Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,872

This is the grave of Rebecca Latimer Felton and William Felton.

Born in Decatur, Georgia in 1835, Rebecca Latimer grew up in the slaver class, something she always loved and always wished had never gone away. She was sent to college, which wasn’t super common among even wealthier southern white women of the era, attending Madison Female College. I think this was a combination of liberal arts education and finishing school on how to be an elite southern woman. She graduated in 1852 and married a doctor named William Felton the next year.

William Felton is least interesting of these two, but let’s give him a moment here too. He was born in Lexington, Georgia in 1823. Rebecca was his second wife, the first having died in 1851. By that time, he was in the Georgia legislature. Rebecca and he would have five children, but only one survived childhood. They lost their plantation, destroyed during Sherman’s march. Good. He was a surgeon for the treason army in the Civil War. With their human capital and house destroyed, they went back to active farming after the war and opened an academy, where both taught. He ended up in Congress in 1874 as a reformist Democrat, which didn’t mean he was any better on race than any other white Georgia Democrat, but he was less corrupt than the party machine. He was a really a proto-populist ranting against the corporate domination of state politics. He won a couple of additional terms, but the election in 1880 was probably stolen to ensure he lost, which was super common at the time and reminds me to again mention that the political machinations of the Trump era are meant to recreate the Gilded Age, when you could steal an election through blatantly illegal means and get away with it, no problem. He went back to the state house in 1884 and stayed there until his 1909 death.

Now, Rebecca was always a very active part of her husband’s career. She managed his first campaign and had a great sense of how to approach voters. She became involved in the kind of reformist causes that could appeal to white southern women. That included the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which she joined in 1886. This became a conduit for her own sort of political career, revolving around white women getting involved in political life in order to purify politics. This meant she became an important advocate for women’s suffrage in Georgia and throughout the South. She did this very much in the context of being a good wife, saying women were doing all this stuff for men and men didn’t recognize it and undervalued them, and it was time to remind them of how important women were for them and their families. She was an advocate for women’s education and that women should have a more active role in household decisions, but that it was a man’s duty to care for his wife and children.

Felton moved actively into women’s suffrage in 1900. There were plenty of elite southern women outraged that one of their own would support such a radical cause and she was often in debate with these women, including over introduced women’s suffrage bills that would die in the legislature. But for Felton, women’s suffrage was key in the most important issue of the day, which was white supremacy. She was a big advocate for the need to lynch Black men in order to stop them from raping white women. This of course was more or less picked up by leading white suffragists going back to the 1870s, when women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony turned their backs on Black suffrage to racebait their way toward women’s suffrage. As it turns out, Stanton and Anthony were always at best squishy on Black suffrage anyway.

This stuff is sad but almost inevitable in huge parts of the women’s suffrage movement. And to be clear, Felton was really good on a number of issues, much more so than many feminists of her day and that’s doubly true of southern feminists. For example, she was very good on work based issues, a big proponent of equal pay for equal work. But my God was she a racist. She just assumed that white women were nothing more than victims of Black rapists and that killing as many of them as you wanted was the only way to keep them under control. She stated that the more money Georgia spent on Black education, the more crimes Black people committed. She called civil rights activists, “half-civilized gorillas.” In 1898, she stated:

When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue – if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts – then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.

As it turns out, I am reading the Library of America series on Jim Crow, which includes much from the freedom struggle and some documents from the racists. I was reading this the other day there was Felton. I’ll just put the speech up here for you to read:

Isn’t learning about our history fun!

I could go on. And on. And on. She was not shy about proclaiming the joys of lynching and how it was key for women’s rights to have more lynching. I mean, this is not uncommon for the era. But it’s always a bummer to see people divided like this, so ahead of their time on some issues and so disgustingly awful on others.

What Felton did not make any connections around was the fact that the South being totally reactionary on women’s rights might have had something to do with the South being totally reactionary on all issues, including her beloved racial politics. Maybe the sexism and the violent racism were connected in defending the white patriarchy? But that was simply not something her mind could wrap itself around. In discussing the South being so far behind on women’s rights, she stated in 1915 that women did not have rights:

except in the States which have been franchised by the good sense and common honesty of the men of those States—after due consideration, and with the chivalric instinct that differentiates the coarse brutal male from the gentlemen of our nation. Shall the men of the South be less generous, less chivalrous? They have given the Southern women more praise than the man of the West—but judged by their actions Southern men have been less sincere. Honeyed phrases are pleasant to listen to, but the sensible women of our country would prefer more substantial gifts.

Of course, this is the same year that Birth of a Nation was released, which she undoubtedly thought was history written with lightning, which Woodrow Wilson evidently did not say but is close enough to what he thought.

In 1922, the current senator from Georgia died. Governor Thomas Hardwick appointed Felton to the Senate for one day before the winner of the special election took over. It was a total show thing to make him look good to women, but it’s also something Felton actively campaigned for once the idea was floated. So she became the first woman to serve in the Senate.

Felton died in 1930. She was 94 years old.

Rebecca Latimer Felton is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Cartersville, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other women senators, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Hattie Caraway, the first woman to be elected to the Senate, is in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Dixie Graves, appointed by her husband the governor to finish Hugo Black’s term after he got bumped to the Supreme Court, is in Montgomery, Alabama. And really, Dixie Graves is a ridiculous name, though perfect for this series. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.