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