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

July 28, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Rebecca Felton was the first woman to serve in the United States Senate, appointed in 1922 at the age of 87. She was also a prominent suffragist, a celebrated Georgia writer, and a lifelong advocate for lynching. This episode of Behind the Bastards, with guest Samantha McVay, traces Felton's early life on a sprawling Georgia plantation to understand how a woman who could write with apparent clarity about the evils of slavery could also become one of the South's most vocal white supremacist activists.

The Making of a Plantation Mistress

Rebecca Ann Latimer was born in 1835 near Decatur, Georgia, into a family that ran the town. The Latimers owned a 725-acre plantation, a flour mill, a blacksmith shop, a tavern, and a general store. Their wealth, like that of all elite Southern families, was built on the ownership of a large number of enslaved people. The family's presence in Georgia was itself a product of the Yazoo land fraud, a massive corruption scandal in the 1790s that saw the state legislature bribe away millions of acres of Native land to speculators. Felton, writing her autobiography in her eighties, openly traced her family's comfort to this theft, a rare moment of clarity that the hosts note is typical of her complicated legacy.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:05) **Introduction and Guest** - Robert Evans introduces guest Samantha McVay and sets up the episode’s central paradox: the first female U.S. Senator, Rebecca Felton, was also a pro-lynching activist.
2 (04:44) **Rebecca's Birth and Family Background** - Felton was born into a wealthy, slave-owning family in Georgia, with roots stretching back to pre-Revolutionary America.
3 (06:53) **The Yazoo Land Fraud and the Trail of Tears** - The episode delves into the corrupt land deal that enabled Felton's family wealth, linking it directly to the Trail of Tears, which she witnessed as a child.
4 (12:51) **Early Life and Admiration for Southern Women** - Felton was raised to idolize the matriarchs who managed plantations, a model of female domestic power within a deeply patriarchal system.
5 (17:30) **The Social Contract of Southern Womanhood** - Felton was raised in a system where white women traded autonomy for protection and comfort, a bargain she only began to resent after the Civil War.
6 (21:15) **A Glimpse of Slave Weddings and Brutality** - Felton’s nostalgic accounts of plantation life inadvertently reveal the brutal realities of the slave system, particularly the pass system and her own role as an arbiter of her slaves' lives.
7 (24:24) **Education and a Judge's Interest** - Felton attended a strict private academy where dancing was banned, and she developed a crush on a much older judge, illustrating the norms of the era.

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Show Notes

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)

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