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

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

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

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

You added a yore to that. You did. I was going to let it go. Stuff mom never told you. Jesus. Stuff mom never told you. Close enough. It's early morning for me, you know? It's 1.13 p.m. friends.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I haven't slept in days. It's 4 o'clock in my time, so. Yeah. There you go. Speaking of friends. Hi, Sam. Hi.

How is everybody? I'm good, Sam. I wanted to know. Do you know anything about the first female senator? First. See, now I'm confused because I remember the pantsuit senator, which we do talk about. And I have to go back to my book. This is the technical first female senator, right?

This is the lady who was technically the first female senator. She didn't actually do the job of a senator, really. But she was an activist who kind of got it as an award late in life after women got the vote because she was also a major suffragette activist. Her name was Rebecca Felton. And she was technically the first female U.S. senator. Now, that all sounds great, right? That doesn't sound like the subject for a behind-the-batchel.

episode. Unfortunately, Rebecca wasn't just a suffragette, right? She wasn't just someone who was an activist for that. She was an activist for a lot of things, including lynching. Yeah, I was going to say she was racist, wouldn't she? She was super racist. She grew up on the plantation racist. Georgia? Georgia. Oh, yeah. Oh, this is a Georgia story. The actual first senator I was thinking about was a black woman, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't remember the elected first senator off the top of my head right now. I read about when I was doing the research for this. But I'm purely focusing on the monster who technically claims the term.

Because she fits for our purposes here on Behind the Bastards, right? I am so excited to talk about racist. I love talking about racist. This is one of my favorite hobbies. Let's go. All right. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.

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On the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So, Rebecca Ann Latimer was born on June 10th, 1835, somewhere near Decatur, Georgia. Felton's family was rich. Oh, okay, cool. I live in Decatur, Georgia. I told you. Such a local story. This is too close to home.

This is full on a Samantha McVeigh episode. It's literally my home. Guys, I think the first female senator was Hattie. I forget her last name. She finished her husband's after he died. She finished her husband's term. Because it was after Rebecca. After Rebecca Felton, there was a senator of a woman who actually got to do some of the work, but it was because she'd taken over for her husband.

And then the first elected female senator was sometime after that. Felton was the first technical female senator. Technically. She's a decatur girl. Her family is rich as hell. And she was going to be raised and spent all of her early life living on a 725-acre plantation. with a big white mansion that is still around to this day, Sam, since your indicator, you could go see the Latimer home. I feel like I know this name.

It was just until pretty recently. Yeah. This is where she would have been raised. And obviously, a 725-acre plantation, they owned a lot of people, right? The Latimer family own a huge number of enslaved people. It will not surprise you to hear that Rebecca's family had been rich basically as long as there had been white people on the east coast of North America. Her ancestors had been early settlers. had fought in the Revolutionary War. So they had been prominent Americans in pre-revolutionary times. And after the war, they're kind of part of the first elite class in this new country, right? Now, her family at the time of her birth lives in Georgia, but they'd initially lived in the Far East Coast. They'd been on the Potomac, right?

Like, literally they'd had a huge estate on the Potomac for like 200 years. And not long before Rebecca was born, when her dad was like seven years old, the family left for Decatur. She would later write of this move, quote, The family left behind them the splendid brick residence, the capacious barn and outbuildings, all built of brick, perfectly sound and useful at this present time, a home of former wealth and luxury to adventure, life, fortune, and happiness,

and a sparsely settled country, fully half of which was still inhabited by red Indians. So this is like her dad's generation. This is still what she's being raised to feel about like what the family's doing. Why we left the northeast for Georgia, right? Is because there was more adventure there. It was more open. There was more space. It was only inhabited by these natives, right?

I was going to say. So she was there before the Trail of Tears? Like she helped drive out the Terricudiation? The Trail of Tears happens as she's a girl, basically. Okay. Like that's an early thing she would have been aware of, right, is the Trail of Teal of Tears. And in her autobiography, by the way, she writes about it as a horrifying thing. Like she at least as an adult after the war.

It doesn't see as this is good. But she's also, she's very critical of her family. the South as an adult decades later. So don't take that to mean that as a kid growing up in this rich family that's like colonizing this region, she's not necessarily feeling like it's wrong while she's living it, right? This is something she'll come to recognize later in life. I don't know why the Latimer's left the Potomac for Georgia other than what they said, more adventure. I think probably the real reason was that by selling that land in the more crowded East, they were able to afford to buy a much larger plot of land and a place with a better

growing climate. One of my sources for these episodes is the exceedingly good history books, Southern Horrors by Crystal Feimster. And she writes that by the time Rebecca was born, the Latimer family owned not just their vast plantation, but a flour mill, a blacksmith shop, a wood shop, tavern, general store, and post office. They ran Decatur, really. So they own Decatur.

They own Decatur, pretty much. The Latimer family runs Decatur in its early days. By the way, yeah. Our theme is Come to Decatur where it's greater So maybe they're the ones That place that there

And that's why they did that. That is more or less Why she seems to think that they came. Now the Latimer Latimer's East Coast Family Land was sold to the Potomac Boat Company

and made into a park outside of D.C. That I think still exists today. So I don't know. That's cool. Anyway, Rebecca did not write that autobiography that I get some of this

info from until she was like in her 80s. And so again, we shouldn't assume that her thoughts in it always reflect her thoughts time. For example, in her autobiography, she writes extensively about the reason her family was able to buy

land in Georgia in the first place, which was something called the Yazoo land fraud. The new Georgia encyclopedia describes this as the, quote, bizarre climax to a decade of fringed speculation in the state's public lands. See, in the immediate wake of the American Revolution, the state of Georgia, like many states, was broke and running low of young men. It was unable to defend its claims to the western Yazoo lands, so named after the river. So the legislature solicitor, solicitor, pitches from speculators who wanted to create new settlements in the unsettled areas. And this led to a series of failed attempts to create communities in the 1780s. But it's really hard to do that out there, right?

So after those kind of go bunk, Georgia tries to cede the land to Congress. They're like, we'll make this federal land. I don't want to deal with this shit anymore. And Congress says, wait, we don't want to deal with. What are you talking about? And so then in the 1790s, after a bunch of back and forth public pressure, the governor transfers 35 million acres. to four companies that had paid a total of about half a million dollars. Now, the only way to actually do this transaction was for the governor to bribe a huge number of people

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

also get involved and start in, you know, countersuing and whatnot because it's their land being sold. And they have some issues with it, right? Some of them are like, we should at least get some money for this, right? So there's a lot of court fights over this. The land eventually gets seated finally to the federal government in 1802, like Georgia had wanted to do originally, and the federal government pays Georgia $1.25 million to extinguish the remaining claims on the territory. That means they're supposed to pay off, for example, a lot of these tribes who say they have claims to this area. And then, per the New Georgia Encyclopedia, as cotton culture spread across Georgia, the national government proved not able to extinguish Creek and Cherokee claims to land quickly enough for

white Georgians, who were rapidly laying claim to inland up tracks through the land lottery system. Anger over this matter fueled the development of the state's rights philosophy for which Georgia's leaders became notorious in the 1820s and 1830s as they continually prodded the United States to complete the process of Indian removal. In a sense, the Azuland fraud helped lead to the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838. So, I'm glad it had a purpose. Yeah, the purpose is horror, but like that's, this is Rebecca's understanding of like how her family gets to Georgia later, which is she realizes it's because of this fraud that like violently displaced these people and she has very early memories of the Trail of Tears.

It's a thing that, like, I think is upsetting to her, even from a young age before she fully understands it. So I suspect that's kind of why she spends so much time as an adult trying to understand what had caused it. But this is something she writes about a lot. So she knows my comfortable family life in Georgia only was possible because these people were robbed. And because of this vast fraud, like, we should never have been there, which is something she's going to, like, talk about pretty openly later. But again, isn't really thinking about it. at the time, right? We shouldn't assume she knew any of this as a little girl. You're starting to build her up like she's actually like human and kind, so I'm really

interested in where the story goes. The tough thing about Rebecca is she says the right thing like 60% of the time, but if you interrogate it, like most of the time when she says the right thing, it's for a really bad reason. And we'll get to all of that. She does sound weirdly woke at points. Like this is like the white women tears. Those that we were like, yeah, we're definitely need that intersection because without it is very one-sided. So this is where we're at with her, right? Okay, okay, okay.

Yeah, yeah. So from an early age, Rebecca is aware of how much of her daily comfort and security is provided for by the women in her family. And most of her, like, most interesting recollections of her childhood is her talking about how much she admired to the older women in her family. These women who, like, are in charge of these huge households and plantations and are kind of organizing the affairs of all of these workers and enslaved people. she really admires like the ladies in her family more than it,

because in part because that's who she has direct contact with, but she also sees very accurately that a lot of southern culture is held up by the labor of these women, right, even though they don't get a lot of credit for it. And one of these women that she admires as a girl is Mrs. Lucy Talbot Swift, who Rebecca described as the mother of 11 children, all reaching maturity except two that live to 11 and 12 years, her industry, her management, and her executive ability

in caring for and carrying on household affairs, are still wonderful memories. So this is like, this is who she's raised to idolize. This is the best woman you can be in the South, right? Is this like Lucy Swift? You know, this lady who has 11 kids, nine of them make it to adulthood,

and she's really good at managing a household, right? That's a successful woman. She is a powerful woman in the world. That's what we call leaning in. Exactly, exactly. And so Rebecca is raised to idolize that kind of woman. All her clothing, all of Rebecca's clothing, every blanket and every pillow she ever used,

were all handmade and all crafted by her female relatives or by enslaved people, usually by enslaved people being like watched over by her female relatives, right? One of Rebecca's first specific recollections about her own life is that she was given a pony at a very young age. So this was her pet, which again shows that she's a very wealthy girl, but it's also a practical tool for the farm. She writes, quote, The Negro boys learned to plow with him and he was the dependents for going on mill

with a sack of corn on his back for more than a dozen years. And her family also owns a bunch of race horses. So all of their, and this is kind of worth noting, all of their wealth and all of their luxury items are alive. This is a wealthy family, but they primarily think of their wealth. In terms of like material goods, they basically have what they make. They don't go out and buy stuff. They don't have a ton of ready cash necessarily, but they own people, which are worth way more than just about any other commodity you can own. And they own horses and livestock, right?

That's what makes them rich. That's what makes you rich in this day, right? in the South is that you have human beings. In the first few dozen pages of her autobiography, she refers to the people her family owned exclusively as nurses, servants, and help. In one passage describing a great feast held at her plantation, she writes, White farmers came with their colored men. So it's interesting, she seems to be almost hiding or trying to avoid even maybe

unconsciously describing these people as slaves and what her family is doing as slaving for a weirdly long time. Now, that doesn't keep up the whole book. She finally makes a direct and open reference to slavery, the first that I found, on page 53. And it's a lot more common after that. It's just weird how long it takes her to use that word. I thought that was kind of worth noting. So she may have subconsciously understood, eh, this is kind of bad because this is a person. Because she refers to them as people. Yes. And she also is writing this decades later after the Civil War, after freedom in the 20th century, right? The early 20th century is when they're this book it's written. So some of this is certainly her referring to these people more by the

modern terms than by, you know, what she would have called them at the time. Her first and direct open reference to slavery, at least that I found, came when discussing a woman she admired whose husband had passed away early and left her to manage an entire plantation and family. Quote, there were slaves, but nobody to direct but the anxious woman who had this large family, black and white, to provide for. And you see this a lot in like southern narratives before the Civil War where they will both refer to the people they own as family and as, you know, property. Yeah.

And that's also literally true in most of these cases. Right. Most of these enslaved people are related to the people who own them. Or not most, but a lot of them are. It's very common. I mean, that's what companies do today. We're family, right? We do this because we love the job, not because we have to be paid.

It's a bit. It's, we're literally family because, like, I own you and I'm raping you in order to make more people that I own. And then I discard you if you are no longer viewed, which is horrifying. Yeah. Yeah. And Rebecca's aware of this. Yeah, Rebecca's very aware of that dimension of it, too, as she gets older.

Now, Rebecca is open about the fact that most wealthy Southern women were raised to be ornaments in this period of time. They're made for early marriage and child rearing. They're not supposed to make decisions about anything too important. In her book, Crystal Feimster, adds, from a young age, Rebecca, was integrated into a hierarchical social order that sanctioned male dominance and discouraged female autonomy. Because southern white women were legally subordinated to and economically dependent on their fathers and husbands, they had little choice but to accept paternalistic domination in exchange for male protection and a measure of discrete power within the household.

As an obedient and dutiful daughter, Rebecca could count on her father's care. It was he who came to her rescue when she found a drunken man hanging on their front gate, shouting the most awful things. The man served as a reminder of the dangers that lay outside. the sheltered security of the plantation and her father's protective and watchful eye. Rebecca and the other young women of her class were always closely guarded and never traveled without male chaperones.

She's a hot house, Lily, right? Does she realize she's being owned as well? Like, she's so close. She comes to understand very quickly that women can't have a cap on their ambitions and a cap on what they can do no matter how smart and capable they are. And she's going to gradually understand that,

And this understanding starts when she's a girl, which is that like, well, it's a dangerous world out there for me a girl. I need the protection of a man, my father and then my husband, right? And then if I don't have that, I feel naked and unprotected to the world. That's how she's raised to feel from being a very little girl. And so there's this- From other men, by the way. Fear of other men. Yeah, from other men.

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

And technically, the women that she admires work a lot in keeping the household. But they're working a lot at managing the work of people they own. That is also a big part of it, right? So there are accounts, though. And again, that's also not always what happens because not all of these,

especially the higher you get in wealth, these white like mistresses of the plantation, it's almost the more money you have, the less you're expected to do. And in fact, there are accounts by white women in extremely wealthy plantation households from like letters where we see them talking about panicking when their husbands and sons are away and they have to be in charge of the help themselves. This isn't the overwhelming norm, but it wasn't uncommon. And it gives you an idea of how much agency high status women in the old South are expected to seed. In Southern horrors, Feimster quotes a South Carolina matron named Emily Harrison, who wrote in her diary,

I shall never get used to being left as the head of affairs at home. I am constituted so as to crave a guide and protector. I am not an independent woman, nor ever shall be. That's a woman writing. That's like a rich woman, you know? That is not what Margaret Mitchell told me about the antebell himself, so I'm really... Turns out some stuff that might have getting glorified. Just a little bit

Turns out Gone with the Wind wasn't a perfect recollection Although Rebecca's story is a lot like Scarlet O'Hara's honestly That's why I connected this They have a lot of comparisons to make I'm starting to wonder if Martin Mitchell

actually knew her Because she was from Georgia as well So I mean I'm a very good chance Rebecca's very famous after the war too Like knew of her certainly I don't know if they were social

Yeah As a girl Rebecca attended multiple slave weddings on the plantation. She was candle holder for, quote, one big negro wedding at her grandmother's house. Through this reminiscence, rose-colored as it is in her words, we still see glimpses of the brutality of the slave system. This is you're talking about like what is a fond memory of her girlhood. The girl was a housemaid, but the groom lived several miles away and came to his wife's home every Saturday to stay until Monday morning daylight.

The patrol system was still enforced throughout the south. Colored men going to the wife's house were given a pass, and it was a wise precaution. Slaves were too valuable to allow one of them to be beaten if he did not have a pass. So she's talking about this because of like the fear of slave uprisings. You can't go around even if you're like heading over to your fiancé's place for the night without a pass. And she's like it was a good precaution because otherwise, you know, they're too valuable to just like beat them because they don't have a pass.

So that's the only thing she thinks about like the wisdom of the slave system is, oh, it stops the property from getting damaged. Right. Like I can't lose those because it's my money. It's my currency. Yeah, yeah. It would be really bad if this got hurt. So she describes the courtship process.

of this enslaved couple in a way that still centers her own experience, which I also find quite telling. Quote, the colored boy came one night after supper to ask for the girl, and I was present at the asking. I was very fond of the bride to be, and I became a close listener. Now, because this young woman was Rebecca's family's property, the man wound up asking Rebecca for permission, and she relates that whole conversation. Will you treat your wife decent if I allow you to marry her? Will you act the dog and beat my good 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 to if you behave yourself. Do you like see? Again, she doesn't see this

as like, she sees this as I think a fundamentally like natural and good relationship. Like she's working out, looking out for this girl because she cares about her. But you also see like that casual use of a slur that she doesn't even, I'm sure it would say like, oh, that was just what we called them, you know, that wasn't like a term, a hurtful term. And it's like, yeah, I mean, it's pretty racist, Rebecca. It's all like, and I'm sure you use worst terms actually in 1850 or whatever the hell this was. But you see this like, she is really invested in depicting this as like a familial relationship. This is someone I care about.

But this woman's not allowed to get married without this random teenage girl saying it's okay. And like her ringing her adult husband who can't go there without a pass, otherwise he'll get beaten and murdered by random guys on horses. Anyway, the South. No, this really is like the. way Gone with a Wind wants to tell you that they wanted to be enslaved. They were treated well. They were more confused when freedom happened. There's definitely a bunch of articles that compare Scarlett O'Hare, I mean, like Scarlett to, to Rebecca. Rebecca felt. Yeah. The real Rebecca Felton, you know, I mean, they're like, yeah, the real Scarlet is Rebecca Felt. There's a bunch of articles

like that. Pretty much definitely. Like, and this is like Scarlett O'Hara, the character probably would have gotten into politics after the war, right? Yeah. She absolutely would. Or at control her husband. Right, right. I wouldn't call Rebecca's autobiography good, but it is legitimately fascinating because of the glimpse it gives us of pre-war southern plantation life. This is not just true of horrible things. And I want to read you one of my favorite paragraphs just for like color about daily life back. Then this is her talking about when she was a little kid. And rural schools of my earliest days, nearly all of us wore a court around our necks with a little wallet of brimstone and esophodia tied on as an itch preventative. And the warts, my, my, how to

get rid of the itch and warts on their hands occupied so much of just. conversation at recess time. And a surprising part of the whole thing was the apparent indifference to both itch and warts in the rude homes where the majority of the pupils were domiciled. Just a little, like, look into this rich girl is still going to a school that her dad has built in Decatur. So, like, the poor kids come there, too. And all of them are constantly wearing all this stuff on them because they're itchy.

They're filled with lice. And, like, anyone who's not growing up like Rebecca, rich on a plantation, is just covered in warts all the time. That's just normal life in, like, the fucking countryside for poor people. Just little bits like that. Like they don't even notice the itch anymore because it's just their normal life as being so completely fucking covered in warts. Anyway, it's awful. It's good not to live in the past.

So when we're saying warts, it's obviously not just warts, right? Like if it's itchy and calluses maybe and then disease type of things and all sorts of shit, I'm sure, going on. Okay, all right. People's skin was fucked up back then. I'm like, what is happening? Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, we'll get back to more of Rebecca's life. and more skin care tips from the pre-war South. But first, here's ads. Get Bell, Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers.

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They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. Oh, gotcha. I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachie Sobiesky. Yeah. I don't think she was an American Pie, but I still like that. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time.

Yeah. Then Mary Steenbergin. Why are you guys talking to me? I'm worried. Why are you talking so down? to me that you think I don't understand your little play game. I just really, I get it. I'm trying to set you up for success here.

Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So you can find yourself at times forgetting that Rebecca's book is the account of an unapologetic bigot because whole pages go by where she just like writes about weird little details of farm life in this period of time that I do find interesting. So when she's an adolescent, her parents buy a separate home indicator away from the plantation so she can attend a fancy private academy. The teacher there was one John S. Wilson, and he hated dancing more than the town from footloose did.

He banned any of his students from dancing, not just at school events, but recreationally on their own time. You'd like sign a contract that if you're there as a pupil, you will never dance in her out of school. And if you dance, it gets to expel you. And Rebecca writes that at the time, she's like an adolescent 12 or 13, this terrified her. because I love to dance like I loved candy. There's not much else to do for a little girl in the 1850s. And she really wants to dance. What's the job problem?

What the fuck, bro? Man, it's this weird religious thing. Yeah. I have to ask. Did y'all, is this just a southern thing? And this is going to be horrifying. And I'm going to be, like, really embarrassed that I told you all this. Did you all have a Civil War ball in your school?

Not in tech, not in Plano, Texas in the 90s. You did have it in Texas? Like, Texas doesn't even teach history outside of Texas. I was in the 90s. Don't even ask about Los Angeles. You know the answers, no. Well, like, we literally had to dress up, find dresses that were antebellum. Mine was bright red, by the way.

And then do the dances, the traditional dances, celebrating. So, really, was it just me? And imagine being the only person of color, literally. There was two Asian people actually doing this. No, see. Y'all didn't experience this? Y'all didn't learn the dances? No.

I went to a huge school district where like fucking half the kids in my school district were like from southeast. Because there's so much of like Texas instruments and stuff in there. Half of my school was from like Southeast Asia. It would have been really weird to have a sanchard to dress like Confederates that would not have gone over. You think of. Okay. So really like y'all didn't have any of the re-telling of the war or the battles. I definitely got some lost cause.

narrative in my education, sure, but we never, like, dressed up like a... I mean, Texas, I was told by someone who lived in Texas, that we didn't study history outside of Texas history. Like, that was our... We have a Texas history class, but we sure had other history. The schools where I went to in North Texas were pretty good. It's just that, you know, you get it filtered a little bit. Did you go to a fancy school? No, it was a public school. I only ever went to public schools. There's just really good public schools in North Texas, because there's a, there's like a lot of businesses and stuff there. We only had one school, high school, so you're going to tell me about...

Yeah. It's, I mean, when I grew up in a, I, in like, rural Oklahoma, like my school, there was one school in the entire town and it was tiny. But North Texas is very densely populated. That's fair. That's fair. So, okay, my, it's a single church. I got it. She goes to this school and this teacher who doesn't want her dancing and her parents are eventually saying like, look, this is the right thing for you. We'll, we'll dance when you graduate, right? So she's very upset. And she's particularly upset that she has to stop dancing for a while because there's a lot. a big dance coming up in Decatur, and she has the Hots for the town judge, the honorable Edward Young Hill. Now, she's 12 or 13 at the time, and he's a judge. He's got to be 30 or something, right? Or more. But she describes it as one of the handsomest men she ever knew, and notes that at several previous dances, quote, several times the judge would ask me to dance with him, and he was a splendid dancer. Now, I don't know if this judge was grooming her or if this was really innocent. She's 12 or 13.

it's really not weird for girls of her status to get married at like 14 or 15. I was going to say, I think that's about right. That's when they get sold off, right? So this isn't super weird. That said, her parents are clearly, they're not as, like, if her parents are aware that this judge might be making the moves on her, they don't see him as a good enough match to have it worth her not graduating from this private school. So she's not allowed to go to the dance.

And she graduates from school, at which point her parents throw her a dance party to celebrate. She's a rich girl. And she writes lovingly of plantation life. But she also complains about the role of women in Southern culture at the time. She noticed early on that many of her teachers and governesses were northern women who had moved to the South for work. Quote, no Southern woman of means ever proposed to work at anything outside of home. Rapid marriage was the goal, as early as 14 or 15. And it was seen as a stigma to not have received at least one marriage offer by the time you had advanced into long dresses as a girl.

So you don't have to accept your first marriage offer, but you're kind of saying. scene is like fucked up if by the time you're wearing like long dresses someone's not trying to get with you right so perhaps the most sympathetic thing about rebecca is that she clearly just naturally paid attention anytime a woman in her world was allowed to act with the slightest bit of autonomy you can just kind of catch that from bits like this in her autobiography she writes about an unforgettable church service where quote i heard a woman pray in meeting for the first time it came like a clap out of a clear sky she had been talking to a bench of mourners and broke loose in the fervor of her pleadings.

It was the talk of the town for a good while. Some said it would not do it all. Others said she was so good that she must be forgiven, but the majority said she should have kept silent. And this lady is like famous in town because she keeps praying aloud at these big public prayer meetings, but she's the only woman who does it. And it's noted as being really weird. And Rebecca can't not pay attention to this as a little girl, because this is like the one

woman who's bucking the system even a little bit and showing that like, no, women can do like at least something, they can at least pray in public? That's props, because even the Southern Baptist today wouldn't allow that. So go ahead. Yeah, that's tough in certain denominations to this day. So what we see from Rebecca noticing this stuff is that this is a girl who is smart and who from a young age knows that her society is only going to allow her to marry and produce children. The most autonomy she's ever going to exercise is managing a household. By her own accounts, she doesn't really start to chafe under this load until after the fact, after the Civil War, because the comfort and security and convenience of her privileged life owning slaves,

protected by her father, meant more than any ambition she might have nursed. In other words, once things start to get hard, she realizes how unfair this is, but she doesn't seem to when it's working properly because it's just really nice to have everything taken care of for you. Yeah. Oh, comfy. This is so nice and cozy. Yeah, nice and cozy.

When she was halfway between 15 and 16, Rebecca went to college in Madison, Georgia. The location had been picked because it was close enough that she could return home in less than two days if she took ill, which tells you something about the priorities of the time. Now, this is not a college like we have today. The goal was to train upper class girls to be interesting and useful wives, not to nourish their individual gifts or allow them to pursue dreams. So this isn't a college like we'd call it, right? This is just a college to try to make everyone the same kind of wife, more or less. I think that's 30 minutes outside of University of Georgia today. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

And they have the same opinion about that. And so they hit it off afterwards and wind up getting engaged and then married. And today we would say a 30-year-old doctor hitting on an 18-year-old just graduated college, pretty gross, right? I mean, that's not great. That's not ideal. Leo would be like, I'm cool with it. It's illegal, but not ideal.

Yeah. We'd call this a little odd, but it's not weird for the time, right? 1830 is not like an insane split at the time. And more importantly, they do, they have like a super long and committed partnership. Like, it's kind of evil, but they're together and seem to really love each other. It's kind of evil is such a fucking crazy gabriott. But they seem to be really happy together. So I don't know.

Like there, some people, being a good partner to someone isn't a moral. term. You can be a great husband or wife and shitty. Yeah. Hey, they are together our villains and they're okay with it. Their love is strong through their villainous ways. That's right. They're an evil power couple. Yeah. So at this point, Rebecca couldn't have been living a more normal life for a girl of her class and era. The couple moved to a plantation, after getting married, they moved to a plantation near Carter'sville and Rebecca starts putting out babies. She spends the next years, several years caring for her first children and managing what she described as a considerable number of slaves. her book, Crystal Feimster, puts the number of enslaved people they start with at 50,

which shows you how wealthy the Latimer family was. Yeah. Right? Like, if you got five or six slaves, you're doing way better than most white families. Like, 50, as soon as you get married, means that your family is rich. She would ultimately give birth to five children, a girl and four boys, but only one, well, none of her sons actually live to adulthood. So, yeah, this doesn't go.

childhood is not going to be great for her. It's not great for a lot of women in this era, but so far it's nice. She's having her kids. She's starting her farm, you know. The Civil War doesn't start brewing until she's like 25, right? When she's already a young mother and one of her sons has already died of some weird illness as it is, that's when kind of things get started and people really start ramping up talk about secession. Now, Rebecca claims that she and her family did not support secession. As an older woman, decades later, she would write, if there had been no slaves, there would have been no war.

As a direct counter to the lost cause myth, which she despised. It's another interesting thing about Rebecca. She hates the lost cause myth. Because among other things, it's like slavery was not, and she's like, no, of course, slavery was literally why we did it. I was there. Right, right. I lived right there.

She was honest, I guess. Yeah. She would later add to fight for the perpetuation of domestic. slavery was a mistake. The time had come in the United States to wipe out this evil. The South had to suffer. And even when our preachers were leading in prayer for victory during the war, and black-robed mothers and wives were weeping for their dead ones who perished in the field of battle, I had questions in my own mind as to what would be the end of it. And I don't, again, she doesn't condemn slavery and succession while it's happening. But she clearly, and I don't have

trouble believing at the time, she's not excited about it. She thinks it's going to be a really bad idea that's going to endanger everything she loves. So was she calling slavery evil or the war evil? She's calling slavery evil there. But that's again much later. At the time, she just thinks this is a really bad idea. This is a bad idea because it's risking her comfort. It's risking everybody's comfort for the sake of guaranteeing that you can spread slavery.

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

So one of the most, yeah, I got some issues with this. One of the most disturbing experiences for her in the lead up to the, and start to the war, and this would have been disturbing for millions of Southerners besides her, was that it began with a disruption to the source of all of their comfort, right? All of the comfort for rich Southerners is provided by enslaved black people. Gossip spreads rapidly on plantations. And among other things, you've got poor white workers there, too, who often talk with their enslaved colleagues and the slaves talk to themselves about the coming war and what it might

mean to them because they're also people. And because gossip spreads both ways, quite a few white owners and white overseers overhear slaves talking about the war and they reported back to the owners. They talk about it amongst themselves. And a lot of these enslaved people are talking about like, well, shit, we might get to be free, right? Now, this panics a lot of these owners. And you have to understand prior to the kind of raise of hostilities, the dominant belief among women like Rebecca is that they truly loved the people that they owned and were loved by them in turn. Rebecca really did think she treated Mammy, who is like her nanny, who raises her as a second mother, even though she slaps Mammy at one point.

She has to apologize, but like she doesn't see that the fact that she would even think to do that. So she's not treating this woman really like a mother? And the fact that her family owned this woman means that it's not really that kind of relationship does not occur to Rebecca or rich ladies like her. the wealthy women of the South are weighted on hand and foot by enslaved black women who are very often their primary sources of emotional comfort too. Now, I'm not asking you to sympathize with these ladies because they're all awful, but you do need to try to understand what it would do to a person to go to bed one night feeling like I'm surrounded by these people who I consider family, who take care of my every need, and then you over hear one of them say something and suddenly realize, oh, these people might not care about it. me. They might murder me for a chance to escape to the union lines. It completely shatters some

people's minds. That switch flipping is the first panic that runs through the South before any shots are fired because people are like, wait a second, especially after John Brown's raid, wait a second. They might not be happy? Like, obviously a lot of, especially the owners and like the men and whatnot, the overseers, they're beating these people to keep them in line. They're running slave patrols. But women like Rebecca, who are mostly interacting with the women in their house, it's easier to lie to yourself about that. You're showing up at the weddings. You're calling these people, your family, your ma'am, right? And there's this sudden realization like, oh, these people and I don't have the same interests. And things might just have gotten a lot more dangerous for me. They don't benefit the same way I do from them constantly working to the point that they almost die. That's odd. I don't understand. So crazy. Rebecca writes about one of these panics. We had a Methodist campground.

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

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

Horrific. Again, she's so close to the point, but so far. Yeah. According to Feimster, this was a near universe, these kind of panics were a new universal experience in the South after John Brown's 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry, which acted as a forced reminder that the people they owned are not in fact chill with the status quo. From Southern horrors, quote, As far away as Florida, Susan Bradford's side, we feel we can trust none of the dear black

folk. I'm afraid to say a word for fear it will prove to be just what should have been left unsaid. In 1861, a widow moaned in a letter to her sister. Can we cope with the enemy abroad and one at home? Negroes are fully live to the state of things and are much more sensible than one would suppose. I can imagine all sorts of noise at night and sometimes think they are right at my door.

I really, there's a degree of satisfaction in that of like this woman finally being like, oh, I don't even know if I can ask them if they're thinking about freedom because then they might say they are and I'm scared about what they're not willing to tell me. Right. There's a little bit of payback just so these ladies starting to realize how wrong they've been about the community they've grown up in. Right. Essentially realizing these are human beings who have the same intellect.

as everyone else and has probably already thought of how to escape this moment and maybe the vengeance that they deserve. Yeah, possibly. Yeah, you would have had it coming. You know who else has it coming? The sponsors of this podcast. And it's just a dick pill ad. Mm-hmm. Let's hope.

Get Bell, Pure Fiber Internet with Crave Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay. credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell. Connection is everything. What's up fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I heart women's sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo roer to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is, like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what do we, what do we, what do we?

eating. The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline. And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out, she beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that. Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, The Chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning,

breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators, and friends,

including director Jonathan Chryssel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song, a melody. Well, I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that.

Listen to Podlandia. Ayo rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport. And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers. The show's famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes

and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes. was with Ben Stillard. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere, too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride. He loves over.

Oh, that's fantastic. And you make it on, you make your own. That's great. I call him Tarot Reed. It's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. Oh, gotcha.

I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachy. Obieski. I don't think she was an American pie, but I still liked that. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Yeah. Then Mary Steenberg. Why are you guys talking to me? I'm worried. Why are you talking so down to me that you think I don't understand your little play game? I just really, I get it. I'm trying to set you up for success here. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Felton does not write about her own fear of a slave insurrection in her autobiography, but she does discuss a letter from her mom who was home alone at the family plantation one night.

This is part of why many Georgians were leery of war. The men knew that they were going to have to leave their wives at home to fight, and the women knew they were going to be left at home by their husbands, possibly forever. Still, after the war started, Rebecca and the Felton family were as patriotic as any southerners. She diverted production of cotton to corn in order to help feed her starving country, and her husband volunteered as a doctor for injured soldiers. These people's reservations did nothing to stop them from volunteering to help the fight for slavery. In the fall of 1861, a few months after the Battle of Fort Sumter,

a woman named Betsy Witherspoon, who lived as the sole white person in the Society Hill plantation, was murdered by her slaves. This sparked a panic. Feimster quotes one woman who wrote her mother-in-law not to touch the soup their slaves had cooked for them. Her recipient replied, Hitherto, I have never thought of being afraid of Negroes. I had never injured any of them. Why would they want to hurt me?

I feel that all the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why should they treat me any better than they have done cousin Betsy? Right. Why should they? You own them. Like, right? Bring the room, girl. It's this like direct realization of like, oh shit, why wouldn't they kill me?

I'm like, yeah, they've got no reason not to. Yeah. So the war went on still. And, you know, as terrifying as cases like this were, and as much as this fear of slave uprising and fear of violence, is kind of baked into the southern psyche after this point, violence by black people. You know, we would say liberatory justified violence, but that's not how these people think of it. This is going to stay rooted in their minds long after the war, right?

And despite that, the vast majority of enslaved people in the Confederacy either escaped without doing any violence or remained shockingly loyal to the people who had owned them. Rebecca felt on herself credited the black enslaved women that she and other white people owned across the Confederacy for stopping a mass insurrection. As Feimster summarizes, Felton specifically argued that the fidelity and general excellence of colored women scattered all over the Southland had prevented slaves from turning on their masters. Southerners, she explained,

own their security of Confederate homes to their faithful female slaves. Now, that's her take. Now, this is a phenomenon, a documented one, right? Most of the people who were enslaved in the South don't try to commit like a violent uprising to escape. If they escape, they just leave. And a large, a weird number of them, like, don't leave until it's over, right? They, they, a weird number of people do kind of stay with these families. And again, or run away, but without doing any kind of violence. And there's a couple reasons for that, right? One of them is that, as I said, many of these people are related. They are often the children and

grandchildren of the people who own them. Now, these family relationships are sometimes hidden from the outside, but they're often, if not always, widely known to members of the household. And that makes things fucking complicated, right? Even if they own you, even if it's fucked up and unfair, if that guy's like your dad or your uncle biologically and you, like, were raised or if you're one of these, like, women that Rebecca, like, credits with calming, you know, everyone else down from violence. Maybe part of why you're doing that is you nursed a bunch of these young white kids when you were, when they were babies.

And you just can't square yourself with murdering them. Because as evil as these people are, you're not. And you recognize that this person was a baby that you held at your breast and you don't want to see them killed. Like, it's hard. It's complicated. Like the relationships that are created by this abominable system are really complex. And the way people react as the war pushes more pressure on them are complex and multifaceted, right? Yep.

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

of her psychology and what's going on in this lady's head. That's like mind-blowing because she really dissects these levels of understanding the enslaved people in such a way that you, she kind of feels like she could have been a heroin in this story, but instead she's not. It's weird. And there are pieces where I think she has things very right. For example, she's very racist and racism is going to be a major motivating factor in her life. but I actually think the motivation behind her her main racism in life.

And the motivation for her activism later is because the Civil War makes her hate Southern white men. That is a huge part of all of her belief system and everything that comes afterwards. What's forming right now is a deep anger in her at the society she was raised in, at the lies she was raised with, and at the men who told her it'll be fine if you just let us control everything and led their society to ruin. and she is the failure of southern white men is going to be like the main thing that motivates everything she does as an adult and I think that's also very interesting. Again, I feels like I don't understand

because that should not lead to racism. Yeah, she's racist before, but the motivation for the racist activism, like her racist activism is motivated by a fact that she thinks that white men have failed to protect white women. Well, men ruin everything, right? And so that's where she becomes pro-lynching is because she's like, we white women need to take a, like, responsibility for our own defense on ourselves because these white men are fucking useless.

That's a big part of why she believes in the vote is what white women need the vote in order to enforce white supremacy because white men are too weak to do it on their own. That's Rebecca Felton's ideology, and it's forming right now. Because when she's a girl- She's saying white men just didn't do it right. We didn't do it right. You didn't. Well, clearly you didn't. We gave you the chance.

When I was a girl, the rule was we give up our autonomy. for permanent safety and comfort. And you guys threw that away because you wouldn't compromise with the rest of the union, even a little bit about slavery. And because you wouldn't compromise, not only did we lose slavery,

but we lost all of our wealth and comfort and have to work for a living now. So I don't trust you anymore. That's her justification later for why women need the vote, right? First of all, white women fucking suck. White men fucking suck.

Yeah, I was going to say, first of all, never trust men. Second of all, that is nothing. What's nothing to do with this, girlfriend? Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not calling it good logic. I'm just saying that it is really interesting to me, that I do think the motivation for her more even than the racism is that she's like, well, fucking white dudes are useless. And that's really, really interesting as a justification for lynching.

Yeah, not a justification for lynching, but like. No, but it's weird. Her hostility is pointed in the wrong area. Yeah, the call is coming from inside the house. Yeah. What are you? We're going to tell. This whole story is like how she gets there.

Okay. Okay. Okay. So, yeah. You know, after the war, which they lose, the Felton family has to sell their plantation and things go very much downhill for them. And more than the recklessness, she came to blame Southern men for what she saw as the chief evil of slavery, miscegenation.

Something she recognizes. I think she sees it at the time and she speaks out about it after the war is that you can't stop white men from raping their slaves and impregnation. many of them. And many do this, in fact, for the economic benefit as much as anything, because a new slave is a new slave. Now, as a lady scientific racist... We need to take a pause. What the fuck. Yeah. She hates the mis-the-inbreeding. That's a big part of her. Again, it's white men she's pissed at, but it's not white men who pay the price. She's going to go up. It's kind of like with a girl catches her man cheating. She goes after the woman instead of the man, this kind of

scenario. With all the schools she went to, did she never take basic math? Because she's like basically going. That's not what the folk. I mean, she's going one plus one equals seven. What are we doing? And it is worth noting other women of her class and time are able to recognize this and take the right conclusion to Grimke sisters who are very prominent abolition activists in the period of time where she's a young woman, grew up on plantations owning people, realized it was evil left and became activist against it. And part of one of the reasons they said it was evil is that all these white men are raping these slaves. Now, they didn't think miscegenation was evil.

They thought it was evil to rape a white woman or to rape a black woman, right? And they believed it was rape either way. And that's part of what the Grimkees were saying, is that like this is wrong because of that. Felton recognizes that it is really fucked up that these men are doing this. But she does not think it's fucked up for the same reason. She thinks it's fucked up because race mixing is wrong, right? And while she does acknowledge that sometimes unfortunate enslaved women are raped by their brutish masters.

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

She knew them as men and she knows how fucking wrong they were, right? And so it is kind of satisfying to read for that. But at the core of it, her real issue with them is race mixing. And that's so you can never forget that, right? So cool. She writes in her autobiography. As a rule, slave owners were careful of the health of their slaves. The profit in it made them careful.

There were bad masters, many of them, but the increase of slave property before the Civil War, a test. to the good breeding and housing of slaves. The crime that made slavery a curse lies in the fact that unbridled lust placed the children of bad white men in slave pins on auction blocks and no regard was shown to parentage or parental responsibility in such matters.

Now, again, you can just read that last bit and be like, yeah, it's really fucked up to put your own kids in auction blocks, I get it, she's not saying that's the fucked up thing. She's saying slavery was great except for this. She's saying we took really good care of them except for the rape. You can see how good we took care of them

by how many more of them there were, you know, over the years. But also there was a lot of rape. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. And you can really get a feel for her beliefs when you understand that. While Rebecca thought violent rape was pretty bad would upset her far more were the male slave owners who claim to have consensual relationships with black women they owned. Because a lot of these guys will describe, at least in like small gatherings, some of these women as like their wives.

That's the thing that happens all throughout slavery. There's always white dudes who will marry, quote, unquote, women that they own. And yeah, here's Rebecca. I remember well a noted home in Middle Georgia where a rich man lived in open alliance with a colored woman and where governors and congressmen were often invited to die and where they were glad to go.

In his will, there were other men of distinction in Georgia who also defied the marriage law of the state by keeping up to two households on the same plantation, one white and the other colored. And both women were afraid to make the matter outcry, make the public outcry. Therein lie the curse of slavery. And I don't think that's where the curse of slavery lies.

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

How are you feeling? Wonderful. Wonderful. Excellent. Well, you want to plug your plugables before we roll out here? I'm Samantha. You can find me on the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You with my co-host, Annie. We also wrote a book, same title, Stuff Mom Never Told You. It's been out for a minute. He's also on, like, audiobook, so you can listen to us, try to read our books in a weird manner. Yay. Also, I'm on Instagram. Ha ha.

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