about the war and they report it back to the owners. They talk about it

• 41:00Robert Evans?

  amongst themselves. And a lot of these enslaved people are talking about like, "Well shit, we might get to be free," right? Now, this panics a lot of these owners and you have to understand, prior to the kind of raise of hostilities, the dominant belief among women like Rebecca is that they truly loved the people that they owned and were loved by them in turn. Rebecca really did think she treated Mammy, who is like her nanny who raises her as a second mother, even though she slaps Mammy at one point. She has to apologize, but like she doesn't see that the fact that she would even think to do that shows she's not treating this woman really like a mother. Um, and the fact that her family owned this woman means that it's not really that kind of relationship, does not occur to Rebecca or rich ladies like her. The wealthy women of the South are waited

• 41:45Robert Evans?

  on hand and foot by enslaved black women who are very often their primary sources of emotional comfort too. Now, I'm not asking you to sympathize with these ladies because they're all awful, but you do need to try to understand what it would do to a person to go to bed one night feeling like, "I'm surrounded by these people who I consider family, who take care of my every need," and then you overhear one of them say something and suddenly realize, "Oh, these people don't, might not care about me. They might murder me for a chance to escape to the Union lines." It completely shatters some people's minds. That switch flipping is the first panic that runs through the South before any shots are fired because people are like, "Wait a second," especially after John Brown's raid, "Wait a second."

• 42:29Robert Evans?

  They might not be happy.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Like, right.

• 42:31Robert Evans?

  Obviously, a lot of, especially the owners and like the men and whatnot, the overseers, they're beating these people to keep them in line. They're running slave patrols. But women like Rebecca, who are mostly interacting with the women in their house, it's easier to lie to yourself about that. You're showing up at the weddings, you're calling these people, your family, your ma'am, right? And there's this sudden realization like, oh, these people and I don't have the same interests and things might just have gotten a lot more dangerous for me. Rebecca writes a lot.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  They don't benefit the same way I do from them constantly working to the point that they almost die. That's odd.

• 43:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  I don't understand.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  It's so crazy.

• 43:09Robert Evans?

  Rebecca writes about one of these panics. "We had a Methodist campground on our plantation in 1860. Immense crowds were in attendance on Sunday exercises, among them, the governor of the state. The crowd was so great that I could not leave our tent while, as we were cooking and feeding people the most of the day. On Sunday night, while the mourner's bench was crowded and people shouting down into the auditorium, there were neighbors and friends inside our tent, armed to the teeth, waiting for midnight to go out and quietly suppress a rising that had been reported to them late in the afternoon. The dread of Negro insurrection and social equality with Negroes at the ballot box held the Southern whites together in war or peace. That rising was a false alarm, but the terror of these risings made the Southern fathers and husbands desperate as to remedies. It is the secret of lynching.

• 43:50Robert Evans?

  Instead of as a legal remedy, it was born in the blood and bred in the bone and a result of domestic slavery in the Southern states." And it's again, her making a point about later that lynching in the post-war period comes out of the same thing that these slave raids and slave patrols came out, which is this fear of a social equality with black people. And she's not going to accept that later in her life as a lynching advocate. Only at the end of it will she write that like, oh, you know what? Lynching is just another example of white people trying to stop social equality. Right? She's not going to see that her whole life, but it's interesting that she can write it out that clearly in her autobiography.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Horrific.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Again, she's so close to the point, but so far.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:34Robert Evans?

  According to Feimster, "This was a near-universe kind, these kind of panics were a new universal experience in the South after John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, which acted as a forced reminder that the people they owned are not in fact chill with the status quo." From Southern Horrors, quote, "As far away as Florida, Susan Bradford sighed, 'We feel we can trust none of the dear black folk. I am afraid to say a word for fear it will prove to be just what should have been left unsaid. In 1861, a widow moaned in a letter to her sister, 'Can we cope with an enemy abroad and one at home? Negroes are fully live to the state of things and are much more sensible than one would suppose. I can imagine all sorts of noise at night and sometimes think they are right at my door.'"

• 45:14Robert Evans?

  I really, there's a degree of satisfaction in that of like, this woman finally being like, oh, I don't even know if I can ask them if they're thinking about freedom because then they might say they are and I'm scared about what they're not willing to tell me.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:26Robert Evans?

  This, this, there's, there's a little bit of payback just in these ladies starting to realize how wrong they've been about the, the community they've grown up in.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Right. Essentially realizing these are human beings who have the same intellect as everyone else and has probably already thought of how to escape those, this moment and maybe the vengeance that they deserve.

• 45:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, possibly. Yeah, you would have had it coming. You know who else has it coming?

• 45:56Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of this podcast.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  And it's just a dick pill ad.

• 46:01Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. Let's, let's hope.

• 46:05Speaker 04

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• 46:35Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her? I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  Stories of survival.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 47:09Speaker 05

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 47:33Speaker 05

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:40Speaker 07

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Here's what you missed.

• 47:45Speaker 07

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  It's raw.

• 48:00Speaker 07

  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 48:10Speaker 07

  I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 48:24Speaker 07

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

• 48:38Speaker 04

  or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 48:45Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So Felton does not write about her own fear of a slave insurrection in her autobiography, but she does discuss a letter from her mom who was home alone at the family plantation one night. "This is part of why many Georgians were leery of war. The men knew that they were going to have to leave their wives at home to fight and the women knew they were going to be left at home by their husbands, possibly forever." Still, after the war started, Rebecca and the Felton family were as patriotic as any Southerners. She diverted production of cotton to corn in order to help feed her starving country and her husband volunteered as a doctor for injured soldiers. These people's reservations did nothing to stop them from volunteering to help the fight for slavery. In the fall of 1861, a few months after the Battle of Fort Sumter, a woman named Betsy

• 49:29Robert Evans?

  Witherspoon, who lived as the sole white person in the Society Hill plantation, was murdered by her slaves. This sparked a panic. Feimster quotes one woman who wrote her mother-in-law, "Not to touch the soup their slaves had cooked for them." Her recipient replied, "Hitherto, I have never thought of being afraid of Negroes. I had never injured any of them. Why would they want to hurt me? I feel that all the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why should they treat me any better than they have done Cousin Betsy?" Right? Why should they? You own them. Like, right?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Bring her around, girl.

• 49:59Robert Evans?

  Is this like direct realization of like, oh shit, why wouldn't they kill me? I'm like, yeah, they've got no reason not to. Yeah. So the war went on still and, you know, as, as terrifying as cases like this were and as much as this fear of slave uprising and fear of violence is kind of baked into the Southern psyche after this point, violence by black people.

• 50:22Robert Evans?

  You know, we would say liberatory justified violence, but that's not how these people think of it. This is going to stay rooted in their minds long after the war. Right? And despite that, the vast majority of enslaved people in the Confederacy either escaped without doing any violence or remained shockingly loyal to the people who had owned them. Rebecca Felton herself credited the black enslaved women that she and other white people owned across the Confederacy for stopping a mass insurrection. As Feimster summarizes, "Felton specifically argued that the fidelity and general excellence of colored women scattered all over the Southland had prevented slaves from turning on their masters. Southerners, she explained, own their security of Confederate homes to their faithful female slaves." Now, that's her take. Now, this is a phenomenon, a documented one, right?

• 51:07Robert Evans?

  Most of the people who were enslaved in the South don't try to commit like a violent uprising to escape. If they escape, they just leave. And a large, a weird number of them like, don't leave until it's over, right? They, a weird number of people do kind of stay with these families. And again, or run away, but without doing any kind of violence. And there's a couple of reasons for that, right? One of them is that, as I said, many of these people are related. They are often the children and grandchildren of the people who own them. Now, these family relationships are sometimes hidden from the outside, but they're often, if not always, widely known to members of the household. And that makes things fucking

• 51:49Robert Evans?

  complicated, right? Even if they own you, even if it's fucked up and unfair, if that guy's like your dad or your uncle biologically, and you like were raised, or if you're one of these like women that Rebecca like credits with calming, you know, everyone else down from violence, maybe a part of why you're doing that is you nursed a bunch of these young white kids when you were, when they were babies. And you just can't square yourself with murdering them. Because as evil as these people are, you're not. And you recognize that this person was a baby that you held at your breast, and you don't want to see them killed. Like, it's hard. It's complicated. Like, the relationships that are created by this abominable system are really complex. And the way people react as the war pushes more pressure on them are complex and multifaceted, right?

• 52:33Robert Evans?

  Yep. The morality of slavery isn't complicated, but what it does to people's heads is very complicated, right? For example, as Rebecca Felton almost never reports a bad memory of her childhood or even a young adult life, she lived a charmed existence and only grew more racist over the course of her life. But I think you could argue she was at her least bigoted, or at least her least openly bigoted, when she owned people, right? Because there's this weird degree of paternalism where she only kind of expresses positive opinions of the black people that she owns. When she doesn't own them, she's really racist. And that's also very interesting, right? In terms of her psychology and what's going on in this lady's head.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  That's like mind blowing, because she really dissects these levels of understanding the enslaved people in such a way that you, she, it kind of feels like she could have been a heroine in this story, but instead she's not.

• 53:29Robert Evans?

  It's weird. And there are pieces where I think she has things very right. For example, she's very racist, and racism is going to be a major motivating factor in her life. But I actually think the motivation behind her, her, her main racism in life, and the motivation for her activism later, is because the Civil War makes her hate Southern white men. That is a huge part of all of her belief system and everything that comes afterwards. What's forming right now is a deep anger in her at the society she was raised in, at the lies she was raised with, and at the men who told her, it'll be fine if you just let us control everything, and led their society to ruin. And she is, the failure of Southern white men is going to be like the main thing that motivates everything

• 54:13Robert Evans?

  she does as an adult. And I think that's also very interesting.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Okay, that feels like, like, I don't understand, because I should not, it can lead to racism. I'm.

• 54:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. She's, I mean, she's racist before, but the motivation for the racist activism, like, her racist activism is motivated by a fact that she thinks that white men have failed to protect white women, right?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Men ruin everything, right?

• 54:36Robert Evans?

  And so that's why she becomes pro lynching, is because she's like, we white women need to take a, like, responsibility for our own defense on ourselves, because these white men are fucking useless. That's a big part of why she believes in the vote, is what white women need the vote in order to enforce white supremacy, because white men are too weak to do it on their own. That's Rebecca Felton's ideology, and it's forming right now. Because when she's a girl.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  She's saying, white men just didn't do it right.

• 55:00Robert Evans?

  We didn't do it right. You didn't, well, clearly you didn't. We gave you the chance. When I was a girl, the rule was, we give up our autonomy for permanent safety and comfort. And you guys threw that away because you wouldn't compromise with the rest of the Union even a little bit about slavery. And because you wouldn't compromise, not only did we lose slavery, but we lose, lost all of our wealth and comfort and have to work for a living now. So I don't trust you anymore. That's her justification later for why women need the vote, right?

• 55:28Speaker 01

  First of all, first of all.

• 55:29Robert Evans?

  White women fucking suck. White men fucking suck. Sorry.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, first of all, never trust men. Second of all, that is nothing to do with this, girlfriend.

• 55:39Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not calling it good logic. I'm just saying that it is really interesting to me, that I do think the motivation for her more even than the racism is that she's like, well, fucking white dudes are useless. Then that's really, really interesting as a justification for lynching.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, not, not, not a justification for lynching, but like.

• 55:59Robert Evans?

  No. But it's weird.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Don't like cut her, her hostility pointed in the wrong area.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, the call is coming from inside the house.

• 56:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We're gonna, this whole story is like how she gets there, right?

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay, okay.

• 56:12Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, you know, after the war, which they lose, the Felton family has to sell their plantation, and things go very much downhill for them. And more than the recklessness, she came to blame Southern men for what she saw as the chief evil of slavery, miscegenation, something she recognizes, and I think she sees it at the time, and she speaks out about it after the war, is that you can't stop white men from raping their slaves and impregnating many of them. And many do this, in fact, for the economic benefit as much as anything, because a new slave is a new slave. Now, as a lady of scientific.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  We need to take a pause. What the fuck?

• 56:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. She hates the miss, the inbreeding. That's a big part of her, again, it's white men she's pissed at, but it's not white men who pay the price.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  She's gonna go up, it's kind of like when a girl catches her man cheating, she goes after the woman instead of the man, this kind of scenario.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  With all the schools she went to, did she never take basic math? Because she's like, basically going.

• 57:10Robert Evans?

  That's not what the folk, I mean.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  She's going one plus one equals seven. What are we doing?

• 57:14Robert Evans?

  And it is worth noting, other women of her class and time are able to recognize this and take the right conclusion. The Grimkey sisters, who are very prominent abolition activists in the period of time where she's a young woman, grew up on plantations owning people, realized it was evil, left and became activists against it. And part of, one of the reasons they said it was evil is that all these white men are raping these slaves. Now, they didn't think miscegenation was evil. They thought it was evil to rape a white woman or to rape a black woman, right? And they believed it was rape either way. And they were, and that's part of what the Grimkeys were saying, is that like, this is wrong because of that. Felton recognizes that it is really fucked up that these men are doing this, but she does not think it's fucked up for the same reason. She thinks it's fucked

• 57:57Robert Evans?

  up because race mixing is wrong, right? And while she does acknowledge that sometimes unfortunate enslaved women are raped by their brutish masters, she's also vocal in her belief that a lot of these enslaved women are willing partners to scandal, right? This is easy to ignore if you just skim over her work, you can miss it and think that like, oh, she's saying some pretty good stuff here. But that's not really what's going on. One of the strangest things about reading Felton is that the language she uses around slavery, she calls it a curse or an abomination, sounds appropriate. And her disgust with Southern men and the Confederacy almost seemed woke. When she's talking about what idiots these white guys are, she does better than even a lot of the abolitionists, because she knew these fuckers, right? She knew them as men, and she knows how fucking wrong they were,

• 58:42Robert Evans?

  right? And so it is kind of satisfying to read for that. But at the core of it, her real issue with them is race mixing. And that's so, you can never forget that, right?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  So close, so far away.

• 58:53Robert Evans?

  As a rule, slave owners were careful of the health of their slaves. The profit in it made them careful. There were bad masters, many of them, but the increase of slave property before the Civil War attests to the good breeding and housing of slaves. The crime that made slavery a curse lies in the fact that unbridled lust placed the children of bad white men in slave pens on auction blocks, and no regard was shown to parentage or parental responsibility in such matters. Now, again, you can just read that last bit and be like, yeah, it's really fucked up to put your own kids in auction blocks. I get it. She's not saying that's the fucked up thing. She's saying slavery was great, except for this. She's saying, we took really good care of them, except for the rape. You can see how good we took a care of them by how many more of them there were, you know, over the years. But also, there was a lot of rape.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 59:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And you can really get a feel for her beliefs when you understand that, while Rebecca thought violent rape was pretty bad, would upset her far more were the male slave owners who claimed to have consensual relationships with black women they owned. Because a lot of these guys will describe, at least in like, small gatherings, some of these women as like their wives. That's the thing that happens all throughout slavery. There's always white dudes who will marry quote unquote, women that they own. And yeah, here's Rebecca. I remember well a noted home in Middle Georgia, where a rich man lived in open alliance with a colored woman, and where governors and congressmen were often invited to dine, and where they were glad to go. In his will, there were other men of distinction in Georgia who also defied the marriage law of the state by keeping up to two households on the same plantation, one white and the other colored. And both women were afraid to make the matter

• 1:00:21Robert Evans?

  outcry, make the public outcry. Therein lie the curse of slavery. And I don't think that's where the curse of slavery lies.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:00:29Robert Evans?

  I think actually, these are like, arguably, these cases where some weird guy decides that like, this person he owns is his wife, probably some of the less abusive than a lot of the other relationships. But she's like, no, this is the great evil, is because they're breeding and treating each other like equals. And they're not, we wouldn't say, but that's how she sees it, right?

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Except a person is owned. And coercion is the most likely, like, they are not more than consent. So, okay.

• 1:00:57Robert Evans?

  Anyway, that's part one. How you feeling?

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Wonderful. Wonderful.

• 1:01:01Robert Evans?

  Excellent. Well, you want to plug your pluggables before we roll out here?

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  I'm Samantha. You can find me on the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You with my co-host, Annie. We also wrote a book, same title, Stuff Mom Never Told You. It's been out for a minute. It's also on like, audiobook, so you can listen to us, try to read our books in a weird manner. Yay. Also, I'm on Instagram.

• 1:01:26Robert Evans?

  Awesome. Well, check out that on Instagram. And check out the next episode of this podcast. We will have Samantha back in a day or so. Good night.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:02:13Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 1:02:28Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:02:34Speaker 05

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• 1:02:55Speaker 07

  Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools.

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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