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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

"A CALL 'm m" : 113:3th TATIMER Harmon
AND WHITE SUPREMACY

presented by

MARY A. HESS

has been accepted towards fulfillment
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"A CALL TO HONOR": REBECCA LATIMER FELTON AND WHITE SUPREMACY

BY

Mary A. Hess

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of History

1999

 

ABSTRACT

"A CALL TO HONOR": REBECCA LATIMER FELTON AND WHITE SUPREMACY

BY

Mary A. Hess

Rebecca Latimer Felton, suffragist and reformer, was a
fervent advocate of white supremacy and a believer in the use
of lynching as social control. Her status as an elite white
woman of the New South, the wife of a Georgia politician who
served two terms in the U.S.Congress, as well as the protege
of Populist leader Tom Watson, allowed her unusual access to
public platforms and the press. Felton, a woman of
extraordinary abilities, relished her power in Georgia
politics and remained a force until her death. She was
appointed as interim U.S. Senator in 1922, an office she held
only two days. Her legacy is less one of reform than of her
notoriety for her racial politics. This study examines her
personality and her place in the New South political

universe.

This is dedicated to my friend, Dianne Rebecca Cafagna
1949-1993

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank first my husband, John Roche, certainly the
most considerate partner any writer could wish. My family
have made the entire enterprise possible and have given
freely and generously of themselves, especially my sister,
Laura Anne Brown and my brother, Thomas W. Hess. My parents'
encouragement has made all the difference. Thanks are
certainly due to my committee, Dr. William B. Hixson, Jr.,
Dr. Darlene Clark Hine and Dr. Jane Vieth. Their thoughtful
counsel was often sought and gratefully appreciated. I also
wish to acknowledge the help of Dr. Joel Williamson of The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr.Williamson 's
advice helped me advance beyond my naive preconceptions and
significantly influenced the final work. The staff of the
Hargrett Library at the University of Georgia, particularly
the late Larry Gulley, assisted more than can be adequately
expressed. The staff of the Library of Congress and of
Emory University's Woodruff Library were also of great
benefit to me as a researcher.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTIONOOOOO0.0.0.0...O000......OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOl

I.MRS.FELTON:"GEORGIA'S
EMPRESS...O00......00......0..0.000......00.000.000.00000006

II.A NEW SOUTH PROPHET IN "THE LAND OF THE TREE AND THE HOME
OF THE GMVE"...IOOOOOOOOOOCOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOOOCOCOOCOOOOC41

CONCLUSIONOOOOOOOOOO0.0...0.0...OO...00.000.00.0000000000070

BIBLImRAPHYOOOOOOO0.0......0.00.00.00.000.00.00.00.00000090

Introduction

The "Southern lady", once overlooked by historians,
has come under intense scrutiny. Her diaries and memoirs
are searched for significant observations on racial,
sexual, class and gender issues in an effort to decipher
and recast the role of the elite white woman in the
postbellum South. It is an effort that was overdue: as
Anne Firor Scott has observed, for most Americans,Scar1ett
O'Hara is the Southern woman 1 Now, however, we know the
likes of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, Sarah Gayle and Mary
Chesnut, and we are coming to know Harriet Jacobs, Harriet
Tubman and Ida Wells-Barnett, who each offer us a view of the
Southern woman that is both candid and unencumbered by the
self-deceptions so characteristic of white Southerners. As
the invisible woman Scott describes emerges, Black
Southerners are also brought into focus.

Rebecca Latimer Felton is described by Scott as
neglected, but when her story is brought forward, so too are
the freedmen and women of her time. Recent attempts to
render Felton as a feminist pioneer and, in particular, as an
advocate of the farm wife and mill girl, miss an important
aspect of her public persona-- that of a designated and
tolerated voice for lynching as social control. Many women's
voices were heard in the public arena by the year of the

Tybee Island speech (1897), but they spoke of missionary

work, and of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the
Daughters of the Confederacy. Felton's message in that
speech was very different: direct, savage, and targeted at
her own class: "If it takes lynching to protect woman's
dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts, then
I say lynch thousand a week if it becomes necessary."2 Felton
was an instrument of the architects of the New South, and as
a well-connected elite woman and gifted propagandist, she
proved a valuable asset for the white supremacist cause. Her
views were shared by many of her class but even a powerful
politician like Tom Watson was held in check by the
conventions of a gentleman's political discourse. The
audacity and passionate delivery of her jeremiads astounded
her audiences and helped legitimize the derailing of justice
and the subsequent murder of Blacks.

In this thesis I have attempted to answer a simple
question which has proved most difficult: why did Rebecca
Felton, in so many ways a reformer, become an advocate of
lynching, and how did she overcome the supposedly rigid
structure of the proper sphere for the Southern lady and
become a woman of extraordinary influence in the most public
of arenas and the most thoroughly male, politics. In
essence, what created Rebecca Felton the journalist,
activist and politician and what can account for her
astonishing career as an advocate of white supremacy. Felton

speaks not only for herself, but attempts to represent all

women. Her views were news, but as will be shown, she spoke
for many Southern white women, though hardly all.

Felton herself can be seen as a figure that prefigures
the activity of the women who participated in the Ku Klux
Klan in the 19208 as described by Kathleen Blee 3as a
representative of the often racist woman suffrage movement.
Felton's acceptance as a respected journalist and
politician, culminating in her appointment as the first woman
Senator, made it permissible for the formation of a group in
Atlanta in the late 19308 called the Women's National
Association for the White Race. Their motto: " The spirit of
God must govern and future America be sired by the white
race." 4

Rebecca Felton's career is particularly surprising
considering the way the supposedly conservative South
supported traditional gender roles, but it is important to
remember that the New South was a raw and disorderly shadow
of the Old South. The transitional nature of the 18908
created an opportunity for women who were poised to enter the
public arena as it did for the demagogues of the time. The
very novelty of a public woman assured her of an audience,
and her grandmotherly visage assured that she would be
respected and believed. Rebecca Felton is, like her mentor
Tom Watson, a paradox. Both abandoned idealism in later life
and embraced racial politics that propelled them to the U.S.
Senate. Watson's was surely a pyrrhic victory, but when

Rebecca Felton stood in the Senate, made a speech and was

showered with congratulations and roses,5 she can be
accounted as a success in her own opinion and by her own

constituency.

Felton was the most successful of the demagogues because
her class and gender provided her with protective coloration
in the fierce political struggles of postwar politics, and
ultimately surpassed her husband in her own time and
certainly in history. Her triumph came in midlife, after a
lifetime of disappointment in the domestic sphere, and it
came because she presented herself as the embodiment of
wisdom and experience both as a wife and mother, but first as
a Southerner.

The Atlanta_flggrnal was her forum and her pedestal;
she dispensed homey advice in her column as well as racial
cant from her protected preserve of the women's pages. The
nineteenth century woman's world was powerfully affected by
growing numbers of women writing for women. Housekeeping
and child-rearing were the focus of these writers, and
usually it involved an older woman giving wise advice to a
naive young woman.6 Felton used her column, "The Country
Home" to proselytize on all issues that concerned her, going
far beyond the old fixinderhkirgne,kfigne" paradigm of women's
concerns.

Rebecca Felton, who made her name championing the rights
of women, has finally found a place in Southern history to

suit her.The W lists Felton as

the sole female profiled in the section on "Politics." All

other "political" women have been confined to the "WOmen's
Life" essay on "Women in Politics." 7 Felton, in other words,
belongs with the likes of Orval Faubus and John C. Calhoun —-
like Faubus, racism has clouded her legacy and as a "fire-
eater" Rebecca Felton would surely have gained the respect of
the ultimate sectionalist. Certainly not an unqualified
heroine of women's history, Rebecca Latimer Felton deserves

a fair assessment.

Notes

lAnne Firor Scott,"Introduction to a Special Issue on

Women in Georgia and the South " 9eQrsia_nistorisal_9uarterl¥
2 (Summer,1992):240.

2 Joel Williamson. W

W (New York:
Oxford University Press,1984),128.

3 Kathleen M. Blee. WWW
in_the_lfizgs (BerkeleyzUniversity of California Press ,1991).

4 Mrs. J.E. Andrews, Atlanta,to Mrs.David Alter,
Pittsburgh,8 April 1939,Typescript from J. Rosenwald Fund
papers collected in the National Urban League papers, Series
IV, Box 7.1 am indebted to my colleague Felix Armfield for
calling this to my attention.

5 Stanley J lemons, WW
£h§_12298,(UrbanazUniversity of Illinois Press),105-106.

5 David P. Handlin. WWW

sggjggg, 1815-1215. (Boston:Little,Brown and Company,1979),
412.

7 Charles Wilson Reagan and William Ferris, ed.

WW ( Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina, 1989), 1186- 1187.

I. Mrs. Felton: "Georgia's Empress"

The life and public career of Rebecca Latimer Felton
(1835-1930) is a study in paradox. A famous woman in her
time, she is practically unknown today. An activist in the
woman-suffrage, temperance and. peace movements, one might
expect to find her name with that of her friends Frances
Willard, Isabella. Beecher' Hooker and Bertha Palmer,
influential and prominent women all -- but instead she is
consigned to the shadows of history. Her most cherished
achievement, that of being appointed Senator from Georgia in
1922, the first. woman. ever' in 'the Senate, is a virtual
footnote in history, despite the intense furor it aroused at
the time. When Governor Hardwick offered her the interim
appointment, she recalled later:

I was left to ponder the significance of it.It meant

that a woman reared in the sheltered security of an

antebellum plantation was to be the first of her sex to
sit in the United States Senate. It was hard to
realize. I thought back through the years and decades,
and remembered the first time a woman had lifted her
voice in public at our little country church in my

girlhood. What a stir that had caused! Who in that day
would have had the hardihood to predict that the time

would come when Georgia women would hold public office?1

A brilliant student and a lively cheerful girl, Rebecca
Felton cherished two ambitions above all others: a life in
politics and a career as a writer. Her marriage to the

widower William Felton only delayed those ambitions, given

their fullest reign at the end of her long life. Her progress
from valedictorian of Madison Female College to sleepy
Cartersville and her beloved farm, to a grim wartime
existence as a refugee in Macon, shaped her public life in
postbellum Georgia. One constant aspect of her character
echoed again and again in her speeches and writings is a
palpable nostalgia for her former privileged existence.

Rebecca Felton's life spanned the last years of the Old
South and reached into the raw New South. For a time, from
the tumultuous 18908 through the 19208, she exerted
significant influence in the public sphere; Mrs. Felton was
the foremost woman politician in Georgia. Her strength lay in
her ability to elicit the same nostalgia for vanished
prosperity and order in her audience; like General John
Gordon, a professional Confederate, she skillfully
manipulated the bruised psyches of a humiliated people. Mrs.
Felton's particular genius was her emotional connection with
her audience; folksy and familiar, her columns were florid
and sentimental. She gave the impression of maternal care,
and of near saintliness: one young man asked her, "Aren't you
the Mrs. Felton who writes for us?"2

Despite her appalling legacy as a propagandist, she is
still uncritically viewed in some quarters as a feminist
heroine: one publication calls her "A Reformer of the First
Order. "3 Her gift for words made her both an influential
reformer and a demagogue of considerable influence. A

feminist assessment must weigh these two personas carefully

in order to give Felton her due. Certainly her influence
extended beyond her two day tenure in the Senate, and this
study will examine her legacy, particularly in the politics
of race in the South.

A gifted writer and speaker, she enjoyed phenomenal
popularity through her column in the W that ran
from 1899 to 1930. Clearly among Georgia's governing elite,
this congressman's widow wielded immense power in the affairs
of her state. How had she seemingly avoided the barriers of
propriety and custom that effectively silenced so many
Southern women? What experiences or beliefs motivated her
aggressive Opinions on the subject of race which enflamed
passions with such tragic results?

The most promising area of exploration on this question
would seem to be Felton's upbringing, but the evidence here
raises more questions than it answers.The young Rebecca grew
up in very comfortable circumstances on a plantation ten
miles from Decatur.She reminisces about her childhood in a
rambling memoir. W
m, which establishes her family tree and casts her family
in a hagiographic light.What mention she makes of her
relations with Blacks are innocuous and often warm, albeit
usually condescending.0ne account of a wedding between a
favorite housemaid and a groom from outside the Latimer
plantation illustrates her view of the proceedings, in which
she is "present at the asking":"Will you treat your wife

decent, if I allow you to marry her?" Will you act the dog

and beat my good darky 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 if you behave yourself." 4

Since Rebecca was an adolescent when this wedding took
place, it is clear she already saw herself as an authority on
the management of the slaves. Her biographer, John Talmadge,
portrays an idyllic girlhood, punctuated by the practice of
domestic tasks, training her for her future as a mistress of
a plantation. He describes Rebecca as surrounded by "kindly,
fun-loving Negroes to praise and pet her and make her feel
important."5 There is no hint of anything other than
benevolent condescension in her relations with the servants
at the Latimers' Panola Plantation.

The name "Miz' Becky", given to her by the servants, was
her preferred mode of address throughout her long life. While
this connotes a certain easy familiarity with the plantation
slaves, it also signifies her absolute insistence on a
recognition of her position as a woman in charge, a
plantation mistress in training. A self-absorbed, precocious
girl, Rebecca absorbed the conditioning of the planter elite
that insisted on the natural superiority of whites and
consigned Blacks to meek servility. Her belief in herrenvolk
democracy was a natural outgrowth of her upbringing and of
her class background. Whatever her adult experience, no
matter how devastating the trauma, her behavior remained

consistent with her childhood inculcation in white supremacy.

Once the plantation order was upset by the war, benevolence
quickly gave way to a nearly hysterical hatred for Black men
that was pathological in its intensity. Talmadge is at a
loss to understand it in his biography of Felton: "A possible
explanation is that her antipathy for the Negro was
accentuated by her strange antagonism towards all men. More
than one of her firmest convictions were warped by this
persistent hostility...."6

Talmadge does a remarkable job rendering Felton's "nine
stormy decades" as he called them, but deducing what prompted
her "strange antagonism" and "persistent hostility" is beyond
the scope of his study. Joel Williamson's analysis in The
.Crucible__of__3age offers the best insight into Felton's
personality. He agrees that Felton's feelings towards males
were primarily those of resentment and fury, and his
psychosexual analysis of her behavior is convincing, grounded
as it is in a larger study of a South similarly afflicted by
Victorian demons.7 Rebecca Felton became a voice for that
South, but, as I will demonstrate, she was not the only elite
woman who felt as she did.

In addition to this it is important to consider the
large part that frustration had played in Felton's life. Of
the five children born to her, only one survived to maturity.
That. child, Howard, favored his cranky and often ailing
father, and was a real trial to his mother. 'Felton worried
constantly that she might lose that child as well. It was

also Rebecca Felton's lot to put up with the constant

10

complaints and peevish insults of a stepdaughter. She worked
hard all her married life, and her letters to her mother in
particular reflect her weary and worried state of mind. Hard
economic times had cut deeply into the Feltons' small
inheritance, and Rebecca found herself scrimping and
hoarding, which pained her proud spirit.

Rebecca Felton would have agreed with Lucy
Breckinridge of Virginia, who expressed a view of marriage
that was acid and telling : "A woman's life after she is
married , unless there is an immense amount of love, is
nothing but suffering and hard work. I never saw a wife and
mother who could spend a day of unalloyed happiness and
ease... I wish I were a man! I would make my wife so happy.
She would never repent having married me. " Despite a genuine
love of her home and family, Felton wanted far more, and felt
trapped. 8

Small wonder she found consolation in her stories of a
South of plenty and grace, and later turned her anger on the
men who had destroyed her South. That she reserved her
particular wrath for the freedman is less mysterious when one
considers the inversion of their fortunes. Emancipation of
Black men seemed to her the ultimate insult; the freedman
even had the franchise and in her paranoia she saw him as ”a

ravenous beast at heart, capable at a given opportunity of

violating any white woman."9 She felt perfectly comfortable
espousing such a view, and believed that most of her friends

and neighbors shared it, which in fact, they did.

11

Another window on her world view is her copious writings
on Native Americans. Mrs. Felton admired the "noble savage"
and praised the departed first residents of Georgia whose
descendants now lived in exile in Oklahoma. She deplored
Andrew Jackson's removal of Cherokees to the Indian
Territory. One of her own relatives had died after her rescue
from a long captivity with the Cherokees, but Rebecca
believed her demise came from her separation from the tribe
since she never readjusted to life with whites. In Country
Life she explores the local lore of the Etowah Mounds, a
significant archeological site of the Muscogulge people.
Typically, she wildly mixes pseudo—science and fact in these
earnest passages :"[the artifact] ...we may reasonably
suppose was fashioned by a race of people who occupied this
section long before anything was known of the rude and
illiterate aboriginal Indians of America."10

What follows is a tribute to the "red man who refused to
be the white man's slave, preferring to be bayoneted off the
continent, in his love for freedom."11 Rebecca Felton may
have been expressing the sentimental folk-wisdom of the time,
but her express comparison to Blacks reveals much about her
own racism: "The African in the slave holding states did not
rise up in defense of democracy or human freedom when the
Federal armies of the North had overrun and subjugated the
slave owning Southern Confederacy. Whoever writes the true

story of the red man must give him credit for higher ideals

12

and loftier patriotism than the Mongolian or any of the
yellow or black tribes can furnish."12

This romantic vision of Native American life probably
appealed to Rebecca Felton's sensibilities strongly; she
certainly identifies ‘with her lost child captive cousin.
Captivity' narratives ‘were thrilling reading for repressed
Victorians, and no real Native Americans were about for her
to observe. She was convinced that her life experience with
Blacks had given her acute insight into their "nature." She
piously huffs that "the story of Georgia for a hundred years
and the methods used to dispossess-the Indians of their happy
hunting grounds will ever be a humiliating confession of the
Anglo-Saxon's greed and injustice against their red brother."
13

Felton eagerly romanticized a people she did not know
rather than accept equality with Blacks whom she had known
her entire life. Particularly revealing is her scorn for
Blacks' supposed passivity. Felton and any other Georgian
would be familiar with the legacy of the Stono Rebellion and
Denmark Vesey: fear and suspicion of slaves' conspiracies
underlay the placid plantation facade of the white elite.
Rarely expressed but omnipresent was that threat of violence
in the antebellum South; after Emancipation that facade was
stripped away, revealing the legacy of fear. An imagination
that thrived on romantic captivity narratives could easily
concoct the fevered threat of the "black beast rapist" as

Joel Williamson calls this phantasm.14

13

Perhaps she further identified with the Native American
because she envisioned an active, vigorous existence in what
she called "the wild woods" as preferable to her humdrum life
as a farm wife. She could also recall her childhood, one of
relative freedom and indulgence from her father. Bertram
Wyatt—Brown observed that girls in antebellum days were
raised much as boys were to the age of menarche. 15 It is not
too preposterous to imagine that her warm sympathy for the
oppressed Indian sprang from her own resentment at her
confinement within the stifling conventions of southern
culture by men who just as often as not were her intellectual
inferiors.

In W, Ronald Takaki describes the fascination
of white males of the nineteenth century with the "noble
Indian."l6 A cultural commonplace for white males gradually
crossed over into the popular culture of women, witnessed the
proliferation of poems about Indians and pageants featuring
"Indian" themes. Rebecca Felton's nascent feminism would make
her all the more receptive to tales of the brave Sacajawea or
Pocahontas. Starved for autonomy, it is understandable why
she would yearn towards these idealistic tales and away from
the Blacks who shared her oppression in a South and a country
controlled by white men. Her attitude towards Native
Americans seems to reinforce Winthrop Jordan's observation of
the beliefs of the colonists regarding the sexual behavior of
Black and Indian males: "Far from finding Indians lusty and

lascivious, they discovered them to be notably deficient in

14

ardor and virility. . . the colonists developed no image of the
Indian as a potential rapist...In fact the entire sexual
complex did not pertain to the Indian." 17 By the 18508
Native Americans, desexualized and absent from Georgia,
provided a safe outlet for fantasy and romantic fictions.
Rebecca Felton is clearly drawn to the "Other", but only as a
foil for her "historical fictions." Her view of women of all
races is similarly skewered, but she is determined to write
women into history, however sentimentally and whatever the
distortions she creates.

She related in her memoirs, for example, a tale of Mary
Musgrove, "The Empress of the Creeks " who was an ally of
Oglethorpe in the early years of the Colony of Georgia. After
praising Mary's resourceful negotiations with the General,
she typically adds, "When she was full of rum she made a fool
of herself as generally happens. Nevertheless there was in
her the making of a great woman."18 Felton almost always
qualifies any praise she offers non-whites with such bits of
racist cant or moralistic qualification of their "weakness"
as perceived by whites.

Rebecca Felton used this "great woman" trope extensively
in her writing. Even a casual reader cannot escape the
insinuation that in framing her memoirs as a sequence of
tales of heroic Georgians, she fully expects to be included
in that number. She may be disapproving of Mary Musgrove's
consumption of rum, but she admires her daring and her

command of authority. She mentions that Mary had a sequence

15

of bad husbands, but approvingly notes that when sober she
refused to obey them. Even closer to her heart is Nancy
Hart, the heroine of the Revolution who was, according to a
"critic" Felton quotes as saying, " a honey of a patriot and
a d;___l of a wife." 19

But her warmest remembrance is of her own Mammy, who she
knew by no other name. Her account is cloying and familiar to
anyone *who has read. the sentimental tributes of southern
whites to a favorite servant. "Mammy" is favored by no
quotation of homey wisdom but Rebecca does guiltily recall
how "one time I got impatient and slapped Mammy. I knew I had
committed a serious offense but I was too stubborn to say so.
I went to the big house, crept into my little bed and
suffered as I deserved to suffer...."20

This reminiscence occurs within her framework of "great
Southern women" of Georgia before the Civil War. Rebecca
Felton marveled at the fidelity of Black female slaves during
the war, which she attributes to that affectionate bond she
believes bound Confederate women and their black female
slaves together against a common enemy. Her paternalistic
coloration of this relationship is hardly unusual, but her
singling out of Black women for praise for their "fidelity
and general excellence" is striking. No such praise is
forthcoming for the partners and sons of these women,
however.21 Removed from affluence and absolute authority
over the lives of freed Blacks, Rebecca Felton's resentment

of their new position in society followed naturally after her

16

own domestic discontent. Like many another white feminist,
she regarded the new status of the freedman as an insult to
her, although she was far less reticent about expressing her
anger than. were other ‘women ‘who preferred to let their
spouses or male relations act out their own fears and
resentment for them.

Felton's candor and the shocking and violent nature of
her remedy for the perceived threat of the Black male
instantly connected with the Southern white man who saw in
this deceptively genteel matron a justification for his most
irrational and violent behavior. Many Southern women warmed
to her message. Nancy MacLean describes this surging
violence as "a pattern of political mobilization best
described as reactionary populism."22 She argues for
"militant sexual conservatism" as a key to this phenomenon.
This is also a key to Felton's crusade for the women of
Georgia, the mill worker and the farm wife, the "decent"
white women like herself who might have lost much but not
honor.

Her fear of isolation, however, shows itself all too
clearly in her speeches and writings in defense of the lonely
farm wife, ‘whom Felton sees as prey for the Black man
"roaming" the countryside. The paradoxical nature of her
fears and her fantasies can be explained by her romantic
image of Native Americans ( who are conspicuously absent in
her Piedmont home ) and by her terror of the Black freedman

who is all too present and familiar. Her identity as

17

plantation mistress altered and diminished, Felton demonized
the men she could no longer control.

Rebecca Felton herself became a useful symbol for the
powerful men of the "New South" exemplified by Henry Grady
who condoned lynching by publishing lurid and moralistic
accounts of incidents occurring throughout the South. Grady
made his views clear on the subject in his collected essays,
The_ueu_§gnth, published in 1890. While Grady's newspaper The
Atlanta_§gn§;itutign rarely supported Dr. Felton's political
views, Grady would certainly have been in accord with Rebecca
Felton. on the jpolitics of race. Recalling' the "shameless
villainies of Negro supremacy," Grady explained the legacy
of Reconstruction:

Deep was the degradation to which these sovereign States

were carried, and heavy as is the burden they left on

this impoverished people, it was only when the white
race, rallying from the graves of its dead and the ashes
of its homes, closed its decimated ranks, and fronting
federal bayonets, and defying federal power, stood like

a stone wall before the utmost temples of its liberty
and credit, and the hideous drama closed --that the

miserable assault was checked. 23

This rhetoric might be directed against Republicans and
the threat of black political power, but it expresses also
the implicit fear of ndscegenation that Williamson discusses
in W. In the next section I wish to
examine Rebecca Felton's character in light of various
psychological theories, expanding on the base established in

Williamson's study.

18

Self Image and Historical Agency

Rebecca Felton's friends were legion, as were her foes.
Without understanding her fierce loyalties and undying
enmities, any explanation of her often pathological behavior
is inadequate and misleading. The young Rebecca absorbed her
attitudes from her family, particularly her father. From him
came her rabid and abiding interest in politics, and from him
she absorbed her affinity for a good scrap. She wrote her
massive and largely tedious My_MemQrigs_gf_§ggzgia_zglitigs
(1911) primarily to settle scores with the Bourbons, and left
explicit instructions for a future biographer with her
voluminous papers "explaining" the feud. 24

One adjective used by both contemporaries and historians
alike to describe Rebecca Felton is "remarkable." She is
certainly that, and was, as Joel Williamson observed, "one of
the most interesting women the South ever produced." He sees
her relationships with her father and husband as particularly
significant: "In an age in which women were to be seen and
not much heard outside of the home, in a state where husbands
might legally whip their wives and sell their property, each
of these men was uniquely sympathetic towards Rebecca
Felton's rise in public life."25 Her intelligence and
ambition complemented first her father's upbringing, then her
husband's political and social agendas. To this I would add

that Rebecca's personality and position in Georgia society

19

greatly enhanced her rise to prominence. But what caused her
to turn sharply away from the Victorian female trOpes that
had served her so well and adopt a spare, angry racial
rhetoric in her Tybee speech of 1897, and marked a startling
preoccupation with the threat of interracial sex and violence
against women?

Felton came of age when the plantation South reached its
zenith and fully enjoyed the life of a young lady of quality.
Her marriage and subsequent heartbreak as a mother coincided
with what was certainly the galvanizing event in her life,
the Civil War. During the infamous "Great March," Felton
found herself forced to shuttle between her ailing mother in
the eastern part of the state and her family in Macon.
Sherman had swept through Bartow county early in 1864, and
the Feltons had been refugees ever since. Her youngest son
died in a measles epidemic, as did "thirty members of our
Negro family." Sherman's advance meant they lived "in hourly
dread and anticipation." 25

Rebecca Felton, like so many other southern women,
blamed the war on male stupidity, but her true feelings ran
much deeper. In Country_Lifie_in_§eg;gia she examined the
institution of slavery closely, displaying at times
sentiments that would not be out of place in an abolitionist
newspaper. But one passage stands out, one that is
characteristic of Felton's more reasonable public persona,
that of the wise old head who has seen the folly of men:

"All we individually owned disappeared, except the farm land,

20

and in my old age, I am pondering this question, why did not
the South compromise by selling their slaves or offering to
take a price, and put it up to those who were afraid of war?
Was slave ownership ever worth the sacrifice of blood and
treasure that resulted from that secession ordinance? " 27
This is Felton at her most disingenuous. She deliberately
ignores the question she herself raises: that the wealth of
the South, of the planter class, would not have existed
without slavery. Shrewd student of politics that she was,
Rebecca Felton knew that the North had no intention of
offering a financial settlement to and slavery. Writing her
memoirs in later years her tactics are those of appeasement
and reason, but as I will demonstrate, her newspaper columns
and public speeches reveal her true sentiments on the subject
of race.

Another remembrance is more telling of her beliefs,
although it is similarly packaged in the language of reason
and rationality and decidedly seen in hindsight. Describing
a Methodist camp meeting held at her plantation in 1860,
Felton writes:

There were neighbors and friends inside our tent armed
to the teeth waiting for midnight to go out quietly to
suppress a 'rising' that had been reported to them late
in the afternoon. The dread of negro insurrection and
social equality at the ballot box held the Southern
whites together in war or peace. That 'rising"was a
false alarm but the terror of those risings made

Southern fathers and husbands desperate as to remedies.
It was 'born in the blood and bred in the bone, ' and a

resultant of domestic slavery in the Southern States. 23

21

Rebecca Felton's memoir of 1919 went on to blame the East St.
Louis riot on the "dread" she describes. 29 The Americans
she addressed had seen for themselves what remedies southern
whites thought appropriate since D.W. Griffith's film "Birth
of a Nation" had been a national sensation four years
earlier.

Felton's writings are the only reliable view into her
character, since beyond her considerable ability to dissemble
she still reveals a great deal about her character because
she assumes her audience understands her and shares her
beliefs. Denied the opportunity to express her opinions in
a meaningful way, her tactics changed to those of subversion.
Her ability to charm and coerce outstrip our conventional
understanding of "southern charm": married to a an older man
of a sour disposition, Felton turned her considerable
energies outward as her maternal role diminished; a woman at
midlife able at last to negotiate a public life at a time
when change was evident everywhere in society. 30 As a
transitional figure Felton is especially striking-— what
suited her of the mythic code of "southern honor" she kept,
what interfered with her vision of the new southern lady she
ignored.

In Country_Life , Felton declared herself as having been
improved by her domestic captivity, by removal to a remote
place; the only adult white woman on her plantation. This

both suited her and left her unsatisfied. That an adult

22

woman would identify with girls carried off by "red savages "
shows a mind both fanciful and repressed. Annette Kolodny,
in her study We; examines the p0pularity of
captivity narratives among women readers argues women
identified strongly with the white female captives. Kolodny
believes that women, isolated and angry with husbands who
risked all to explore the frontier, placed that anger
"vicariously... onto the dark and dusky figure of the Indian,
a projection of the husband's darker side."31 Rebecca
Felton, the young wife of an older husband who remained on
his plantation to protect his property during the Civil War,
must have been ambivalent about Dr. Felton's nonparticipation
and her confinement to her home. Numan Bartley observes
that Dr. Felton "did not enjoy good health" and thus remained
at home, able to protect his family if threatened by the
invading forces, which interestingly enough becomes a
familiar trope of Rebecca Felton's writing in the 18908. 32
She might identify with Nancy Hart, who proved herself
capable of defending her own home, but Felton portrayed the
typical Georgia planter's wife as a helpless victim in
waiting without her man.

Marriage was decidedly a subject that Rebecca Felton
addressed with her characteristic passion. She acidly
observed that "The marriage business is a lottery. You can
draw a prize but you are more likely to draw a blank." 33 Her
frank criticism of the inequities of marriage is all the more

remarkable considering most women had been inculcated in

23

their duty to their mates and masters just as Felton had as a
young girl. As Bertram Wyatt-Brown points out, "Like the
slaves who often heard in the white people's church about the
necessity to obey, women were commanded to defer to male
authority. " 34 Despite her frequent praise of her obliging
spouse, enough bitterness tinges her writings to raise

questions about the reality of the Feltons' domestic bliss.

A mother who bore five children and saw only one survive
to adulthood, Felton's considerable energies were swamped by
her domestic life: "For eight or ten years my life was so
absorbed in my children that it was Cloister-like, months
elapsing sometimes when my feet were never outside the front
gate. "35 Her biographer attributes her entry into politics
and journalism as an answer to her sorrow, but her
correspondence often reflects a scarcely-concealed impatience
to participate in life outside the "woman's sphere." Perhaps
as an answer to those who would question her ladyhood, some
of her most impassioned speeches and writings were on the
subject of motherhood; two representative speeches ("A Word
to Men Concerning Their Mothers " and " The Problems That
Interest Mothers ") are contained in her memoir W
W 36 Felton, a lively, very
opinionated woman, had been obsessed with politics since
childhood and must have been delighted to finally have the
opportunity to voice her concerns when her husband started
the W in 1885. At the time of her

greatest literary output, Felton is past her child-rearing

24

days and her most trying years, but still clearly in thrall
to her suppressed ambitions. Certainly the life of a sedate

older woman was not for her.

Her memoirs reveal her true identification with Georgia
heroines was with the bold defender of home (and country)
Nancy Hart, and the "Empress of the Creeks," Mary Musgrove.
She clearly yearns for a more heroic age, one of thrilling
female adventures in the wilderness and a frontier where
powerful women dealt directly with powerful men. The colonial
experience in Georgia provides her with vivid figures for her
pamphlet, "Romantic Stories of Georgia Women", which
concludes with her own story, neatly placing herself in
history and crafting a self-serving narrative. 37
Constrained by the straitjacket of "true ladyhood," even more
farcical after the grueling experiences of Southern women
during the War, Rebecca Felton must have felt impatient and
cheated of a chance to be a great woman on the scale she
imagined.

Her home life was that of a farm wife. Hard work was
the daily round. The Feltons financial crisis persisted for
decades, anxiety over crops and prices was a constant theme
in her letters and columns. Quite a different life that the
valedictorian of Madison Female Academy had imagined since
playing the piano and mastering dance steps were unimportant
now. These social skills mattered far less than her skill at
writing "themes" -- writing became her one important release

and a source of both money and personal fulfillment.

25

Many southern women found themselves in an uncomfortable
position of privation that brought out hitherto unsuspected
entrepreneurial skills. After the war many turned to teaching
as Felton herself did for two years. Although culture and
character was required of a female teacher (as it would not
do for an unsuitable woman to instruct pupils), it was a
considerable drop in status for a member of the planter
class. One woman frankly called it "drudgery." Ella
Gertrude Clanton Thomas, herself a product of Wesleyan Female
Academy in Macon, complained to her diary in February 1880
concerning vanished prosperity and privilege:

Perhaps persons who have never been accustomed to

anything better are satisfied.with the position in which

they find themselves but to me bare floors in ‘winter--
windows without shades —-and broken plastering are
trials much more irritating than 1088 of property. They
are constant, unending in their annoyance, the more so
because I feel I ought to be above such trifles. Loss

of preperty, public advertisements are terrible.... I

do not think even my own family know how I have felt my

change of fortune. I think I have borne a brave front.
38

She wrote of her cherished rosewood chairs "with
coloured brocatelle embroidery. Some of them broken ."
Thomas also mentions her piano, which along with the
remnants of her once splendid parlor she clung to
stubbornly.39 Like Felton, Thomas had begun a small school.
Her obvious pride in her cultivation and ability is, like her

parlor, a link to the past in the midst of penury. Thomas

26

was unlucky in her husband, a weak man and a poor manager.
Felton, on the other hand, continually praises "the Doctor",
while she allowed minute glimpses of her real opinion of men
and marriage in her columns and private letters.

About Dr. William Felton we learn little beyond his
political opinions. 4° The memoirs of Southern elite women of
the period are characteristically romantic and adoring when
referring to a husband, yet rarely venture beyond a
description of a spouse as a good man, a loyal Southerner and
a benign slaveholder . A Louisiana woman raised on a
plantation, Caroline Elizabeth Merrick, opposed slavery, but
exulted in Emancipation seeing her own freedom at hand:
"When President Lincoln issued his proclamation of freedom to
our slaves I exclaimed: "Thank heaven! I too will be free at
last!‘ --forgetful of the legal disabilities to which white
women of these United States are yet in bondage. "41 This
observation comes after a long passage describing the
goodness and fine sensibilities of her beloved husband. Dr.
Felton seen through his wife's eyes is much the same, except
that his wife frequently remarks on his growing infirmity
while her own narrative grows more assertive and bold with
the passage of time. She sees herself as a heroic avenger of
"the Doctor's" reputation, but this Joan of Arc posture is a
clever invention to conceal her own advancement in the public
arena and protection from accusations of most unfeminine

ambition.

27

Dr. Felton was, as suspected by the Feltons' political
enemies, more and more a mere shadow of his wife. The charge
that Rebecca Felton was the real power in their partnership
only became true in the Doctor's later life, when it became
clear he was an invalid at their Cartersville farm, never to
reemerge, while his wife traveled and built her reputation as
a crusader. While Rebecca enjoyed her life as a Lady Manager
at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, her letters
home reflect an ill-concealed impatience with her husband's
domestic problems. A letter of March 19, 1893 instructed
him not to pay a "rascal" sharecropper: "Don't pay him a
nickel--for he owes Johnson all he has in the cotton -- and
owes me $4.00, with interest from 1890...." Exasperated by
his understandable fretting after their cook has left, she
continues," ...you must get another... I can't think of
anyone that would suit you -- but you must get a boy, if you
can do no better." That dispensed with, she blithely
recounted her adventures at the fair. Her cheerful tone may
have been an attempt to appease her spouse, or divert him
with news. Oddly, her papers only include her letters to
him, this from a woman who seems to have kept virtually all
of her correspondence intact in her papers. There is one
terse, angry telegram preserved from the same year
instructing her to "Are you planning to reside permanently in
Chicago. Answer immediately." Dr. Felton was, of course, an
ailing older man who depended on his dynamic younger spouse

to run his household and order his life, and her absence

28

obviously disturbed him. Her response is a two-page defense
describing her many letters home which have yet to reach him,
defensive yet placating in its tone. 42

The relationship between Rebecca and William Felton
illustrates well what the psychologistlanthropologist David
L. Gutmann describes in his landmark study of gerontology,
Begiaimefi_£gwers. Gutmann proposes a developmental position
in refutation of the "depletion perspective-—the weak face
of aging -- that currently dominates conventional thinking in
gerontology. “ 43 His concern is with changes in the entire
lifespan of an individual. Elders he sees as the locus of
knowledge and experience, to be dislodged at peril to the
health of a society. Gutmann is, of course, concerned with
the present, but I believe his analysis is particularly
apprOpriate in the Victorian South and sheds light on the
development of Rebecca Felton's self image and agency.

He constructs "special developmental axes along which
older men and women mature into their special assignments as
emeritus parents."44 Further, he sees males in general as
progressively less assertive and women, inversely, asserting
themselves.45 In a chapter titled "The Inner Liberation of
the Older Woman", Gutmann describes a type he calls the
Moralistic Matriarch. "They are alert to the moral
deficiencies of others and having found them, they take
direct, corrective and retaliatory action. "45 Felton's Tybee
speech is the best illustration of this, in which she

advocated the lynching of Black men to protect white women

29

 

 

 

from rape. Criticized by the Bostgn_mran§gript she retorts,

" My rebuke was intended for the inertness of our pulpits in
this crisis; my indignation was expended on the incapacity of
our courts, and my contempt was freely expressed for the
deficient manhood which could not protect the innocent and
helpless, in the land their fathers died to save. " 47In a
short statement, she condemns the churches, the legal system

and white men, and invokes filial piety and the Lost Cause.

According to Gutmann, the Moralistic Matriarch derives
her power and authority from her years and her progeny.
Rebecca Felton seemed to have adopted the entire population
of Georgia as her children, with particular attention to the
white daughters. When Mary Phagan was murdered in 1913,
Felton's columns rang with indignation and fury against the
hapless Leo Frank. 48 The death of children is an oft—
repeated theme of her writings, almost as frequent as her
lectures on the dangers to white women's virtue.

It is likely that the death of her children weighed
more heavily on her than she recognized. After all, she was
reared in the Old South, where, as Bertram Wyatt Brown
described in figuthe;n_flgngr , "Childbearing was an ancient
and sacred calling of the gender."49 He cites Mary Chesnut's
diary on the subject of her childless marriage, and observed
that " Barrenness ...had always been a point of shame... The
married woman who disappointed her husband and relations in
this respect could scarcely help having feelings of

incompleteness. Moreover, it cut her off from a source of

30

personal power-~the duties of nurture-~and from a source of
fulfillment as a woman. " 50 While Rebecca had borne many
children, only one survived, and as any woman who has lost
children can attest, no matter how many children she has, the
lost child is never forgotten. Even if Felton was not
barren, losing so many children might well have shamed her.
She often referred to herself as a ”childless mother." 51
While she attributed the mortality of her young children to
the harsh conditions of wartime, and the loss of children in
an age of large families and primitive medicine was common,
it clearly marked her life as a major disappointment. At the
point in her life when she had hoped perhaps for a large,
bustling clan about her, she had instead a frail, irritable
old man, a sickly adult son, and a troublesome step-
daughter. It is clear why the public sphere held such an
attraction for her, if only as an outlet for her considerable
energy.

At age 38, Felton began her public career in earnest,
and quickly achieved her place as the much remarked
"political 'She' of Georgia." In 1873, as the South was
convulsed by Reconstruction, Rebecca Felton and her husband
saw their moment and seized it. As Williamson explained in
describing the demagogic political leaders of the era (not to
be confused with "Radical Republicans") : "Radical leaders,
like Radicals at large, seemed to be people specially
affected by a sense of powerlessness, people who strove

valiantly to develop power and exercise it to counter that

31

feeling of vulnerability. Of course, managing black people
in an arrogant and arbitrary manner was a satisfying exercise
for such people, but there was another nemesis to be dealt
with , and a very real one --the North." 52 The North,
however, would serve as the Feltons' avenue to political
power. Entering national politics was a natural step for the
ambitious couple, and a way to effect change in Georgia that
would trump their enemies in Atlanta, particularly John
Gordon and the Bourbons.

John Talmadge, a perceptive biographer of both Rebecca
Felton and Corra Harris, understood well the dynamics of the
Feltons' marriage and echoes Gutmann's theory on the sex
difference in aging:

The poet Robert B. Tristam Coffin has said that a

newly-married Maine wife always walks a few steps behind

her husband. With the passing of the years, however, she
gradually moves up , and then they walk together until
that day when she goes ahead 'to break the force of the
wind for an old man.‘ ...If Coffin had been writing
about the Feltons he would have had to add another

stanza to the poem. When the Doctor retired, his wife
went on alone. She had come to love the force of the

wind. 53

As Rebecca Felton became more visible and influential,
some of her sharpest critics were women, and some were even
counted among her friends. Corra Harris (1869—1935), Georgia
writer and journalist, shared a great deal with Felton in
terms of upbringing and ideology, but her disapproval of her
friend Rebecca is plain in the character of Susan in her 1915

novel, Ibe_§g:§itizens, an attack on feminism.and woman

suffrage:

32

This was Susan Walton, the one celebrated character
Jordantown had produced since the Civil War, and she was
a source of embarrassment rather than pride. According
to the ethics of that place no woman should be known
beyond her own church and parlour, much less
celebrated... It was said of her that she kept her
husband, an elegant soft old gentleman, in Congress for
up to a century and up to the very day of his death by
being a thorn in the side of the political life of the
state. She kept scrapbooks in which she pasted
dangerous and damaging information about politicians and

prominent men generally. 54

Somewhat of a public figure herself, although a
"reluctant" one, Corra Harris condemned Susan/Rebecca's
oratory : "She made public speeches at a time when no other
woman in the South would go further than to give her
"experience" in church or read a missionary report before the
Women's District Conference... it was said that she actually
did address that dignified body [the state legislature ] as
'boys', and that the 'boys' liked it." Harris described Susan
as "waddling like a fat old duck" while wearing widow's
weeds and being generally uninterested in her appearance.
She manages some grudging appreciation of her gifts: " She
had the brains of a man and the temper of an indignant but
tenderhearted woman ....And what she said was violently
effective. Her victims might persist in the error of their
ways, but not one of them ever recovered from the face-
scratching fury of her attack."55 Ing_gg:§i;izens parodied

Rebecca Felton and her beliefs as a counterpoint to a

33

saccharine love story, conflating feminism with aging and
vituperation, and contrasted it with youth and beauty. At
the novel's end, a young woman expresses an ardent desire
to abandon politics to darn socks and iron for her beloved.
The life of the public sphere created only discord and made
women unnatural in Harris's view.

Whatever Corra Harris really felt about Rebecca Felton,
and jealousy is just one possibility, the most interesting
aspect of their relationship is that Felton appreciated this
caricature and promoted the book. Perhaps Felton was
acknowledging that she was past beauty and the pedestal, and
accepted that as a matron of years she could behave as she
pleased. Williamson advances this theory in Ino_g;noiolo_o£
Bnoo, and convincingly argues that Rebecca Felton's racial
rhetoric was one strategy she used to force the creation of a
new and more equitable society. 55 As we shall see, however,
her vision extended to whites only, consistent with her
lifelong belief in white supremacy.

In an interview with Isma Dooley of the Atlanta
Constitution, Rebecca Felton sees her role as a great woman
and a reformer. Age suited her better than youth, as she was
widely admired , as Dooley puts it: "She is an old woman who
has been a new woman for fully thirty years." Rebecca
Felton states:

I must have had crude but novel ideas not familiar to

Southern latitude, but as I survey 'the new woman's'

field of action at the close of the nineteenth century,

I find that I have been 'breaking ice' for a quarter of

a century, and although I was forced to stem the current
with my rude bark, I find the tide is floating in a

34

convoy of elegant and cultured women who are becoming
leaders of thought and opinion. 57

It pleased Rebecca Felton to think of herself as a noble
woman who had paved the way for her sisters, but her fame was
bought at a high price. She would be chagrined indeed to
consider her present obscurity, and to find that she has been

left out of the canon of "great women" as constructed by

historians.

Notes

lRebecca Latimer Felton, Ihe_Bomantic_§tor¥_of_§eorsials

Homes.(AtlantazThe_Atlanta_9eozgian_and_§unda¥_American.
1930),45-46.

2 John Talmadge,.Behecsa_Lafimer.£elton1__Nine_§torm¥
,Dooaoos (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1960 ) ,
129.

3 Barbara B. Reitt.ed~Qeorsia_flomen1_.a_9elehration.
( Atlanta:The Conger Printing and Publishing Company --
Atlanta Branch, American Association of University Women,
1976) , 17.

4 Rebecca Latimer Felton. Qountr¥_Life_in_§eorsia_in_the
I E H X Il-E' J I' . E I l' l' E E .
Homon,ed.Annette Baxter, Leon Stein, and Barbara Welter.
(New York: Arno Press,1980),Reprint of a 1919 edition.56.

5 Talmadge,‘Behecca_Latimer_Eelton, 5-

6 Ibid. , 113.

35

7 Joel Williamson, Ihe_Qrucible_of_Basei__Blask_:flhite
1 . . l . i l 5' . . (New
York: Oxford University Press , 1984 ) 128-30.

8 Mary D. Robinson, "Lucy Breckinridge Comments on

Marriage, 1862-1864." In.Maior_Prohlems_in_the_nistorx_of
tho_Amezioan__§ontn, ed. Paul D. Escott and David R.
Goldfield. Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath and Company,

1979. 381.

9 Talmadge.Behessa_Latimer_Eelton , 113.

1° Feltonigountrxlhife_in_§eorsia . 10.

11 Ibid., 11.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Williamson. The.§rucihle_of_3ase. 116-19.

15 Bertram Wyatt-Brown.rSouthern_Honor_i_Ethioa_and

Bobeyior_in_tne_gld_5ontn.(New York:Oxford University Press,
l982).231.

16 Ronald T.Takaki, Iron_Qases_i_Bace_and_Cnltnre_in

Nineteenth:Centur1_America (New York: Alfred A- KnOPf.
1979) , 84-92.

17 Winthrop D- Jordan, Hhite_Qxer_Black_i_Amerisan
AhtiLndaa_IQWa£d_th§_H§9£Ql_l§§Q:l§lZ (Chapel Hill 3 The
University of North Carolina Press, 1968 ),162-63.

18 Felton,Countr¥_Life_in_§eorsia . 96-

20 Ibid.

36

21 Ibid.

22 Nancy McLean,"The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered:
Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary

PopulismuoumaLoLAmericarLHistorx .78.3(December 1991)
:920.

23 Henry W.Grady,1no_Nou_§ontn (New York:Robert Bonner's
Sons,l890),24l.

24 Talmadge,156—157.

25 Williamson,124.

26 Katharine H. Jones, MW
gng_;hg_1§;gnt_nazon1 (New York:The Bobbs-Merrill Company,
Inc.,1964),35-36.

27 Felton. W .84.

28 Ibid.,87.

29 Ibid.

30 Charles I» Flynn. W
W (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1983) , 140. Flynn calls
Dr. Felton " a sanctimonious, vituperative preacher
politician ."

31 Annette Kolodny. WW
EMIWWW ( Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina, 1984 ), 33 For a

thoughtful discussion of the persistence of the captivity
narrative in American history, see June Namias, White

I
0.. ‘r- 1‘!‘..‘ t... .0, 9! '_‘ "1‘ v.0 .9 ‘

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

32 Numan Bartley, We
(Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1983), 119.

Bartley devotes more attention to Rebecca Felton than her

37

spouse, and credits her with being the more effective
politician.

33 Ibid. , 121.

34 Wyatt-Brown.$_outhern_flonor . 231.

35 Talmadge,15.

36 Felton,gonntzy_Lifo ,257, 259.

37 Felton, W. John
Talmadge describes this book: " The first two of the twenty

short chapters deal briefly with Mary Musgrove, the Creek
princess, and with Nancy Hart, the legendary heroine of
Revolutionary days; and the last four describe the rather
sparse achievements of Georgia women in such fields as
education, journalism, and literature. The remaining
fourteen tell the story of one Georgia woman: Rebecca
Felton." 134 .

38 Virginia Ingraham Burr.ed,1he_§ecret_fixes_1he_flonmal
52W (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press,1990), 395-396.

39 Ibid.

40 Stephen Hahn, WW

2011‘ ‘- -O‘ 9‘ '0‘ 0911-. .0 0 0‘ 1‘. 0. -'. 01. O Q
lfioo;1§2Q (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) 226-237.
Hahn's study discusses William Felton's political career and
clarifies his role as an Independent. Dr. Felton's character
is only discerned through his fiery rhetoric and contentious
political style.

41 Caroline Elizabeth Merrick, Did—Iim§§_in_nixi§_L§ndt

W-(New York: Grafton Press, 1901).
12.

38

42 Rebecca Latimer Felton, Chicago, to William H.
Felton, Cartersville,March 19, 1893. Transcript in the hand
of Rebecca Latimer Felton,Felton Papers,3:2, Box 3,Ms. 81.
Correspondence, etc. 1893. Telegram from William H. Felton
to Rebecca Latimer Felton, April 5, 1893.Rebecca Latimer
Felton to William H. Felton,April 8,1893.

43 David Gutmann,Booloimoo_£onoto.(New York: Basic
Books, 1987),5.Gutmann states:"Whereas adult males start from
a grounding in Active Mastery, including autonomy from and
even dominion over the husband. Across cultures, and with
age, they seem to become more authoritative, more effective,
and less willing to trade submission for security."

44 Ibid.,133.
45 Ibid.140.
46 Ibid.

47 Rebecca Latimer Felton, Felton Papers, University of
Georgia.

48 Horace Montogomery,ed.§oo;ginn§_in_2;gfiilgi
111W, "Rebecca

Latimer Felton" by John E. Talmadge.(Athens: University of
Georgia, 1958) 299.

49 Wyatt-Brown,Sontno;n_flonon,236-237.
50 Ibid.

51 LeeAnn Whites,Introduction in Qixidgd_flgn§g§i

fiende:_and_tno_giyil_flan ,ed.Catherine Clinton and Nina
Silber (New York:0xford University Press,1992),3.

52 Williamson, 503.

39

53 Talmadge, 90.

54 Corra Harris, The_so:§itizens_ (New York: Doubleday.
Page and Co. , 1915) , 21-3.

55 Ibid.

56 Williamson, 303.

57 Felton, Countr¥_Life. 122.

40

II. A New South Prophet in "The Land of the Tree and the Home

of the Grave"

Rebecca Felton's impact on her region and her
constituency was significant in her own time, but the real
assessment of her influence has only begun as scholars probe
the connections between women and white supremacy. In its
earliest form, women's history as a discipline was strongly
influenced by the "founding mothers" approach, much as the
study of "lost women writers" absorbed the attention of
literary scholars in the last two decades. Many were
unqualified heroines uncovered by those pioneering scholars,
but now, as the field matures, our attention is also focused
on the women whose influence on history was malignant, or at
best, ambiguous. Since it is impossible to render Rebecca
Felton's career without accounting for her support for white
supremacy, she has been left to wait for a feminist
assessment that realistically evaluates her achievements and
delineates her role as an advocate for lynch law.

In August of 1897, Rebecca Felton gave an address to the
Georgia Agricultural Society meeting at Tybee, entitled "Farm
Wives and Their Needs." The audience, largely affluent and
male, was startled by this speech, which on its face was a
plea for the women of Georgia who, like herself, were an
integral part of farm life. Felton asked that the men in

agriculture recognize that their wives needed and deserved

41

some equity in their property, the "wife's farm."1 But the
sensational aspect of her speech , eagerly reported by the
press, was her stern upbraiding of Georgia's white men for
what she believed was their failure to protect their women
from rape. She painted a lurid picture of women alone on the
farm, vulnerable to attack from Black men, "... if it takes
lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from drunken,
ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week if
it becomes necessary." As Williamson observes, her words
seemed the "gospel truth" to the planters and her incendiary
opinions took on a life of their own, which had tragic

consequences for the already besieged African—American.2

Rebecca Felton was a true maverick, a born politician
and pundit. Restrained by nothing more than duty to her
family, she staged a careful and subversive agenda for
women's rights that encompassed more than fifty years in the
public eye. Her self—image was firmly grounded in her role
as a southern white elite woman, yet as LeeAnn Whites has
pointed out, much of her rhetoric was distinctly that of the
"new woman."3 Claiming sisterhood with the less fortunate
women of her region, Felton launched her most famous
campaign. She could not have anticipated that her Tybee
address would gain her so many new admirers and supporters.
Neither could she envision this description of her: "This
woman not satisfied with the South's bloody record since the

war is clamoring and whining like a she wolf for more human

42

sacrifices, and an increased flow of human blood. She is
unmercifully pounding a helpless and defenseless people...."4
The author of that novella, "Jack Thorne" begins his
W, with this imagined
outburst by the Black editor of the Wilmington Bogota ,
Alex Manly. Manly's response to Rebecca Felton generated
even more controversy than the Tybee speech, and inspired two
works of fiction based on the Wilmington Riot of November 10,
1898. Both David Bryant Fulton (writing as "Thorne") and
Charles Weddell Chestnutt in his The_narrou_of_Tradition,
felt compelled to address the horrors of the event more
properly known as the Wilmington Massacre from the
perspective of the victims. Both novels utilize Manly's
editorial in their plots, but neither sees the exchange
between Felton and Manly as the provocation for the events
of November 10. Most accounts have dismissed the BEQQIQ
editorial as a convenient blind for what actually provoked
white supremacists—- the Populist/Republican fusion
Republican government of the city of Wilmington, considered
until that date to be the most tolerant Southern city in the
matter of race. But just as the "threat to white womanhood"
or "rape" was the convenient excuse for lynchings, so the
Felton/Manly exchange served as a incitement to a massacre.5
Trudier HarriS' study WW1
WWW: explores the nexus
of "violations" of the southern white male psyche. She cites

a reporter's account of a lynching and burning of a Black

43

man accused of attacking a white woman. The reporter asked
if the man was guilty and if any attack had actually
occurred. A bystander answered the question concisely and
chillingly:"No, I was told; that was really irrelevant. No
particular crime was being avenged. The Negro population was
being warned never to forget that the coloured man in the
South is still a slave, that between him and the white man
there can be no law, no claim to justice."6

Lynch law superseded the gains of Reconstruction among
both Blacks and whites, and linked both inextricably to the
days of slavery. Wyatt—Brown observes in Sontno:n_nonot that:
"Lynchings consciously defied the law and abstract justice
and could result in an explosion of hatred, rage and
anarchy... As anthropologist Victor Turner argues, the use of
ritual tends to anticipate deviations and conflicts by
channeling crowd actions into long—practiced forms." 7 The
ritual of lynching had more power to control behavior than
any government, and this Rebecca Felton knew implicitly. It
is doubtful that she was unaware of the effect her Tybee
address would have on her audience, though her subsequent
denials have a familiar ring of dissemblance. In her way,
she had found her opportunity to stand on the pedestal,
fulfill her part in the ritual and slake her ambition all at
the same time.

The Manly/Felton controversy may matter less in
explaining the Wilmington massacre and the surge in lynchings

than the familiar scenario of southern Blacks achieving

44

economic parity with whites and then suffering a violent
backlash. Ida Wells—Barnett, the famous Black journalist,
became an anti-lynching activist after the lynching of her
friends Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Steward in
1892, managers of the successful Black-owned "People's
Grocery" in Memphis.

For Wells-Barnett, the economic link to lynch law was
all too clear. In her essay, "Lynch Law in all Its Phases",
she dissected the events that led to the burning of her press
and her exile from Memphis. Significantly, it was her EIEE
Soooon editorial that contained the statement, " Nobody in
this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie
that black men rape white women. If Southern white men are
not careful they will overreach themselves, and public
sentiment will have a reaction. A conclusion will then be
reached which will be very damaging to the reputation of
their women." 8 The Memphis gommotoinlznoooal and the
Exonino_&oimitn; fired back its own editorial threatening to
lynch the editor, and the result was the destruction of
Wells' press. She was traveling to Philadelphia to attend
the A.M.E. conference at the time, and thus narrowly escaped
the mob. Such was the rage of whites against her that Wells
recalled that a white "lady" had professed regret that the
three men were lynched "but she did wish there was some way
by which I could be gotten back and lynched." 9

All this should have warned Alex Manly that his

editorial would provoke a terrible response. The pattern

45

had become alarmingly clear, but as Williamson suggests in
Ino_gtnoiolo_ofi_3noo , perhaps the growing power of Blacks in
North Carolina assured him that he could "defend the colored
man" with impunity. 1° The reality was that very little had
changed. In fact, the old restraints of common decency were
crumbling, as Charles Chestnutt's old white gentleman Mr.
Delemere says: "Time was, sir, when the law was enforced in
this state in a manner to command the respect of the world!
Our lawyers, our judges, our courts, were a credit to
humanity and civilization. I fear I have outlasted my
epoch,-- I have lived to hear of white men , the most favored
of races, the heirs of civilization, the conservators of
liberty, howling like red Indians around a human being slowly
roasting at the stake."11 The old planters' 'gentility' had
vanished when a threat to his economic life and racial
purity seemed imperiled.

Rebecca Felton's address at Tybee was the first step for
her own crusade to achieve political hegemony. Cloaked in
her passionate appeals for gender equity and the "wife's
farm" was her call to honor, a message no southern person,
particularly no white man, could mistake. In the next
section, the Tybee speech and the Wilmington Massacre will be
examined in the light of this understanding of ritual and the

consequences of the Felton/Manly controversy.

46

The Press as Pedestal

Rebecca Felton wrote compulsively, and few details
about Georgia life escaped her attention. It can be said
that the Tybee address gave her one of her most significant
opportunities, as Hoke Smith, the publisher of the Atlanta
Jonznnl , offered her a column on "women's issues" the year
after her greatest notoriety, 1899. The part the press
played in creating her as a symbol was substantial, and both
the gontnal and the Qonotitntion had a role in creating "Mrs.
Felton," the woman who dared to advocate white supremacy.

Felton was excellent copy, perfect for the "New
Journalism" that Henry Grady had made ubiquitous. Grady's
"keyhole journalism" was characterized by "sensational
stories and flippant headlines."12 Grady might have expired
in 1889, but his influence persisted in the relentless
boosterism of Atlanta's newspapers as well as the
preoccupation with melodrama and political chicanery. A
typical day for the gonotitntion included the latest news on
the new jail, a lawsuit filed over the "value of a dog" and
the "Queer Story of a Young Girl Whose Relatives Say She Is A
Lunatic" concerning a certain Miss Lula Meeks said to have
been in a "towering passion."13 Fallen women ruined by
drink and glib seducers abound in their pages, and the
content of all the city's publications reflect a profoundly

racist and nativist sensibility.

47

At the same time, the neWSpapers of the South were
propagating an image of the southern woman which one writer
called "hypocrisy... Editors played all the keys from
idolatry to gross jest." Southern women were "taught not to
say unkind words and to be horrified at any form of
crudeness...to learn more about men than Shakespeare, to love
God and her ancestry and to be a comforting nurse. In short,
'she is the strongest power in the South, that sweet-voiced,
gentle womanly creature that we call the Southern girl.”14
But the woman of the South worked hard after the Civil War.
Yesterday's belle found herself holding a broom instead of a
fan, and the newspapers promoted this new image : " Music,
art, painting and embroidering were ideal pastimes for girls,
but the time had come when sweeping the floor, washing
clothes, darning socks, cooking, patching breeches and
saving money were more important. A.girl's kisses could be
just as sweet and her smile just as tender in the kitchen as
under the parlor chandelier." 15

Many women's lives were indeed grim, and in the hard
economic years of the 1890s the newspapers offered a false
gentility and romantic nonsense about "moonlight and
magnolias" of the Old South to appeal to those sentimental
for the Lost Cause. Popular literature held up the
plantation ideal to a generation which had never known
either the prosperity of the antebellum years or the War
itself. As women began to claim a place in the public

sphere, the southern press could only adapt by creating a

48

fiction that a girl should emulate. All the old virtues and
accomplishments were needed as well as domestic skills and a
strong back. "Women's issues" were segregated to a women's
page marked by advertisements for Lydia Pinkham's tonic and
dress patterns. For a white woman to make the transition
from the society columns to the editorial page, she had to be
either be visiting royalty, an adventuress, or involved in a
murder. Rebecca Felton, who Margaret Mitchell dubbed
"Georgia's Empress," was a special case. 15 Her tenure at
the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, and subsequent
expositions in Atlanta, Tennessee, and St. Louis gave her
added prestige in a city that worshipped celebrity and
success. She turned an inheritance from her father into
investments in land which paid her in crops and revenue from
mining. Talmadge likens her drive for financial security to
the fictional Scarlett 0' Hara's, and perhaps the young
Mitchell also observed this also in the feisty old lady. 17
The gonotitntion had been hostile to the Feltons, having
supported their archenemy General Gordon in several
encounters, and once, their candidate for Governor, Major
A.O. Bacon, was accused of "hiding behind the petticoats of a
woman." 18 Mrs. Felton wrote most of her stinging epistles
under pen names like "Citizen" or "Bartow" (her home county),
ostensibly to conceal her identity and her gender. Rebecca
had been likened to H. Rider Haggard's ‘Sno , "a mythical
monster in a novel who preyed on mankind for two thousand

years." This was offered as an apology to the Feltons by the

49

culprit, a young upstart Bourbon legislator, E.G. Simmons,
who claimed he likened the Doctor's prison bill to the
monster. 19 In 1893, she tangled with Bishop Warren Candler
on the editorial page over, of all things, the ultimate
destination of financier Jay Gould's soul, and then
scrutinized Emory College's endowment, much to the annoyance
and embarrassment of Candler. 20 She survived it all, and
thrived as her legend grew.

Mrs. Felton had not mellowed by 1897, but the
Qonotitntion now found her rhetoric was extremely effective
in bolstering the white supremacy/peace and order mandate of
the New South gospel as articulated by Henry Grady. The
Nineties were turbulent and violent, and the constitution
became less reticent to give its sanction to lynching than it
had been in Grady's time. In time, confronting the "menace"
of the Wilmington Fusion government, the Qonotitntion_ would
drop the pretense of civility and become the most significant
newspaper supporting who the white oono_g;otnt. It was in a
unique position to influence the outcome, being the most
prominent paper in the Southeast, and one read avidly in the
Old North State. 21 Those readers would read of lynchings all
over the South, of so-called "race wars", and always
derogatory and viciously racist reporting on Blacks.
Significantly, Rebecca Felton's name began to appear with
remarkable frequency in the gonotitntion , especially after

with the Tybee speech.

50

The gontna1_was somewhat more moderate in tone, and
lagged behind the Qonotitntion in international reporting.
Local news predominated , and "Mrs. Felton" was a familiar
name in its pages. A November, 1898 goofing; article
announced, "Mrs. Felton Victim of Midnight Thief." 22 The
story concerned two robberies by a night burglar, who
absconded with the lady's traveling bag and some money while
the Feltons slept. The story calls her "one of Georgia's
noted women" (though such identification would hardly be
necessary for most readers) and nowhere in the piece is Dr.
Felton, a former congressman, mentioned in any other context
than as the owner of the Cartersville home and the lady's
husband.

The actual coverage of the Tybee speech by the press was
direct and reverent. A stark headline in the August 12
Jontnal declared "'LYNCH,‘ SAYS MRS. FELTON," and went on to
describe a "remarkable" and "sensational " address. The
most controversial passages were printed in bold-face type,

including this angry philippic:

I say it is a disgrace in a free country when such
things are a public reproach and the best part of God's
creation are trembling and crying for protection in

their own homes. And I say, with due respect to all
those who listen to me, that so long as your politics
takes the colored man into your embraces on election day
to control his vote; and so long as the politicians use
liquor to befuddle his understanding and make him think
he is a man and a brother; when they propose to defeat
the opposition by honey-snuggling him at the polls, and
so long as he is made familiar with their dirty tricks

51

in politics, so long will lynchings prevail because the
causes of it grow and increase. 23

The speech also included a plea for coeducation at the
state university and her pet project, the "Wife's Farm"
proposal, which was actually reasonable and would certainly
be a considerable step forward for rural women and a
recognition of their labor as part of the farm enterprise.
Both, however, were lost in the furor over lynching. Felton
had by all accounts given an inspired performance, by turns
passionately pleading with her audience, then subjecting
them to 'withering scorn. This was her moment, and she
intended to make the most of it.24

When. the .Agricultural Society closed its meeting at
Tybee, the headline read simply: " THE FARMERS OF THE STATE
ARE PROSPEROUS AND HAPPY." In a brief mention of her
"exceptionally able paper--sensational to a degree", the
reporter concluded that "The convention was thoroughly
entertaining." 25 The speech was picked up and republished
all over the country, and a flood of letters and
invitations followed. Many of the letters were from southern
men who praised Rebecca Felton extravagantly and must have
gratified her vanity. She had, after all, awakened their
consciences and they responded with the most elaborate
chivalry and astonishing ferocity. One correspondent is

typical, the Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture, 0. B.

52

Stevens. He called himself one of "Georgia's boys" and
thanked. her for' her’ sentiment, that of a "true Southern

women":

We will certainly hang not only a thousand a week, but
ten thousand, if necessary,to protect the honor and
virtue of our women. Without the influence of our noble
women, our manhood, our Christian influences would be
below par, -- and God knows they are low enough now. If
the Northern women and the Northern men wish to mingle
their blood with, and surrender their honor to the
negroes of the South, let them come down here and we
will let the negroes commit the horrible crimes upon
them without raising our hands for their protection.

Or, if they desire, let the negroes go north, we are
perfectly willing to get rid of them,

but we do propose to shield and protect our women. 26

Another correspondent, Mrs. Fannie H.Guilliams of Tennessee,

wrote:

Although myself a northern woman coming from the
vicinity of Chicago, I lived in Florida ten years, and
was never free from fear of the negroe one moment. And
if it were only death to be feared, that we could
endure. But the thought of outrage is worse than that
of a thousand deaths.... Every southern, (or northern
either) woman should lend their voice to yours to bring
about a state of affairs in which we may breathe the
breath of life without cowering and terror from the most
dreadful threatening dangers. 27

Mrs. Guilliams' letter is a window into Felton's own

psyche, belying the boldness of her words. Her rage is

53

inseparable from her fear, and similarly troubled men and
women found in her appalling racist propaganda permission to
employ the rope and faggot.Ida Wells examined this phenomenon

and offered this observation:

Their chivalric protectors were hundreds of miles away
in their northern homes, and yet they never feared any
'great dark faced mobs,‘ they dared night or day 'to go
beyond their own roof trees'... Before the world
adjudges the Negro a moral monster, a vicious assailant
of womanhood and a menace to the sacred precincts of
home, the colored people ask the consideration of the
silent record of gratitude, respect, protection and
devotion of the millions of the race in the South,to

the thousands of northern white women who have served
as teachers and missionaries since the war... The Negro
may not have known what chivalry was, but he knew enough
to preserve inviolate the womanhood of the South which
was entrusted to his hands during the war...Faithful to
his trust in both of these instances, he should now
have the impartial ear of the civilized world, when he
dares to speak for himself as against the infamy
wherewith he stands charged. 28

Most historians are disturbed by the idea of women
sanctioning lynching, but there is ample evidence that women
were frequently involved as spectators as well as accusers.
Certainly the 1893 Paris, Texas incident was a community
event . As Ida Wells described the scene in W
Henry Smith was burned alive before a "thickly-packed crowd
of 10, 000 persons... Every train that came in was loaded to

its utmost capacity, and there were demands at many points

54

for special trains to bring the people here to bring the
people here to see the unparalleled crime." Schools let out
for the day as well as "whisky shops", "unruly mobs were
dispersed...and everything 'was done in business-like

manner."29

Viewed today, it seems difficult to imagine how common
lynchings were, nor how brutal they were. Each lynching was
a stark tragedy played out like a bloody carnival, sometimes
with whole families in attendance, howling their approval as
the terrified victim suffered unspeakable agonies. Frequently
the victim was tortured before the noose did its work, then
the body was riddled with bullets. Often bits of bone and
pieces of flesh were carried off as ghoulish trophies. Many
were burned alive. W, a
remarkable documentary source compiled by the NAACP,
documents that each lynching victim had a story of his or her
own, and 'that often the victims had only in common the
misfortune to have offended the dominant whites in some way,
or all too often, merely to have been in the wrong place at
the wrong time. A quarrel over wages, an imagined slight --
virtually anything could provoke violence. One charge,
however, was more common than any other: rape. The statistics
compiled by the NAACP proved however that less than one fifth
of the lynchings reported 'were for rape or "attacks on

women." 30

One lynching became particularly notorious, that of Sam

Hose in Newnan, Georgia in 1899. Accused of killing a farmer

55

and raping his wife, Hose was tortured and burned alive by a
crowd giddy with blood lust, so much so that pieces of the
victim's bones, heart and liver were taken as trophies to
Atlanta. W.E.B. Du Bois, then at Atlanta University, recalled
viewing them in a shop window, while he was on his way to the
,Atlanta_§onotitntion office to meet with editor Joel Chandler
Harris. Du Bois had hoped to set forth the evidence
concerning the case, "a careful and reasoned statement of the
facts." He turned back, and his shock changed his research

forever:

Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and
eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm,
cool and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched,
murdered and starved; and secondly, there was no such
definite demand for scientific work of the sort that I
was doing....I regarded it as axiomatic that the world
wanted to learn the truth and if the truth was sought
with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion,
the world would gladly support the effort. 31

If Black America had become awakened and angered by
the dimensions of this phenomenon, much. of ‘white .America
still found it possible to read newspaper accounts and
dismiss it as regionalism and 'inevitable' considering the
times and the nature of the South. In the same spirit, it
became possible to accept the ‘word of a distinguished
gentlewoman who insisted that lynching was the only method
of social control that would aid the besieged women of the
South. Rebecca Felton's very respectability and her years

gave her license; she was a wise old woman who had seen many

56

horrors in her life. She never tired of reminding
audiences or readers of the atrocities of war-- she stood for
order and for sacred verities. Her message connected with
white men and women powerfully, and each found what comfort
they needed. By conflating all the old pieties about the
Southland, motherhood and ladyhood and linking them to
women's growing restlessness with the confines of separate
spheres, Felton crafted an appeal to the uncertain and the

fearful. It was a message for its time if ever there was one.

In L;on_§ngoo, Takaki describes the reality of the New
South; grimy cities like Birmingham and Atlanta, rapidly
growing and peopled by workers of both races.When Booker T.
Washington emerged as a black man "preaching the gospel of
the New South", he received an enthusiastic reception : "a
tension existed between the hope for industrial 'progress'
and the desire for racial dependency and order. If they could
only have it both ways, wealthy white southerners could feel
secure; no wonder they cheered so excitedly and even wept
when they heard Booker T. Washington deliver his startling
message at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition." Takaki further
portrayed the Atlanta Compromise as a signal event in white
consciousness and it obviously appealed to the women:" The
fairest women in Georgia stood up and cheered. It was as if
the orator had bewitched them. " 32

So when the promise of black docility seemed to have

fallen apart in Georgia, Rebecca Felton emerged as a prophet

57

of the Old Testament variety. If order could not be
negotiated , it must be enforced. The Tybee speech
legitimized lawlessness because of the unique person of
Rebecca Felton. The spectacle of a genteel-looking little
grandmother shaming an audience of sons, fathers, and
brothers into protecting their women from unspeakable
indignities was a potent one indeed. Many of the readers
were women, whom the dailies desperately wanted to entice
into the habit of readership.

When her column "The Country Home" column began its run
in 1899, Hoke Smith of the Atlanta Jonnnal had made a
perfect match between the paper and its readers. Between the
homey stories and the gardening hints, Rebecca Felton opined
on anything she pleased, to the delight of her many readers.
And what a fitting reward for Mrs. Felton, her very own bully
pulpit. White supremacy formed the bedrock of her beliefs,
and she was as John Talmadge described her, "a stout hater."
33 Whatever her enmity towards her political enemies, her
rage towards the creation of her own imagination, the "black

beast rapist," was unquenchable.

58

"Blood Will Tell In North Carolina"

This one-line prophecy appeared in the Atlanta
Qonotitntion in October 1898, a early indication of the
intent of the Democrats to overthrow the interracial
Populist-Republican government. Meanwhile, the controversy
over the Tybee speech never ended; instead, it simmered as
Felton continued to receive accolades and invitations to
speak about the state. She also received requests for
transcripts of the speech. A Philadelphia woman, Mary Salome
Allen, wrote to her expressing her admiration for her and
"the holy work you have begun-- here in the North we know by
oxoonionoo.nooolntoly nothing of their brutality for Thank
God they are kept in their place that of servants--& not
equals oxooot_nt_tno_goting_ooll§ . When the people of the
South...learn to.on;h.tno.oonoation of the Negro they will
learn the value of the purity —-of our sex—- hoping my
prayers for your followers (many I hope) will be of avail
that you may conquer." 34

John Herbert Roper comments on the repercussions of Mrs.
Felton's call to lynch "a thousand a week": "She was not
rewarded with that ghastly number of murders, but she exulted
in the wide dissemination of her address, a notice of which
was entered in the congressional report for Georgia's General

Assembly, as she exulted in the subsequent number of

59

lynchings: 165 recorded for 1897 and 127 recorded for
1898."35

Mrs. Felton's crusade took her across Georgia, propelled
by her sense of mission.Rebecca Felton was, however,
temporarily diverted by a critic, Marie Louise Myrick, who
received her own share of attention in June of 1898, and
presaged her exchange with Manly. It was not the first time
she had quarreled with another woman journalist. Usually she
appealed to her readers to back her. They always responded
promptly and in great numbers, accusing the writer of all

manner of sins. But apparently went unanswered--for awhile.

A cause celebre had occurred in 1891 when she castigated
fellow southerner Claire DeGraffenreid for her report in
W, "The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton
Mills."36 Stung by the unflattering portrait of lower-class
white women, Felton blasted DeGraffenreid as a traitor to her
region and implied she was no lady, effectively exiling her
from any potential influence she might have in helping to
effect change in the miserable lot of the mill workers.
DeGraffenreid defended herself ably, but Felton had used the
same old trope of "outraged morality" to great effect:
"Through her description of the supposed degradation of white
mill-working white women, DeGraffenreid created the basis,
according to Felton, not only for undermining the further
development of the southern textile industry, but she

simultaneously laid the ground for a northern attack on the

60

legitimacy of white supremacy as a whole."37 Rebecca Felton
had prevailed and held the moral high ground and must have
gratified the New Southites with her spirited response.

But a clever opponent found a weak spot in her armor.

Myrick, the editor of the Americus Iimoozgoootoon,
chaffed Felton for her celebrity and her audacity in
stepping out of her proscribed role as southern lady,
somewhat disingenuously considering her own position. Felton
complained to the editor of the Atlanta Jontnnl that she
"fell a victim to the virile and emphatic pen of the Americus
Timoo;3oootoot." Mrs. Myrick's column, "Let Our WOmen
Beware" is an arch little masterpiece, which nettled Felton
since she hated having the tables turned on her. Myrick wrote
that she had the "highest regard for the ability of the
learned and eloquent woman from north Georgia" and that
".Mrs. Felton has perhaps forgotten more than we can ever
hope to know, but there is one fact and truth we do know-—
that any woman, whether she be young or old, makes a sad
mistake when she voluntarily assumes either the political or
professional prerogatives of men." This was the sort of
challenge that, if made by a man, would have provoked Felton
to fire back a furious reply. But she "made no reply, but
saved the newspaper clipping, hOping at a future time to
'point a moral'...."38

Mrs. Felton was particularly vulnerable to this sort
of criticism, and she encountered it frequently from groups

like of the Daughters of the Confederacy, who believed she

61

went too far in advocating woman suffrage. It must have
galled her to read Myrick's pious lecture and hold her
tongue:
Believe that there are no accomplishments so pleasing,
self-satisfying and God- like as womanly
accomplishments.0ccupy the sphere properly accorded
heaven's best gift to man just as long as you can, for a
public life with its snares and cares is killing, and in

the and must bring precious little comfort to a woman.
Let [?] women beware and take care, and not like 'fools

rush in where angels fear to tread.‘ 39

Felton had gained her first real fame beyond her
husband's career as an activist in the Women's Christian
Temperance Union. It was the ideal entree into the public
sphere, since as Jean Friedman writes in Iho_£noloood_§aroon
"temperance viewed as a 'maternal struggle' widely appealed
to southerners because it implied 'womanliness first' and
reform second." 40 Mrs. Felton seemed to be "an instrument in
the hands of the dear Lord" to one writer who had been "so
drunk I had to shut one eye" to see the speaker but stopped
drinking altogether after her address. 41 Such virtue made
her unassailable as long as she confined herself to
appropriate crusades.

It was essential to Rebecca Felton's appeal to embody
womanliness and maternal virtue, which of course allowed her
the most outrageous latitude in expressing most unladylike
views. Marie Louise Myrick had exposed her in the same style
Felton herself employed to such devastating effect.She

professed herself amused when Myrick received gallantries and

62

applause upon her entrance to the Georgia gubernatorial
convention, but she submitted both clippings with a letter
clearly angling for the publication in the fionnnal , hoping
to show up the lady editor as a hypocrite.42 The importance
of this incident lies in the precedent it set in penetrating
Rebecca Felton's invulnerability, and that another lady of
the press had accomplished it made the cut worse. Her next
confrontation would be with Alex Manly, who, like Myrick,
parodied her style in his editorial, further provoking her
wrath. To be criticized by a woman and a colleague was
trying, but to be insulted by a Black man was beyond
endurance.

As the year 1898 progressed, the Atlanta press
reflected what could only be called a climate of violence.
The gonotitntion featured story after story of lynchings
around the state and in the South. In October of 1898,
evidence of a " gathering storm" 43 appeared: "FOUR LYNCHED
AT PHOENIX, S.C." described a story of an "election race
riot" that the Constitution blamed on the Tolbert family,
described as "white Republican leaders."A white posse
captured eight Black men after a "prominent farmer" was shot
during an argument with T.R.Tolbert concerning an electoral
challenge:

[The whites] were very quiet at first, but gradually

their passions rose.Cool-headed men tried to counsel

them not to do violence. Finally, however, one of the
negroes was dragged out in the roadway and riddled with
bullets.Two broke away and ran in one direction,and

another two ran in another. One was wounded while
fleeing,but made good his escape. The other three

63

remained on a log where they were sitting. The crowd,
now thoroughly maddened, went for them and all three
were lynched....Men of both races are thoroughly aroused
and there is no telling where the thing is going to

stop. 44

Directly opposite this account is another stark
headline: "LYNCHING IN BANKS COUNTY-~WILL GOBER, A NEGRO,
KILLED JACE AYERS, PROMINENT MAN-—Mob Organized Last Night
and Just Before Midnight Swung Gober to a Limb." The terse
account states that Ayers accused Gober of "running over his
father with a bicycle and he shot Ayers then." The report
states that fifty masked men lynched Will Gober in front of
the courthouse, a powerful symbol of lynch law united with
the very symbol of small town justice. 45 From tiny Homer in
the Piedmont to the Black Belt, the Pine Barrens and the
Coast, Georgia claimed more victims for the gospel of white
supremacy.

The gonotitntion continued to print the stories from
across the South: "NEGRO HANGED ON ALABAMA TREE is paired
with COLOR LINE IS PLAINLY DRAWN --Excitement Over Coming
Election in North Carolina --IS DAILY ON THE INCREASE." 46
The gonotitntion had kept its readers informed as to the
situation brewing in North Carolina -— one editorial cartoon
encapsulates the position of the paper. Below the caption
"North Carolina's Sweet womanhood Appeals to the Ballot For
Protection" is a young white man standing on a pedestal
marked "North Carolina." His left arm is outstretched

towards a roiling sea, crested by a huge black waterspout,

64

"Negro Domination" which threatens in the distance. His right
hand holds a ballot, and a young white woman clothed in
Grecian garb clings to him fearfully looking back at the sea.
She seems to be returning to the pedestal. In one image, the
readers of Atlanta and the Southeast were alerted to the
danger they most feared: "Negro Domination," which meant
miscegenation and a Black state.Suddenly Mrs. Felton's
prophecy was at their very doorstep.47

"BLACKS PROPOSE TO COLONIZE AND CONTROL NORTH CAROLINA"
read the accompanying headline, and DGIOW‘WaS this terse
statement: "...they will repeal the laws against
intermarriage between the races and mixed schools, and all
other laws which, in any manner, shape or form, provide for
separate accommodations for whites and blacks."48
In the writer's view, the whole New South structure of

separation of the races was imperiled.

And then there is the other danger , greatest of all,
the menace to the womanhood of the state, the
constant and growing peril of each man's wife and
daughter. That is the thought which is seated in the
mind and on the heart of each man's wife and
daughter....It cannot be denied that in many counties
the farmer leaves his family with apprehension. While
in the field his ear strained to hear the first shriek
of warning. His eye ever turns in the direction of his
humble home... such a tremendous wave of indignation
has just swept over the state over a published

slander on the white women that actual violence by the
criminally inclined has been checked. But if the
campaign of the blacks for the conquest of the state
succeeds this fall, an epidemic of assaults upon the
unprotected in the country is predicted. This has
aroused the pure womanhood of North Carolina to the
seashore to the mountains. They are asking their
husbands and sons how they intend to vote--for the

65

wives and mothers and sisters or for negro supremacy and
a reign of terror.49

What actually was happening in Wilmington, North
Carolina? H. Leon Prather, Sr.'s, whose flo_floyo_1nkon_n
W is the
single best source on the period,concludes that a deliberate
campaign of redemption created the climate that spawned
what he calls a "pogrom" against the backdrop of the
election. The chairman of the state Democratic Party,
Furnifold M. Simmons, engineered the campaign invoking the
feared "Negro domination ":"Charges of corruption, scandals,
and extravagance were to be leveled against the Republican-
Populist regime, but these were to be given secondary
consideration" since the real issue 'was the omnipresence of
Blacks in the lives of white North Carolinians. Whites
believed Black office holders, Black policemen and
magistrates in particular, abused their power. The appearance
of economic and political parity for Blacks in Wilmington
was intolerable for the white supremacists. 5°

Prather points to Raleigh Neus_and_9hserxer editor
Josephus Daniels as an important player in the Democrats'
scheme. 51 Daniels was in regular communication with Clark
Howell of the Atlanta Qonotitntion and their cooperation
insured that the propaganda campaign of the Democrats would
be disseminated in the New South capital. Daniels' influence
is clear in the above mentioned Qonotitntion piece, and shows

how valuable a piece of propaganda the Tybee speech had been

66

in rallying the whites. The reference to Felton's farm.wives
is deliberate as is the mention of the "colonization" of
North Carolina. The piece warns that Blacks are planning to
move in large numbers into the state, and Wilmington, which
had a majority of Black voters, provided them with enough
"evidence" that the migration had begun. If Rebecca Felton's
campaign had provided the spark they needed to inflame the
white voter, Alex Manly's response in August of 1898 was the
ultimate answer to their predicament.

The history of the editorial is one of deliberate
distortion, as Prather points out: "through certain
omissions, it was distorted from the beginning by the
Democratic news media. Scholars have perpetuated the
distortion by using Democratic papers as their sources..."
(Interestingly enough, the Atlanta Qonotitntion did publish
the entire editorial).52 Manly's reasons for writing the
editorial were as complex as the man himself. A Black man
who looked white, himself proof of the heritage of slavery
and race mixing, who dared to publish a paper that stood for
the growing influence and affluence of a Black professional
class, was as potent a symbol for the white man as Mrs.
Felton, the voice of southern honor.The editorial echoed Ida
B. Wells-Barnett's assertion of the falsity of "the old
threadbare lie that Black men rape white women..." as well
as her other trope of " White Juliets and Colored Romeos"
that so enraged the whites of Memphis.53 Ida Wells-Barnett

and Alex Manly both believed that the pen was an instrument

67

for justice, and like her,Manly "was a humanist, endowed
with a strong sense of black awareness; nevertheless, this
article touched white Southerners in their most sensitive
consciousness." 54 Manly was a young, idealistic and proud
Black man who had done much good.with his press, though "Jack
Thorne" says the editor was thought "high strung, bold and
saucy" by the white elite of Wilmington. 55 He was also
deputy register of deeds, one of the offending Black
officials. finnogot, a "documentary novella" dedicated to the
"eminent heroine Ida B. Wells-Barnett", is a homage to the
powerful, direct style of Wells—Barnett's prose and also to
Manly's .As historian Thomas Cripps states in his
introduction to Honoyor," Throughout the book the point the
point is made clear: proud, competent aggressive blacks
could not be tolerated by a white South bent on preserving
the old order." 56
The editorial "that shook the state from the mountains
to the sea" began by acknowledging the phenomenon of "Mrs.
Felton's Speech":
This woman makes a strong plea for womanhood, and if the
alleged crimes of rape were half so frequent as is
ofttimes reported, her plea would be worthy of
consideration. Mrs. Felton, like many other so-called
Christians, loses sight of the basic principle of the
religion of Christ in her plea for one class of people
as against another ....Mrs. Felton begins well, for
she admits that education will better protect on the
farm from the assaulter. This we admit and it should
not be confined to the white any more than to the
colored girls. The papers are filled often with
reports of rapes of white women, and the subsequent
lynching of the alleged rapists. The editors pour

forth volleys of aspersions against all negroes
because of the few who may be guilty. If the papers and

68

speakers of the other race would condemn the commission
of crime because it is crime and not try to make it
appear that the negroes were the only criminals, they
would find their strongest allies in the intelligent
negroes themselves, and together the whites and blacks
would root the evil out of both races.

Manly spoke from the perspective of a man who, like
Charles W. Chesnutt, viewed the entire scene of race
relations through the lens of class, and rightly assumed
'intellectual superiority to his adversaries. This alone would
have affronted the white reader who felt himself put upon by
Fusion rule, but to suggest that whites thoughtlessly
neglected their duty toward their women was unbearable.

Manly then instructed the white man on his duty as he saw it,

and once again, the effect was electric:

We suggest that the whites guard their women more
closely, as Mrs. Felton says, thus giving no opportunity
for the human fiend, be he white or black. You leave
your goods out of doors and then complain because they
are taken away. Poor white men are as careless in the
manner of protecting their women,especially on farms.
They are careless of their conduct towards them and our
experience among poor white people in the country
teaches us that the women of that race are not any more
particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with
colored men , then are the white men with colored women.
Meetings of this kind go on for some time, until the
woman's infatuation or the man's boldness bring
attention to them and the man is lynched for rape. Every
negro lynched is called a "big, burly black brute," when
in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had
white men for their fathers, and were not only not
"black" and "burly," but were sufficiently attractive
for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in
love with them.57

69

Prather points out that in all the newspaper accounts
concerning the Manly editorial, sexism is pervasive .The
reference to "your goods" is particularly insulting,
reducing women to property, which, in fact, they were
according to law. Every sentence in the editorial was
enough provocation for the hypersensitive white male, but
when Manly asserted that some white women chose consensual
relations with Black men, he committed his cardinal error.
He probably had a naive faith in the power of the press to
persuade and perhaps hOped to help normalize the social
climate by stating the facts of the South's hidden history.
It was, given his own personality, impossible for him to
resist challenging Mrs. Felton. But facts as incendiary as
these were suppressed, as Martha Hodes has observed in her
research concerning interracial sex during the Civil War.58
When Manly lectured the white man and challenged the word of
a respected matron of years, he had struck at the heart of
white supremacy. He was also evoking the resentment the
whites had felt in Wilmington's courts and public offices
observing the proliferation of Black professionals. Alex
Manly exposed the sexual exploitation of Black women and
touched on the class sensitivities of the South, always a
difficult subject for a region whose "aristocracy" was only a
few generations old, and sprang often from common clay as
Wilbur Cash wryly observed in W59

Mrs. Felton must begin at the fountainhead, if she

wishes to purify the stream. Teach your man purity. Let
virtue be something more than an excuse for them to

70

intimidate and torture a helpless people. Tell your men
it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a
white woman than for a white man to be intimate with a
colored woman.

Since Mrs. Felton and many southern women (notably Mary
Chesnut) commented disparagingly on the number of mulattos in
the South, this was a particularly pointed observation. They
were as "common as blackberries" and a curse on the South in
her opinion. 50 Manly had called attention to a painful
reality of the southern woman's life, and the women were no
less offended than their menfolk. Manly finished his
editorial in an almost Biblical fashion:

You set yourselves down as a lot of carping hypocrites;

in fact, you cry aloud for the virtue of your women,

while you seek to destroy the morality of ours.Don't
ever think your women will remain pure while you are

debauching.You sow the seed-- the harvest will come in
due time."61a

Once the editorial appeared in August, the Democrats knew
they had the perfect campaign literature with which to
achieve a double victory. They could break apart the Fusion
coalition and regain the state and begin the serious work of
social "redemption."

As the gonotitntion observed, " The publication set the
state on fire. The white republicans and the populist
fusionists saw at once what a terrible political blunder had
been made. The campaign was just opening and the democrats
had pitched their fight on the recovery of the state from

negro domination, declaring that the lives, virtue and

71

property of the people were at stake." 51 The campaign to
conceal what was an orderly conspiracy to seize control of
the city succeeded so well because of the notoriety and wide
circulation of the Manly editorial, and of course, by the
inevitable and no doubt eagerly awaited response of Rebecca
Felton. Their angry exchange distracted attention from the
deliberate manipulation of the white population and the
systematic intimidation of Blacks. Other charges flew back
and forth, notably that Manly had written the editorial at
the behest of the Democrats. 52 The Black community of
Wilmington was shocked and apprehensive, but support did
emerge for Manly, notably from a "society of black women of
Wilmington passed resolutions praising Manly for defending
the race."63

In Atlanta and Raleigh, the presses eagerly chronicled
the Fayetteville rally of October 20 and the parade and
"White Man's Rally " of November 2, which also featured that
old southern crowd -pleaser, a barbecue. Senator "Pitchfork"
Ben Tillman was the star attraction at Fayetteville, where
he harangued the crowd about their failure to lynch Manly. 54
That Manly was not lynched attested to his value as a symbol
to North Carolinians of the evils of Fusion rule. Prather
quotes alderman Walker Taylor: " I may state right here that
when the article appeared, it required the best efforts we
could put forth [to] prevent the people from lynching
him...the article would make it an easy victory for us." The

editorial was reprinted several times in October in Tarheel

72

newspapers; the Wilmington Sta; alone printed 100,000
copies. 55 The Atlanta gonotitntion claimed that "negro
policemen rallied to his support" to account for the
restraint of the whites, but mentioned that "so many rifles
were ordered from North Carolina that wholesale prices were
given to the purchasers."66

As tensions rose, there was a steady increase in
reports of lynchings and racial incidents in the Atlanta
newspapers, punctuated by reports from North Carolina. The
purpose of the saturation coverage of such events as a mutiny
by Black troops at Camp Pollard in Knoxville, Tennessee was
to show the power of whites even over employees of the
Federal government . "NEGRO REGIMENT IS WHIPPED INTO LINE --
Colored Troops from Virginia Refuse to Serve Under White
Officers" read the headline in the Constitution November 3,
1898.67 A.much reported trial and imprisonment of a Black
convict named Wade Hampton who was said to have murdered
another Black inmate at a prison farm had occupied the paper
for weeks, and his execution by hanging was scheduled for
November 8. "GALLOWS WILL SILENCE THE CURSES OF WADE HAMPTON
ON WEDNESDAY--Yesterday the Condemned Negro Cursed His Aged
Father and Mother Outrageously and Profaned All Things Holy
-- The Other Murderers Quake With Fear" said the
gonotitntion, which vied with the Jontnnl for the most
sensational reports of Hampton's term in the jail. 58 The
execution was covered in excruciating detail, including how

he broke down as he was led to the gallows. A clergyman

73

reported the scene for the curious,since reporters had been
barred.59

From Meridian, Mississippi came news of a "race war": an
attempt to arrest a Black man, Bill Burke, for having "got
the best of the difficulty" with his employer. When a group
of Blacks fired on the posse, three white men were wounded
and one killed. Eventually, the posse swelled to 300 men and
nine Blacks were killed . Below this front page story is a
special report from Wilmington concerning an altercation at
Ashpole, N.C.: "BLOODHOUNDS RUN DOWN NEGROES WHO FIRE ON
GUARD OF WHITES."70 All these stories suggest increased
militancy among Blacks and insist that white justice humbles
the boldest and most insolent among them if white men do
their duty. The newspapers function much as Felton's speech
had done to preach the value of ritual and the necessity for
white supremacy to maintain order. The Wilmington Massacre

was to be the culmination of this climate of violence.

Not surprisingly, "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman made another
incendiary address at a "monster mass meeting" in Charlotte
shortly before the election. Within his racist diatribe is
contained the concocted myth of "Negro domination" rendered

in his own unique fashion:

Fusion in North Carolina is nothing but republicanism.
The way to kill fusion is to invite populists back as
brothers and as white men who love North Carolina. But
if they do not come, as sure as the sun shines, the
150,000 democrats will no longer submit to the present
state of things, I say this because you people are of

74

the same race as South Carolinians.In South Carolina no
negro editor couldslander the white men as the
Wilmington negro did. That negro ought now to be food
for catfish in the bottom of the Cape Fear river instead

of going around above ground. 71

Tillman had invoked "the beautiful girls" in the audience at
Fayetteville, but this time he cut right to the heart of the
matter in speaking of the "slander" of white men. 72 Their
honor was the real concern, not the protection of women.
Tillman reminded his audience of the "evils" of
Reconstruction, the populist promise, regionalism and
advocated lynching in one statement.

The story of the Wilmington riot/massacre/coup is
reconstructed day by day in precise detail by Prather in fig
Hoyo_1nkon_n_gity_ and Williamson also treats the subject at
length. 73 The Wilmington events have,however,been generally
neglected by historians, perhaps due to the difficulty
Prather cites in tracking down sources, but more likely
because the horrific events of November 10 have little glory
about them and the conspirators were so vicious towards the
Black community. If President McKinley could claim
"constitutional inability" to deal with the crisis in the
face of many letters from Blacks pleading for justice, then
it follows that the silence on this and other riots of the
time (notably Atlanta in 1906) is due to the complex and
pervasive nature of white supremacy in America at the time.
74 There is no precise number of casualties, and there will

never be because so many Blacks were driven from the city in

75

for catfish in the bottom of the Cape Fear river instead
of going around above ground. 71

Tillman had invoked "the beautiful girls" in the audience at
Fayetteville, but this time he cut right to the heart of the
matter in speaking of the "slander” of white men. 72 Their
honor was the real concern, not the protection of women.
Tillman reminded his audience of the "evils" of
Reconstruction, the populist promise, regionalism and
advocated lynching in one statement.

The story of the Wilmington riot/massacre/coup is
reconstructed day by day in precise detail by Prather in no
Hoyo_1okon_o_§ity, and Williamson also treats the subject at
length. 73 The Wilmington events have,however,been generally
neglected by historians, perhaps due to the difficulty
Prather cites in tracking down sources, but more likely
because the horrific events of November 10 have little glory
about them and the conspirators were so vicious towards the
Black community. If President McKinley could claim
"constitutional inability" to deal with the crisis in the
face of many letters from Blacks pleading for justice, then
it follows that the silence on this and other riots of the
time (notably Atlanta in 1906) is due to the complex and
pervasive nature of white supremacy in America at the time.
74 There is no precise number of casualties, and there will
never be because so many Blacks were driven from the city in
the wake of the violence. Armed white men patrolled the

streets and killed Blacks at random, Manly's press was

76

After the election, accolades from southern newspapers
poured in to Clark Howell,editor of the Qonotitntion. A
letter from North Carolina Democratic Chairman Simmons was
reproduced on the front page."Mr. weldon's articles upon the
North Carolina situation were in every respect excellent.
They were decidedly the best exposition of the situation we
had during the campaign, and our peOple so regard The
Qonotitntionto work and the good it produced. We feel under
obligation to you, to the gonotitntion, and to Mr.Weldon for
the splendid service rendered us in the matter.” One response
was typical: "White North Carolinians honor the great and
influential gonotitntion for its masterful and telling
efforts in their behalf in the gigantic fight they have won
for good government and white supremacy.”6 On November 11,
The gonotitntion even found "humor" in the recent events: A
republican colored constituent was overheard saying,
yesterday : "Well, de white folks done took North Ca'liny;
en the next thing you knows, dey'll drive outen Mississippi,
complete, en mix us all up with wid de Injuns in the west!"
On November 12, the paper reported, "FIRM HAND OF LAW NOW IN
FULL FORCE -- Objectionable Characters Are Being Deported by
Wilmingtonians." This account followed: "The negroes are
frightened beyond description. Hundreds of them retire to the
open woods at night with their wives and children, and
there, covered with what bedding they have, remain until day.

Thousands have deserted the city." 77

77

Alex Manly fled Wilmington by night and found his way
to Asbury Park, New Jersey. Because he looked white, even
President McKinley assumed he was not a Black man but upon
finding his mistake in receiving the "author" of the riot,
had him ejected from his office.78 His editorial continued to
make "news",as can be seen in a clipping from the Illnotzntoo
Bolioo_flouo found in Mrs. Felton's papers and must have

gratified her :

Had he confined himself to a just interpretation of his
class' call for discontent, if any existed ,no man would
have raised his hand against him. But an entirely
uncalled for, spasmodical attempt to readjust the laws
of the South with his puny,pigmy newspaper, was an
instance of paltry ignorance and deserved the fate
which took place shortly after. No one with the true
spirit on manhood burning in his bosom can ever efface
Manly's despicable insinuations against the white woman
from his memory. We of the North have always in our
mind's eye pictured the lily white Southern woman as
the typical woman of America, with true kindness
beaming from her blue eyes, with smiles of welcome to
the absent returning one, and cordial greeting for the

stranger. 79

Rebecca Felton had finally been called to account for
her own inflammatory statements and for the consequences of
her diatribe. The Northern newspapers were harsh,
particularly the Boston Eyonino_1;nnooziot which had
criticized her sharply after her Tybee address. The Atlanta
Journal obligingly gave her a forum November 15,

1898: "LYNCH 1,000 WEEKLY DECLARES MRS. FELTON-- White WOmen
of the South Must Be Protected From Ravening Human Beasts and

Lynching is Unwritten Law Here-- Wilmington Negro Should Fear

78

Rope." Felton not only reiterated the claims made in the
speech, but added bluntly,"Since that address was made, the
crime and lynchings have decreased 50 per cent in Georgia."
Once again Mrs. Felton created "facts" to suit her and woe to
whoever dared contradict her. She had learned nothing: "It is
the unwritten law in Georgia that the black fiend who
destroys a white woman in her home or on the highway and is
identified with proof positive must die without clergy, judge
or jury."

If there was a beneficiary in the entire episode, it
surely was Rebecca Felton. She was admired and feted
throughout the state, and soon was installed as an
institution at the Atlanta Jonznnl. But first another
adversary troubled her, and Felton swiftly fired off what the
Jonznnl called a "burning answer" to the "vile slander of the
women of the South" by Mrs. Elizabeth Grannis.80 Grannis, a
white woman, made a speech at a protest meeting at Cooper
Union held by New York's Black community shortly after the
Wilmington Massacre. Grannis reportedly said,"I am only here
tonight to represent womanhood. NOW’WE all know that the
white women and white girls of the south are full of colored
blood " and "in my opinion the churches should be in
sackcloth and ashes over the effects of the race war in the
southern states." Mrs. Felton rebuked her even more sharply
than she had Alex Manly, saying that "the colored citizens
of New York are welcome to her and the white women of that

city are well rid of her. Water seeks its level and Mrs.

79

Elizabeth Grannis has turned up in such company as she should
be obliged to stay in for the relief of the community at
large." Felton stormily berated Grannis for inciting racial

hatred in terms remarkably like her own Tybee performance:

She aimed to raise violent impulses in the minds of the
ignorant, and wearing a white skin herself, she was
ready to send her own race down to degradation to awaken
the vilest revenge and violence in the minds of the
black women and men in the audience towards the white
women of the south. It would appear from her presence at
such a time and place that she has been outlawed from
her own race for some reason yet unexplained), and took
the opportunity afforded her in a negro assembly to
expose the exceeding filth and falsehood of her own
mental and moral anatomy."80

Mrs. Felton asked that her readers "pass her around in
southern newspapers that she may obtain a little more of this
notorious advertising." A reader, a Mrs.Henry Smith, wrote
claiming to know "that horrible Mrs.Grannis" and that she
lived "with negroes" and said she had been seen embracing a
Black man "in her parlor." Smith asked her to pass on this
information to her readers but asks her not to use her name.
She concluded by asking Felton to "giyo no; a good boating
--nothing else will do for that woman."81

Rebecca Felton may or may not have continued this
particular crusade, as I have found no evidence of further
mention of Grannis in her papers.She frequently received
letters marked "Confidential" full of gossip about
individuals the Feltons disliked.Her correspondence with Tom

Watson was characterized by such letters, and one from her

80

purports to know intimate and scandalous details of Woodrow
Wilson's courtship of his second wife Edith.82 She bore
Wilson a particular grudge since he had, in her opinion,
neglected the grave of his first wife.83 As she aged, her
obsession with the prurient became more marked. Mrs. Felton
feared girls might be drugged while drinking Coca-Colas and
whisked away to debauchery, or that a picture of a young girl
innocently given to a sweetheart would end up in the "wrong
hands."84 She was still fixated on violent crime, but spent

most of her energy working for suffrage.

Conclusion

As a woman nearly ninety years old, Rebecca Felton
became even more unassailable. She was as much an icon of the
South as the feeble few remaining Confederate veterans. Most
of her most vocal enemies were long dead, and the Doctor had
gone to his reward in 1909. It was left to Rebecca to
record their life together, which she did with gusto,
chronicling their political campaigns and writing her version
of the history of Georgia's great women. To the young
reporter Margaret Mitchell, she was a noble survivor of hard
times and the definition of "gumption", that much-prized

Southern virtue. "Georgia's Empress" suffered no self-doubt,

81

no remorse for her part in a shameful episode in the history
of the South.

Ever concerned with her public image, she gladly
consented to many interviews and played the grandmother role
for her visitors. Rebecca Felton the fiery propagandist had
become the "dear and splendid citizen" that received the
commission to become the first woman United States senator.
This account is from a fiood_flonookoooino piece, "The Lady
From Georgia": "If I just had one sentence to say to the
women of these United States, it would be simply, 'Realize
the dignity of your calling and stand by whatever is good.'"
85 Mrs. Felton was celebrating her appointment among her
friends, and she was in her glory.

Mrs. Felton's voice shock with the joy and wonder of her

statements, and as an ovation swept the room, she bowed

her head .Tears trickled down her faded, old cheeks, and
her shoulders moved gently. " God has been wonderfully
kind to me, " she ended brokenly. "The credit is all

His."86

Rebecca Latimer Felton's brief tenure in the U.S. Senate
proved, among other things, that women had arrived in
political life and that there was no turning back to a time
of exclusion. Soon, other women would join the Senate,
notably Hattie Caraway of Arkansas in 1931, ‘who ‘was
appointed by Governor Harvey Parnell in 1931 after the death
of her husband. Caraway subsequently became Huey Long's echo
and. protégé in the Senate after her reelection. Caraway

became the first duly elected woman to the Senate, though

she too faded from public attention as soon as she reentered

82

private life. She certainly lacked the flair and relish of
her predecessor. 37

If Felton's achievement were to be assessed for
symbolic value, it would decidedly be measured as a victory
for American women. Her own history and the feeling towards
the South explain why she is mentioned in few textbooks,
despite her "first" status. Those that do mention her are of
recent vintage, and explore her positions on gender and
praise her as a reformer.Her "call to honor" is forgotten,
but not the racial hostility she helped foster in America.
This effectively negates her importance as an icon of women's
history, such as those portrayed on "famous women" playing
cards or postcards. Rebecca Felton has yet to be measured by
a biographer who can account for her complicated nature and
deal with the twisted strands of race, region and gender in

a way that neither demonizes nor forgives her.

Notes

1 Rebecca Latimer Felton,"Southern Chivalry: The Wife's
Farm -—The Husband's Pledge!" Felton Papers,Special
Collections, University of Georgia, Athens.

2 williamson. The_Crnsihle_of_Bace. 128.

3 LeeAnn Whites, "Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Wife's
Farm: The Class and Racial Politics of Gender Reform,"

Georsia_flistorisal_0narterl¥.,LXXVI.2 (Summer,1992):354—372.

83

4"Jack Thorne"(David Bryant Fulton)finno1or_,_or_,_tno
" c or 0 0‘ 01. ‘. am 0 0‘ 1-1100. or «was. .

(New York:Arno Press,1969),11.

5 Ibid.,iii,iv.

6 Trudier Harris.Exor_cising__Blaeknes_s_z__His.t.orioal__and
HEW ( Bloomington :

Indiana University Press, 1984),15.
7 Wyatt-Brown. W, 437.
8 Darlene Clark Hine,edifllnok_flomon_in_nmotion,(Brooklyn

: Carlson Publishing , 1990),vol.15,1_dn_flo112—_annott__;__nn
.0020‘p.°°§O;ll‘_29:211.”?!:.-b°.Y

Mildred 1. Thompson ,177-8.
9 Ibid. , 179.

10 Williamson, 198.

llCharles Waddell Chesnutt,Ino_unttou_ot_1:ooition. (New
York: Arno Press, 1969), 121

12 Harold E. Davis, ' . .

AW, (Tuscaloosa,University of

13Atlanta Qonotitntion ,October 26,28, 1898.

14 Thomas D. Clark. W (New
York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1948) , 96-7.

15 Ibid.

16 Anne Edwards, W (New York: Laurel
Books, 1983),100.

17 Talmadge, 94.
18 Ibid.,84
19 Ibid.,8l

84

21 Edward L- Ayers, MW
aufign;__3ooonottnotion.(New ‘York:Oxford ‘University' Press,
1992), 87. See also William Fitzhugh Brundage, "Lynching in
the New South, Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930" Ph.D.diss.
Harvard, 1988.

22 Atlanta gonznnl, November 1898.

23 Atlanta Jontnnl,.August 12,1897.
24 Williamson,128.

25 Atlanta Qon;nol_, August 14,1897.

26 [?] Ulla G. Hardiman to Rebecca Latimer Felton,
December 22, 1898, Felton Papers.

27 Fannie H. Guilliams,to Rebecca Latimer Felton, March
18,1898 Felton Papers.

28 Ida Wells-Barnett 011W
Was (New York: Arno Press.
1969),14.

29 Ibid.,27.

3° NAACP, W
Statos, 1882-121Q. New York: Arno Press, 1969 ), ii.

31 W E Burghardt DuBois W
W New Brunswick:
Transaction Books, 1984), 67- 68.

32 Ida Wells-Barnett Wow—steaks.

- o a o 1‘ ‘0 , or o
9 00° ‘9 'r 0 0‘ t, 2’ E o o. 9’. 0‘
or: ' - '09 ‘ z ‘0 9‘ _ an. o o '7 ’ f '9 9‘
o 29- a - ° 70 0 '9 “ .Qe_‘ 0‘ 9 0'00 0 .u_‘

90:: 9‘ a f or. osra°oo 0. "—o . ° . :09 o“
o o ‘9 o ‘2 0‘ ~10 0‘ 0 9'09 0 i 9‘ 11‘! o z ‘0‘-

.anoon. (Chicago: This pamphlet is circulated by Chicago

colored citizens...,1899):1- ~18.

33 Takaki,1;on_gaooo, 213-214 .

85

34 Talmadge,55.

35 Mary Salome Allen to Rebecca Latimer Felton,1898(?),
Felton Papers.

36 John Herbert Reper, W (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989),36.

37 LeeAnn Whites, "The DeGraffenried Controversy : Class

Race, and Gender in the New South,"1no_gonz;nn1_o£_$_ontnonn
Hintony LIV,3 (August 1988):455.

38 Ibid,457.

39 Nottn_§ootgio_gitizon,"Let Our Women Beware", Felton

Papers.

40 Rebecca Latimer Felton, To Point a Moral Or Adorn a
Tale," June 29, 1898, Felton Papers.

41 Jean E. Friedman. MW
WWW-(Chapel Hill,

University of North Carolina Press, 1985),110.

42 W.C. Newbern to Rebecca Latimer Felton, November
27, 1899. Felton Papers.

43 "Before and After," August 19, 1897, Felton Papers.
44 Atlanta gonotitntion, November 10,1898.

45 Ibid.

46 Atlanta gonotitntion, October 24,1898.

47 Atlanta Qonotitntion, October 1,1898.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 H. Leon Prather, Sr. We Hate Iaken__A..£fiJau.
WW ( Rutherford. NJ:

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984 ),55.

86

51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.,72.
53 Ida Wells-Barnett, Qn_Lynoning, 8-9.

54 Prather,175.

55 Thorne, Jack (David Bryant Fulton),flnnoyertorttho_

" ‘ _ ,9! 0,. l‘ '11 1} . 9‘ 9 Q.‘ A l!!! .0 92‘ ._ o
Introduction by Thomas Cripps (New York: Arno Press, 1969),
13.

56 Thorne,vi.

57 Atlanta gontnnl, November 9,1898.

58 Martha Hodes,"Wartime Dialogues on Illicit Sex: White

Women and Black Men " In W
Ciyil_flnt ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber,( New York:
Oxford University Press , 1992), 230-242.

59 Prather, 75-80.

60 Wilbur J. Cash, W (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 16-17.

61 Felton, 99111131111112.79-

62 Atlanta.gon§titntion ,November 4, 1898.

63 Prather,73. This incident,mocked by the North
Carolina. white press, marks yet another manifestation of
Black women ' 8 organization and emerging political
consciousness throughout the nation.It is particularly
remarkable in the South.

64 Atlanta gonotitntion ,November 3,1998.

65 Prather,84.

66 Ibid.,81.

87

67 Atlanta Qonotitntion, November 3,1898

68 Atlanta Qonotitntion, November 7,1898

69 Atlanta Qonotitntion , November 10,1898
70 Atlanta Qonotitotion , October 24, 1898.
71 Atlanta Qonotitntion , November 4, 1898.
72 Ibid.

73 Williamson,l96-201.

74 Prather, 158.

75 Atlanta gonotitntion ,November 11,1898
76 Ibid.

77 Atlanta gonotitntion ,November 12,1898.
78 Prather,159.

79 Illnotzntoo_£olioo_uono,Jan.1899 (?) ,Felton Papers.
80 Atlanta Jontnnl, November 21,1898.

81 Mrs. Henry H.Smith to Rebecca Latimer Felton,1898,
Felton Papers.

82 Rebecca Latimer Felton to Thomas E. Watson, 1917 (?)
Thomas E.Watson Papers, Southern Historical Collection,
University of North Carolina.

83 Talmadge,152.

84 John E. Talmadge, "Rebecca Latimer Felton," in

A‘9,°. 9..., O ‘ 0 " v ‘ 0 e. “~-. 3 9 I... 0
.Monton_gon1tot, ed. Horace Montgomery (Athens: University of
Georgia, 1958) : 289.

85 Willie Snow Ethridge, "The Lady from Georgia" GQQQ
Housekeeping , (January 1923),27.

88

86 Ibid.

87 David Malone, WNW:

(Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1989) , xii.

89

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Newspapers

Atlanta Constitution
Atlanta lgnznal

Raleigh W
Wilmingtonlfieggrg
Wilmington Sta:

Boston Evening Transcript

Manuscripts

Rebecca Latimer Felton Papers, Special Collections,Hargrett
Library, The University of Georgia.

Thomas E.Watson Papers, Southern Historical Collection,
Wilson Library,University of North Carolina.

Warren A.Candler Papers, Special Collections,Woodruff
Library, Emory University.

94

"Illlllllllllllllll“