In my history classes at Texas A&M University-Commerce, I enjoy talking about strong women in American history who championed for women’s rights. I consider Rebecca Latimer Felton (b. 1835) to be one of these powerful women. Felton became the oldest freshman senator - and first female senator - at eighty-seven years old in 1922. In this article I analyze the political career of Rebecca Felton—a patriotic and successful, yet highly controversial legislator in the Progressive Era.
Joshua V. Chanin explains.
Rebecca Felton in later life.
Political Beginnings
Rebecca was unlike her boisterous peers on the playground, instead enjoying quieter, mature activities such as reading newspapers and partaking in dinner conversations on the state of American politics. Since her father was a Whig, young Rebecca naturally followed suite and devoted herself to reading dense material written by several prolific Whig leaders, including Henry Clay and Millard Fillmore. “I confess to a real liking for political questions. It was my habit for many years to keep up with the progress of great questions in the national congress and I found interest and food for thought in the daily, but dull, congressional record.” She later attested that Henry Clay was the greatest man in the United States in the nineteenth century.
One of her first major political experiences was the 1844 presidential election between Henry Clay and James K. Polk. Rebecca, at age nine, “read the newspapers very diligently” and, like others among the higher social class, firmly believed that “Henry Clay’s election was a forgone conclusion. His ability as a statesman was so transcendent; defeat was unthinkable…” However, the pollsters were wrong, and Polk easily won the political race, capturing 170 electoral votes to Clay’s 105. Rebecca later recalled the political shockwaves in the South following the 1844 election: “It was a terrible affair—it ruptured friendships, split up neighborhoods and got among church people.” Rebecca’s political upbringing allowed the young girl to absorb a distinct preview of the life she would be drawn to in the future—a life of activism and unforeseen outcomes.
Standing at the Side
Amid an education at Madison Female College and responsibilities at the family plantation in Cartersville, Georgia, Rebecca Latimer fell in love with Dr. William Harrell Felton, a southern minister. The couple wed in October 1853. Political ambitions were put aside as Rebecca Felton settled into domesticity where she completed chores and tendered to five children—one of whom, Howard Erwin Felton, survived childhood. She was one among the many women in the South prior to the Civil War who did not have a public voice and was obligated to stand at the side of their husband. Rebecca Felton not only supported her spouse in his expansive political career in Georgia’s House of Representatives and the national House, she gradually honed her own political skills by polishing his speeches and helping draft bills—William Felton’s constituents often bragged that they were getting two politicians for the price of one. At first Rebecca Felton believed her career was tied to her husband, however, she strategically used her husband’s position as a springboard for her future roles. And her visibility as a champion for public education—interest in this subject increased after the Felton’s opened Felton Academy following the Civil War—and in women’s suffrage grew to immense capacities in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
A Patriot
Like many Southerners during the Civil War, Felton did not label herself as a “rebel” nor a “secessionist.” Instead, she viewed herself as a patriot, a defender of Southern values, and a proud citizen of Georgia: “I loved my country. No heart ever was more loyal to the South and Southern honor.” Felton, among many in this region, were angry at the 1860 presidential election results and terrified that Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who had flirted with the idea of stopping the spread of slavery in the West, would abolish the slave trade and forcefully drive the Southern economy to a grinding halt. Thus, southerners kept a watchful eye for hostile political opponents and Union spies. Felton wrote about the hidden enemy in a diary: “..Danger lurked in every passing breeze and was concealed under every hasty legislative act of our political war leaders.” To combat this enemy fear, it was natural for southerners to adopt a patriotic tone in life and demonstrate fierce nationalism.
Rebecca Felton’s love for the South and its common Confederate sympathizers during the war is evident in her 1911 memoirs: “Such heroism was unexemplified! The South has reason to be proud of its soldiers and its women. Their story of courage will bear repeating, because it was genuine, sincere and patriotic. Like all other military achievements, the officers earn and receive all the honors of war, but it was the plain soldiers and true-hearted women of the defunct Confederacy who deserve the medals of merit.” When the Confederate government ceased operations and fled Richmond in April 1865, many supporters blamed Confederate President Jefferson Davis for the country’s economic and political failures. Instead, Felton consistently defended the president’s policies, heeding to the fact that Davis had a herculean undertaking at the start of the war: “He was not faultless—he had many and violent enemies…he was victimized by newspaper reporters…he gave it the best that was in him—and went down with it in defeat.” Although patriotism plays a key role in fueling a politician’s agenda and despite being a Dixie woman of her time, Felton’s admiration for Southern racial politics cannot be ignored.
Racial Politics
Felton’s inhumane racial views coincided with her political career. She openly shunned Native Americans and called them “savages,” a label that presumably had been in her vocabulary since she was a young child when her mother occasionally told her bedside stories of Native-led massacres against the white man. Moreover, Felton promoted white supremacism by partaking in regional Ku Klux Klan activities and dissuading her husband’s political colleagues to vote on bills that favored more liberties for African Americans; she believed that more money spent on black education would result in more black crimes in neighborhoods, and voting rights for black women would lead directly to the rape of white women. Felton was eager to spread her nauseating racial beliefs to mass audiences and publicly mock the “half-civilized gorillas,” as she tried to do at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago where she proposed a southern history exhibit that featured “A cabin and real colored folk making mats, shuck collars, and baskets—a woman to spin and card cotton—and another to play banjo and show the actual life of slave—not the Uncle Tom sort.” To the relief of some, the suggested slave exhibit never came to fruition.
During a bloody time where racial violence was already prevalent in the South, Rebecca Felton advocated for more lynchings in Georgia at the turn of the twentieth century. She wanted the rugged noose to play a fixed role in Southern society, as evident by an explicit diary entry dated on August 11, 1897: “When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about inonce and virtue—if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts—then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.” Following the burning of Sam Hose, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, by a white mob in Georgia’s Coweta County in April 1899—where civilians sold parts of Hose’s body as souvenirs—Felton vocally made it known that Hose was a “beast” who was no better than a rabid dog. Not only was she an aggressive advocate of racial prejudice, Felton condemned anyone who dared to question the South’s racial practices. When Andrew Sledd, professor of Biblical Studies at Emory University, published an article in the Atlantic Monthlyin July 1902 criticizing the lynchings of black men, Felton played an instrumental role in forcing Emory’s administration to terminate Sledd for improper behavior and stoked public anger towards the professor through a series of editorial attacks in the Atlanta Constitution. Felton’s racial views were perpetual as she treaded lightly with progressive politics and stayed true to antiquated Southern beliefs—Felton, having possessed slaves since she was eighteen years old, was the last member of either house of Congress to have been a slave owner.
U.S. Senator
The peak of Rebecca Felton’s political career was her one-day appointment to the United States Senate between November 21-22, 1922. A Senate seat suddenly became vacant on September 26, 1922, following the death of Thomas E. Watson. Since Georgia Governor Thomas W. Hardwick wanted to win the November special election for the seat and appease the women voters who were displeased on his opposition to the Nineteenth Amendment, he strategically decided to appoint Felton as Watson’s temporary replacement on October 3. Despite the fact that Congress was not expected to reconvene until the end of November—President Warren Harding persuaded Congress to meet earlier due to an influx of letters from Felton’s supporters requesting the woman to take the oath of office—Walter F. George, the special election winner, chose to step aside and allow Felton to be sworn in as the nation’s first woman senator on November 21. The symbolic gesture to permit a female to sit in one of the highest political chairs in the United States (even just for a day) was a major political victory for white women.
Equal Partners
Felton did not have the opportunity to support or challenge any legislation in the Senate since she only served for one day. However, in front of a filled senate chamber, Felton delivered a speech to her male peers on November 22, pronouncing the increasing influence women had in 1920s national politics: “When women of the country come in and sit with you, though there may be but very few in the next few years, I pledge you that you will get ability, you will get integrity of purpose, you will get exalted patriotism, and you will get unstinted usefulness.” The reactions in the chamber after the address varied. Felton wrote that some of the gentlemen “Seemed to be a little bit hysterical, but most of them occupied their time looking at the ceiling.” Felton’s triumphant exit from the Senate reinforced the suffrage message she had been campaigning about for decades. Felton had been an outspoken leader in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union since 1886 and had articulated the ideas of white women having more decision-making power in the home, acquiring education beyond basic schooling, and enjoying more influence over their children.
Felton also had tirelessly championed for white women’s suffrage during her career—she ferociously debated anti-suffragist Mildred Lewis Rutherford in 1915. Although the suffrage marches in the 1910s propelled the government to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, the Georgia Legislature was the first state to reject the amendment on July 24, 1919. In retaliation, Felton criticized the hypocrisy of southern gentlemen who boasted about their chivalry but opposed women’s rights: “In truth, character seemed to have gone out of politics…The moral salt of character could not be rescued, inside the party, controlled by such machinery…these men in the saddle were full, fat and saucy!” Thus, white women in Georgia were not allowed to vote in the 1920 presidential election, having to wait until the 1922 congressional elections.
Conclusion
Following an active career in politics—behind and in front of the curtain—Felton returned home to lecture at public libraries and write books; she died in Atlanta in January 1930. Senator George remarked that “All in all she [Felton] must be grouped among the great women of her time.” Despite her political success and critical efforts to advance the women’s suffrage movement, Rebecca Felton was unquestionably a flawed character, rooted in her discriminating beliefs on race and southern prejudice.
What do you think of Rebecca Felton? Let us know below.
References
Felton, Rebecca L. Country Life in Georgia in the Days of my Youth. Atlanta, GA: The Index Printing Company, 1919.
Felton, Rebecca L. My Memoirs of Georgia Politics. Atlanta, GA: The Index Printing Company, 1911.
Helms, Amanda. ““Poor forsaken colored girls:” Rebecca Latimer Felton, White Supremacy, and Prison Reform, 1896-1900.” M.A. Thesis, DePaul University, 2013.
Staman, A. Louise. Loosening Corsets: The Heroic Life of Georgia’s Feisty Mrs. Felton, First Woman Senator of the United States.Macon, GA: Tiger Iron Press, 2006.
Talmadge, John E. Rebecca Latimer Felton: Nine Stormy Decades. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1960.
Whites, LeeAnn. “Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Wife’s Farm: The Class and Racial Politics of Gender Reform.” Georgia Historical Quarterly76 (1992): 354-372.
