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

Summary

Podcast Summary: Behind the Bastards (Part One: Rebecca Felton: The First Female Senator – and a Pro-Lynching Activist)

Released: July 28, 2026
Host: Robert Evans (Cool Zone Media/iHeartPodcasts)
Guest: Samantha McVeigh (Stuff Mom Never Told You)

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Episode Overview

This episode peels back the lesser-known, deeply troubling history of Rebecca Felton—the first woman to serve as a U.S. Senator and an avid advocate for both women’s rights and white supremacy, including pro-lynching activism. Host Robert Evans, joined by guest Samantha McVeigh, explores Felton's paradoxical legacy, highlighting how her life reflects the complexities of Southern womanhood, post-Civil War America, and the ways in which racism and white feminism could intertwine.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Rebecca Felton’s Background and Upbringing

• Felton’s Early Life in Georgia
  • Born June 10, 1835, near Decatur, Georgia, to a wealthy, slave-owning family.
    • “Felton's family was rich as hell... they owned a lot of people, right? The Latimer family owned a huge number of enslaved people.” (04:39, Evans)
  • Her ancestors were part of the early American elite and moved to Georgia via the Yazoo Land Fraud.
    • “As cotton culture spread across Georgia, the national government proved unable to extinguish Creek and Cherokee claims... anger over this fueled the development of the state’s rights philosophy..." (08:00, Evans)
  • Felton grew up on a 725-acre plantation; her family essentially ran Decatur in its early years.
  • The family’s move and prosperity directly resulted from the displacement of Native Americans and the exploitation of enslaved people.
    • “My comfortable family life... only was possible because these people were robbed and because of this vast fraud, like we should never have been there.” (11:31, Evans quoting Felton)

Navigating Southern Womanhood

• Raised Among Contradictions

  • Felton admired strong women in her family who ran plantations but acknowledges their power stemmed from managing enslaved people.
    • “She really admires the ladies in her family... because that's who she has direct contact with... a lot of Southern culture is held up by the labor of these women.” (12:49, Evans)
  • Felton’s autobiography only gradually admits to slavery’s brutality, initially calling enslaved people “servants” or “help,” and often depicting relationships with them in paternalistic terms.
    • “She seems to be almost hiding... describing these people as slaves and what her family's doing as slaving for a weirdly long time.” (15:53, Evans)

• Female Agency and Protection

  • Southern white women were raised to be ornaments—marriage and childrearing were their primary functions, with little autonomy.
    • "From a young age, Rebecca was integrated into a hierarchical social order that sanctioned male dominance and discouraged female autonomy.” (17:16, Quoting Crystal Feimster via Evans)
  • There was a trade-off: comfort and security in return for obedience and dependence on male protection.
    • “She comes to understand very quickly that women can't have a cap on their ambitions and a cap on what they can do... I need the protection of a man.” (18:25, Evans)

• Early Rebellious Observations

  • Felton notices and is inspired by moments when women step out of prescribed roles, e.g., a woman praying aloud at church, which was deemed shocking.
    • “I heard a woman pray in meeting for the first time... the talk of the town for a good while… But the majority said she should have kept silent.” (34:31, Felton via Evans)

Comfort, Complicity, and Slavery

• Rebecca’s narrative shows that many white Southern women believed they loved and were loved by the people they enslaved, often blurring the line between family and property.
  • “The dominant belief among women like Rebecca is that they truly loved the people that they owned and were loved by them in turn.” (41:22, Evans)
• Felton describes attending “slave weddings,” focusing on her own role rather than the brutal reality of enslaved people's lack of autonomy.
  • “The man wound up asking Rebecca for permission. And she relates that whole conversation… you are welcome to, if you behave yourself. Do you like circumstances?” (21:55, Evans as Felton)
• The warped affection and denial facilitated the Southern white myth of “happy slavery,” echoed in popular culture like Gone with the Wind.
  • “They wanted to be enslaved. They were treated well. They were more confused when freedom happened.” (23:28, McVeigh, paraphrasing Lost Cause narratives)

The Civil War and Its Aftermath

• Many elite Southerners, including Felton, were hesitant about secession—not out of abolitionist sentiment, but out of a desire to protect their way of life.
  • “If there had been no slaves, there would have been no war… To fight for the perpetuation of domestic slavery was a mistake.” (39:11, Felton via Evans)
• The war shattered the illusion of harmony between enslaved people and their owners. Fear of insurrection became widespread, especially among women left behind while men fought.
  • “The dread of Negro insurrection and social equality with Negroes at the ballot box held the Southern whites together in war or peace.” (43:31, Felton via Evans)
• Even postwar, Felton credits Black women with preventing mass uprisings, reflecting both a paternalistic worldview and the complex emotional entanglements of plantation life.
  • “Southerners, she explained, own their security of Confederate homes to their faithful female slaves.” (51:24, Feimster via Evans)

Postwar Bitterness, Racism, and Proto-White Feminism

• After the South’s defeat, Felton’s anger at Southern white men for failing to protect their privilege deepens.
  • “The failure of Southern white men is going to be like the main thing that motivates everything she does as an adult.” (54:19, Evans)
• Her feminism is explicitly white supremacist; she wants the vote for white women to enforce white supremacy, believing men incapable.
  • “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…” (55:12, Evans)
• Felton despises “miscegenation” more than rape; her critique is not of the violence but of race mixing.
  • “The crime that made slavery a curse lies in the fact that unbridled lust placed the children of bad white men in slave pens…” (59:41, Felton)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the “Wokeness” of Certain Slave-Owning Women

  • Evans: “The tough thing about Rebecca is she says the right thing like 60% of the time. But if you interrogate it… it’s for a really bad reason.” (12:25)
  • McVeigh: “She dissects these levels of understanding the enslaved people in such a way that it kind of feels like she could have been a heroine in this story, but instead she’s not. It’s weird.” (54:04)

• On Patriarchal Bargains

  • Evans: “There’s a social contract… women in the South do what they’re supposed to and make themselves small. In exchange they get protection and they don’t have to work.” (18:57)

• On the White Southern Female Experience

  • Feimster via Evans: “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.” (17:16)

• On Plantation Upbringing

  • Felton (via Evans): “All her 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 her female relatives.” (14:02)

• On Slave “Family”

  • Evans: “Most of these slave people are related to the people who own them… It's very common.” (16:49)
  • McVeigh: “That is not what Margaret Mitchell told me about the antebellum South...” (20:24)

• On the Roots of Felton’s Racism

  • Evans: “Her racist activism is motivated by a fact that she thinks that white men have failed to protect white women. Men ruin everything. So that's why she becomes pro-lynching...” (55:12)

• On Institutional Hypocrisy

  • Evans: “While Rebecca thought violent rape was pretty bad (and it) would upset her, far more were the male slave owners who claimed to have consensual relationships with black women they owned…” (60:27)

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Segment Timestamps

• 00:05 – 01:43: Introduction, Felton’s status as the “first” female senator, and her suffragette and white supremacist credentials.
• 04:30 – 11:31: Felton’s family wealth, Decatur roots, Yazoo Land Fraud, and the displacement of Native Americans.
• 12:17 – 18:25: Southern white womanhood, agency, and the “paternal contract.”
• 20:46 – 25:08: Anecdotes about plantation childhood; glimpses into everyday southern life.
• 29:45 – 34:35: Felton’s schooling, societal views on women's agency, and early signs of resistance.
• 35:22 – 39:48: Marriage, Southern comfort, and slave-owning expectations.
• 41:22 – 46:11: Civil War, white women’s fear of enslaved insurrection, and the “illusion” of affection.
• 51:24 – 54:04: Postwar complexities; Felton credits Black women with “preserving the families.” Complexity of relationships between enslaved and enslavers.
• 54:19 – 61:46: Felton’s postwar racism, white women’s suffrage as a tool for white supremacy, and her obsessive fears of race-mixing.

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Tone & Language

This episode blends the conversational irreverence, gallows humor, and moral clarity characteristic of "Behind the Bastards," with Samantha McVeigh often providing pointedly sardonic commentary in response to Felton’s worldview. The tone alternates between incredulity, horror, and historical analysis—with a clear focus on exposing the rebranding of white supremacist activism as “proto-feminism.”

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For Next Time

The episode concludes just as the hosts prepare to dig deeper into the most notorious period of Felton’s life: her political career, public advocacy for lynching, and the legacy of “white feminism” weaponized for oppression. Samantha McVeigh will return for Part Two.

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Takeaway

Rebecca Felton’s story is a stark illustration of how movements for women’s rights in the U.S. have often been deeply entangled with racism, white nationalism, and nostalgia for the antebellum South. Her legacy warns of the perils of progress that is exclusionary, and underscores the importance of intersectionality in social justice.

Transcript

[Samantha McVeigh]

Call Zone Media.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 youf Mom Never Told you'd. And the podcast and the book Stuff youf Mom Never Told you'd. I should say, samantha, welcome to the show. To the show. I don't know.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Hey, either way, you added a your to that.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

To the.

[Samantha McVeigh]

You did. I was gonna let it go.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Stuff mom never told you. Jesus.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Stuff mom never told you. Close enough.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

It's early morning for me.

[Co-host or Guest]

You know, it's 1:13pm Friends.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I haven't slept 4:00 clock in my time, so. Yeah, there you go.

[Co-host or Guest]

Speaking of friends. Hi, Sam.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Hi. How is everybody?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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

[Ad Voice 1]

First.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Not that. See, now I'm confused because I remember the pantsuit senator, which we do talk about. And I have to go back to my book.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

This is 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. Cause 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Yeah, I was gonna say she was racist, wasn't she? She was never racist.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

She was. Grew up on the plantation racist.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Georgia.

[Co-host or Guest]

Georgia.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Oh, this is a Georgia story.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

All right. This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

So Rebecca Ann Latimer was born on June 10, 1835, somewhere near Decatur, Georgia. Felton's family was rich. Oh, okay, cool.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Well, I live in Decatur, Georgia.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Such a local story. Such a local story.

[Samantha McVeigh]

This is too close to home.

[Co-host or Guest]

This is full on a Samantha McVeigh episode.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Literally my home.

[Co-host or Guest]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

term because it was. It was after. After Rebecca. After Rebecca Felton, there was a senator 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. Technically, she's a Decatur girl. Her family is rich as hell. And she was gonna 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

I feel like I know this name

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

existent 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 Latimer family own 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 had been white people on the east coast of North America. Her ancestors had been early settlers and had fought in the Revolutionary War. So they had been prominent Americans in pre Revolutionary times. And after the war, they're kind of part of the first elite class in this new country. Right 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? Is because there was more adventure there. It was more open, there was more space. It was only inhabited by these natives. Right.

[Samantha McVeigh]

I was gonna say. So she was there before the Trail of Tears. Like, she helped drive out the character.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

The Trail of Tears happens as she's a girl, basically. Right? Like that's an early thing she would have been aware of. Right? Is the Trail of Tears. And in her autobiography, by the way, she Writes about it as, like, a horrifying thing. Like, she at least is 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. I don't know why the Latimers left the Potomac for Georgia, other than what they said. More adventure. I think probably the real reason was that by selling that 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. 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 wood shop, tavern, general store, and post. They ran Decatur. Really?

[Samantha McVeigh]

So they own Decatur?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

They own Decatur pretty much. The Latimer family runs Decatur in its early years. Either way, yeah.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Our theme is come to Decatur where it's greater. So maybe they're the ones that place that there.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

That's why they did that. That is more or less why she seems to think that they gave. Now, the Latimer. Latimer's east coast family land was sold to the Potomac Boat Company and made into a park outside of D.C. that I think still exists today. So, I don't know. That's cool. Anyway, Rebecca did not write that autobiography that I get some of this info from until she was, like, in her 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 fringe lead speculation in the state's public lands. See, in the immediate wake of the American Revolution, the state of Georgia, like many states, was broke and running low of young men. It was unable to defend its claims to the western Yazoo 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 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 wanna deal with this shit anymore. And Congress says, wait, why? We don't wanna 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 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. And 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 the 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, 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. 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 tracts through the land lottery system. Anger over this matter 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Well, I'm glad it had a purpose.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah, the purpose is horror. But this is Rebecca's understanding of how her family gets to Georgia later, which is she realizes it's because of this fraud that violently displaced these people. And she has very early memories of the Trail of Tears. It's a thing that I think is upsetting to her even from a young age before she fully understands it. So I suspect that's kind of why she spends so much time as an adult trying to understand what had caused it. But this is something she writes about a lot, so she knows my comfortable family life. And 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 real, really bad reason. And we'll get, we'll get to all of that. She does sound weirdly woke at points

[Samantha McVeigh]

like, this is like the white women tears. Those are that we were like, yeah, we definitely need that intersection because without it, it's very one sided. So this is where we're at with her. Right? Okay.

[Ad Voice 6]

Okay. Okay.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 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. Because 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 Mrs. Lucy Talbot Swift, who Rebecca described as the mother of 11 children, all reaching maturity except two that live 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 the. 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Leaning in. That's what we call leaning in.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 her female relatives. Right. 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, which, again, shows that she's a very wealthy girl, but it's also a practical tool for the farm. She writes, quote, the Negro boys learned to plow with him, and he was the dependence for going on mill with a sack of corn on his back for more than a dozen years. And her family also owns a bunch of 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 makes them rich. That's what makes you rich in this day right in the south is that you have human beings. In the first few dozen pages of her autobiography, she refers to the people her family owned exclusively as nurses, servants, and help. In one passage describing a great feast held at her plantation, she writes, white farmers came with their colored men. So it's interesting. She seems to be almost hiding or trying to avoid even maybe unconsciously describing these people as slaves and what her family's doing as slaving for a weirdly long time. Now, that doesn't keep up the whole book. She finally makes a direct and open reference to slavery, the first that I found on page 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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

[Samantha McVeigh]

Right.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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

[Samantha McVeigh]

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.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah. It's a bit here. We're literally family because, like, I own you and am raping you in order to make more people that I own. Yeah.

[Samantha McVeigh]

And then I discard you if you

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

are no longer viewed, which is.

[Co-host or Guest]

Yeah.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Horrifying. Okay.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah. And Rebecca, it went dark real quick. Yeah. Rebecca's very aware of that dimension of it, too, as she gets older. Now, Rebecca is open about the fact that most wealthy Southern women were raised to be ornaments in this period of time. They're made for early marriage and child rearing. They're not supposed to make decisions about anything too important. In her book, Crystal Feimster 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 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

She's a realize she's being owned as well, like she is property.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah.

[Samantha McVeigh]

She's so close.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

She comes to understand very quickly that women can't have a cap on their ambitions and a cap on what they can do, no matter how smart and capable they are. And she's going to gradually understand that. And this 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. 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah, from other men. And 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 the promise for rich women. Right. There's plenty of poor lady white ladies in the south who have to work very hard. Cause they don't own any people.

[Samantha McVeigh]

And technically, the women that she admires work a lot in keeping the household,

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

but they're working a lot at managing the work of people they own. That is also a big part of it. Right. So there are accounts though. I mean, and again, that's also not always what happens. Cause not all of these, especially the higher you get in wealth, these white like mistresses of the plantation, it's almost the more money you have, the less you're expected to do. And in fact, there are accounts by white women in extremely wealthy plantation households from like letters where we see them talking about panicking when their husbands and sons are away. And they have to be in charge of the help themselves. This isn't the overwhelming norm, but it wasn't uncommon. And it gives you an idea of how much agency high status women in the old south are expected to cede 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 the of affairs at home. I am constituted so as to crave a guide and protector. I am not an independent woman, nor ever shall be. That's a woman writing. That's like a rich woman.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Turns out some stuff. Some of 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 Oharas, honestly, that's why I connected this. They have a lot of comparisons to make.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

So, I mean, almost very good chance. Rebecca's an. 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. So the. 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 circumstances? Again, she doesn't see this as, like. She sees this as, I think, a fundamentally, like, natural and good relationship. Like, she's working out, looking out for this girl because she cares about her. But you also see, like, that casual use of a slur that she doesn't even, I'm sure, 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 whatever the hell this was. But you see this, like, she is really invested in depicting this as, like, a familial relationship. This is someone I care about. But this woman's not allowed to get married without this random teenage girl saying it's okay and, like, haranguing 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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.

[Co-host or Guest]

There's definitely a bunch of articles that compare Scarlett o'.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Hare.

[Co-host or Guest]

I mean, like, Scarlett, too. To.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah, Rebecca.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Yeah.

[Co-host or Guest]

You know, I mean, they're like. They're like, yeah, the real Scarlet is Rebecca Felt.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

There's a bunch of articles, like, pretty much definitely like. And this is like Scarlett o', Hara, the character probably would have gotten into politics after the war. Right?

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 itchin 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. Just a little, like, look into this. Rich girl is still going to a school that her dad has built in Decatur. 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.

[Co-host or Guest]

It's awful.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

It's good not to live in the past.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

I'm sure.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Okay, all right.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

People's skin was fucked up back then.

[Samantha McVeigh]

I'm like, what is happening?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah, well, 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. This ad is brought to you by Vive Healthcare, the makers of Dovato Dolutegravir lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devato. Divato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devato is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Dovato is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Dovato.

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[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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[Samantha McVeigh]

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[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 indicator away from the plantation so she can attend a fancy private academy. The teacher there was one John S. Wilson, and he hated dancing 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 had to, like, sign a contract that if you're there as a pupil, you will never dance in or out of school. And if you dance, it gets to expel you. 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.

[Co-host or Guest]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Religious thing. Yeah.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Co-host or Guest]

Don't even. Don't even ask about Los Angeles. You know, the answer is no.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Well, like, we literally had to dress up, find dresses that were antebellum. Mine was bright red, by the way. And then do the dances. The traditional dances, celebrate.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Oh, my God.

[Samantha McVeigh]

So really, was it just me? And imagine being the only person of color. Literally, there was two Asian people actually doing this.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

No, see, y' all didn't experience this. Y' all didn't learn the dances.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Oh, my God, no.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

I went to a huge school district where, like, half the kids in my school district were, like, from Southeast because, like, there's so much of, like, Texas instruments and stuff in there. Half of my school was from, like, Southeast Asia. It would have been really weird to have assassin dressed like Confederates.

[Samantha McVeigh]

That would.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Would not have gone over.

[Samantha McVeigh]

You think of. Okay, so really, like, y' all didn't have any of the re. Like, retelling of the war?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

I definitely got. Got some lost cause narrative in my education. Sure. But we. We never, like, dressed up like a. I mean, Texas.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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.

[Co-host or Guest]

Okay.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

It's just that, you know, you get it filtered.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Did you go to a fancy school?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

No, it was a public school. I only ever went to public schools. There's really good public schools in north Texas. Cause there's, like, a lot of businesses and stuff there.

[Samantha McVeigh]

We only had one school, high school. So you're gonna tell me about educating?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah, it's. I mean, when I grew up 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

She goes to this school and this teacher who doesn't want her dancing. And her parents eventually say, like, look, this is the right thing for you. We'll dance when you graduate. Right. We'll dance when you're very upset. And she's particularly upset that she has to stop dancing for a while because there's a big dance coming up into cater. And she has the hots for the town judge, the honorable Edward Young hill. Now she's 12 or 13. At the time, I was like, how old are you? He's a judge. He's gotta be 30 or something, right? Or more. But she describes it as one of the handsomest men she ever knew, and notes that at several previous dances, quote, several times the judge would ask me to dance with him. And he was a splendid dancer. Now, I don't know if this judge was grooming her or if this was really innocent. She's 12 or 13. It's really not weird for girls of her status to get married at, like, 14 or 15.

[Samantha McVeigh]

I think that's about right. That's when they get sold off.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Right. 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 from school, at which point her parents throw her a dance party to celebrate. She's a rich girl, and she writes lovingly of plantation life. But she also complains about the role of women in Southern culture at the time. She noticed early on that many of her teachers and governesses were northern women who had moved to the south for work. Quote. No Southern woman of means 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 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 kind of seen as, like, up if by the time you're wearing, like, long dresses, someone's not trying to get with you. Right.

[Samantha McVeigh]

All right.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 kind of catch that from bits like this. In her autobiography, she writes about an unforgettable church service where, quote, I heard a woman pray in meeting for the first time. It came like a clap out of a clear sky. She had been talking to a bench of mourners and broke loose in the fervor of her pleading. 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 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. They can at least pray in public.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah, that's tough in certain denominations to this day. So what we see from Rekka 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. Yeah.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Oh, comfy. This is so nice and cozy.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 trying to make everyone the same kind of wife, more or less.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not bad. I bet they still got this wife school going. So she gets her diploma in being married in 1852 and a year or so later, right after she turns 18, right. She marries William Harrell 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 kind of wind up speaking about like their differing. Their beliefs about what makes a good Christian wife and mother. And they have the same opinion about that. And so they hit it off afterwards and wind up getting engaged and then married. And today we would say a 30 year old doctor hitting on an 18 year old who just graduated college. It's pretty gross, right? I mean that's not great. That's not ideal.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Leo would be like a.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Not illegal, but not ideal. Yeah, yeah. 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 kind of evil, but they're together and seem to really love each other. It's kind of sexual.

[Co-host or Guest]

Evil is such a.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

They're kind of evil together, but they seem to be really happy together. So I don't know, like being a good partner to someone isn't a moral term. You can be a great husband or wife to. And shitty.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Yeah, hey, they are together are villains and they're okay with it. Their love is shown through their villainous

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

ways through an evil power couple.

[Co-host or Guest]

Yeah.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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 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. 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. She would ultimately give birth to five children, a girl and four boys, but only one. Well, none of her sons actually live to adulthood. So, yeah, this doesn't go. Childhood is not. Is not going to be great for her. It's not great for a lot of women in this era, but so far it's nice. She's having her kids, she's starting her farm. You know, the Civil War doesn't start brewing until she's like 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 claims that she and her family did not support secession. As an older woman, decades later, she would write, if there had been no slaves, there would have been no war. As a direct counter to the Lost Cause myth, which she despised. That's another interesting thing about Rebecca. She hates the Lost Cause myth because among other things, it's like slavery was not. And she's like, no, of course. Slavery was literally why we did it. I was there.

[Ad Voice 5]

Right?

[Co-host or Guest]

Right.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

I lived right there.

[Samantha McVeigh]

She was honest, I guess.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

So was she calling slavery evil or the war evil?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

She's calling slavery evil there. 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 for the sake of guaranteeing that you can spread slavery. And it's not weird. We have accounts for 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. Yeah, I got my worries. Yeah, I got some issues with this. One of the most disturbing experiences for her in the lead up and start to the war, and this would have been disturbing for millions of Southerners besides her, was that it began with a disruption to the source of all of their comfort. Right. All of the comfort for rich Southerners is provided by enslaved black people. Gossip spreads rapidly on plantations. And among other things, you've got poor white workers there too, who 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 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. 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 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. They might not be happy, like, right. Obviously a lot of. Especially the owners and 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'.

[Co-host or Guest]

Am. Right.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah.

[Samantha McVeigh]

I don't understand.

[Co-host or Guest]

So crazy.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 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 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. That'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 social equality with black people. And she's not gonna 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 gonna see that her whole life. But it's interesting that she can write it out that clearly in her autobiography.

[Co-host or Guest]

Horrific.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Again, she's so close to the point,

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

but so far, yeah, according to Feimster, this was a near universe. 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. 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. There's a little bit of payback just in these ladies starting to realize how wrong they've been about the community they've grown up in.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah, possibly.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Yeah.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

You would have had it coming. You know who else has it coming? The sponsors of this podcast.

[Co-host or Guest]

And it's just a dick pill ad.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 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. Is this like, direct realization of, like, oh, shit, why wouldn't they kill me? Yeah, they've got no reason not to.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Yeah.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

So. So the war went on still. And, you know, as terrifying as cases like this were, and as much as this fear of slave uprising and fear of violence is kind of baked into the Southern psyche after this point, violence by black people, 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 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? 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? 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 reasons for that, right? One of them is that, as I said, many of these people are related. They are often the children and grandchildren of the people who own them. Now, these family relationships are sometimes hidden from the outside, but they're often, if not always, widely known to members of the household. And that makes things fucking complicated, right? Even if they own you, even if it's fucked up and unfair, if that guy's like, your. Your dad or your uncle biologically and you, like, were raised, or if you're one of these women that Rebecca credits with calming everyone else down from violence, maybe part of why you're doing that is you nursed a bunch of these young white kids 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 wanna see them killed. Like, it's hard. It's complicated. The relationships that are created by this abominable system are really complex. And the way people react as the war pushes more pressure on them are complex and multifaceted, right? Yep. The morality of slavery 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 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, that's

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

And there are pieces where I think she has things very right. For example, she's very racist, and racism is going to be a major motivating factor in her life. But I actually think the motivation behind her main racism in life and the motivation for her activism later is because the Civil War makes her 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 she does as an adult. And I think that's also very interesting.

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah, 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. Men ruin everything. So that's why she becomes pro lynching is because she's like, we white women need to take, 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.

[Samantha McVeigh]

So she's saying white men just didn't do it right.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 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. First of all, white women Fucking suck. White men fucking suck. Sorry.

[Co-host or Guest]

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

[Samantha McVeigh]

Oh.

[Ad Voice 8]

Yeah.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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. And that's really, really interesting. As a justification for lynching.

[Co-host or Guest]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

No, but it's weird.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Boy, cut her. Her hostility's pointed in the wrong area.

[Ad Voice 6]

Yeah.

[Co-host or Guest]

The call is coming from inside the house.

[Samantha McVeigh]

What are you.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

We're gonna talk. This whole story is like, how she gets there.

[Co-host or Guest]

Right?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Okay, okay, okay, okay. 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, 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. Cause a new slave is a new slave. Now, as a later scientific research, we

[Samantha McVeigh]

need to take a pause. What the fuck?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Yeah, she hates 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 she's gonna go after.

[Samantha McVeigh]

It's kinda like when a girl catches her man cheating, she goes after the woman instead of the man. This kind of scenario, with all the

[Co-host or Guest]

schools she went to, did she never take basic math? Because she's, like, basically going, the folk. I mean, she's going, one plus one equals seven.

[Samantha McVeigh]

What are we doing?

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

It is worth noting other women of her class and time are able to recognize this and take the right conclusion. The Grimke 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 Grimkes 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 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 seem woke when she's talking about what idiots these white guys are. She does better than even a lot of the abolitionists because she knew these fuckers, right? She knew them as men, and she knows how fucking wrong they were. Right? And so it is kind of satisfying to read for that. But at the core of it, her real issue with them is race mixing. So you can never forget that.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Right? So close.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

She writes in her autobiography, 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.

[Ad Voice 5]

It.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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 care of them by how many more of them there were, you know, over the years. But also, there was a lot.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Yeah.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Oh, God, 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 while 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. Outcries make the public outcry therein lie the curse of slavery. And I don't think that's where the curse of slavery lies.

[Samantha McVeigh]

Oh, my God.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert 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 equals. We wouldn't say. But that's how she sees it, right?

[Samantha McVeigh]

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

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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

[Samantha McVeigh]

Wonderful. Wonderful.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

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

[Samantha McVeigh]

I'm Samantha. You can find me on the podcast Stuff mom never told you'd with my co host Annie. We also wrote a book, same title, Stuff mom never told you'd. 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.

[Behind the Bastards Host (likely Robert Evans)]

Awesome. Well, check out that on Instagram. And check out the next episode of this podcast, where we'll have Samantha back in a day or so. Good night. Woot woot.

[Co-host or Guest]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Coolzone 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 Basterds are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards we love about 40% of you. Statistically speaking,

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