Rebecca Latimer Felton:
Forgotten Feminist

Rebecca Latimer Felton in 1922

In America today, the annals of history are painstakingly raked over and then flyspecked to uncover non-white accomplishments. A mulatto draftsman employed by Thomas Edison is now being touted as an inventor. (Edison is a great annoyance to equalitarians.) On July 4th, a commentator explains with rhapsodies of joy that Porgy and Bess is the archetypal piece of American music. Why not? It is, after all, Jewish music about Negroes. What could be more American?

Despite the mantras of the maniacal about “Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians, gays, left-handed Buddhists,” . . . etc., that are thought to be the indispensable components of that great smorgasbord of “diversity,” women seem to be falling out of favor unless they possess a second property, i.e., color or sexual “status.” Ordinarily what used to be called “notable” women are of declining interest, especially if they “happen to be white,” as the expression so pleasantly goes. (How people “happen to be white” must perplex those leftists who deny any importance to genetics. Must be more bad environment and poor social consciousness on the part of white parents.) Non-white “two-fers” are applauded, but white females are increasingly less celebrated in the modern pecking order. The Burke’s Peerage of Bolshevism is, like Stalinist purge lists, always under revision. After all, it would only be expected that as we progress towards Nirvana, enlightenment will permit us to strip away old preconceptions dating back, say, a week ago. (Your scribbler is researching this point and hopes to make his findings concerning the leftist food chain public shortly.)

Unfortunately, white women do represent an important portion of the minority coalition. (They are really a “two fer” since every white woman voting or acting non-white really counts twice — one less white vote and one more for the forces of darkness.) But the white woman who acts and thinks in the best interests of her race is consigned to the Pluto of leftist cosmology . . . if she is lucky. When mentioned at all, she can be expected to be excoriated by the present guardians of official history.

Consequently, it is no surprise to see a female “who happens to be a honky” play a role in history and then drop from the Pantheon. For example, well-informed readers of this screed are probably familiar with the fairly recent fall from grace of Margaret Sanger. Her sensible views on race have caused the non-whites to demand that she be sent down the memory hole. Total subservience and conformity in this all-important matter is the price of praise in today’s diverse intellectual academy.

If they are successful, Sanger will join Rebecca Latimer Felton. Who? Mrs. William H. Felton. Still no recognition? Senator Rebecca Latimer Felton? Senator Felton (1835 – 1930) was the first woman to serve as a United States Senator. She was appointed by Governor Hardwick to represent Georgia after the death of the great populist Thomas E. Watson in 1923. While Mrs. Felton only served for a few days, she led a long and active political career in Georgia. Her husband, William H. Felton, helped lead the independent/proto-populist revolt in Georgia for some years and served in Congress from 1874 to 1880 representing Northwest Georgia. Mrs. Felton was widely seen as the “second congressman” from that district as she and her husband fought brutal campaign after campaign against the entrenched “Bourbon” Democratic party which dispatched money and legions of rented heroes in Confederate Grey such as General John B. Gordon to campaign against them.

Among the issues that interested and engaged Mrs. Felton were: prohibition, women’s suffrage, honest and limited government, public education, cleaning up the corrupt, political Methodist Augean stables, prison reform, and other similar measures. She was very forceful in her political writings and often enemies (she did not have rivals — only enemies) opened the newspapers with grim trepidation to find one of her scathing articles flaying their political hide.

When she was appointed by Governor Hardwick, she was eighty-eight years old but photographs made of her reveal a youthful twinkle in her eye and a vigorous, grandmotherly aspect in her dress and appearance. After her extremely brief term in the Senate, she went on to write both books and newspaper articles, run her business concerns, and sit on the boards of the foundations and schools she had helped found. She actively campaigned for Alfred E. Smith (a Catholic, drinker, and Yankee) rather than see worshipers of Woodrow Wilson such as Georgia-born William McAdoo get the Democratic nomination. She was opposed to the “League of Notions” and American intervention in future European wars.

In her 93rd year she was involved in a car wreck and, to her doctor’s amazement, made a complete recovery. He announced after a day or two she would be all right — if they could make her stop talking. Nine months later, in December, 1929, she was in the news once more when she took a ride in a blimp.

It was in January, 1930, that she took a cold and yet insisted on riding a bus to Atlanta from her home in Cartersville to attend a board meeting of her Girls Training School. (Her frugal soul rebelled at the extravagance of the railroad fare.) The cold worsened and she finally succumbed a week later at age 94. The United States Senate adjourned in her honor.

Her estate was valued at $250,000 — in the depression. Her money was earned bit by bit in writing, farming, and prudent investment. All in all, Mrs Felton was a remarkable woman. She rode the first train out of Atlanta as a young girl and traveled by air in a blimp the last year of her life. She authored scores upon scores of major newspaper and magazine articles and three books, including Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth and My Memoirs of Georgia Politics. Her fictionalized life was the central character in a best-selling novel of the time — The Co-Citizens by Corra Harris, available here and here.

Her life is also the subject of biography: John E. Talmadge’s Rebecca Latimer Felton: Nine Stormy Decades (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1960). Talmadge’s work can still be found upon occasion in used book stores. Additional information can be gleaned from biographies of Tom Watson, Benjamin H. Hill, John B. Gordon, Alexander H. Stephens, and Joseph Brown. The Feltons also draw mention in post-war histories of Georgia because of Mr. Felton’s Congressional career. Histories of populism in Georgia also give them considerable coverage.

Yet, today few even in her native Georgia remember Rebecca Latimer Felton. Try her name on the knowledgeable feminists. Look in vain for her visage on postage stamps.

Perceptive readers doubtless suspect the reason already. Mrs. Felton was a daughter of Dixie. The race question is the great issue that provided the political poison to tear the nation apart from 1860 – 1865 and haunts it to this day. Rebecca Latimer Felton did not truck with race-mixers or equalitarians. Indeed, the presence of the dusky-hued electors was cited as one of the reasons that White women needed enfranchisement in her suffragette speeches. She and her husband were slave holders and had first-hand experience with the Negro race. That close and personal experience, unlike that of the distant New England abolitionists, lead Mrs. Felton to very decided opinions of the capacities and therefore the appropriate role of the Negro in the post-war South.

For the Left, race always trumps. Felton’s activities on behalf of feminism receive no plaudits when weighed in the balance with her racial views. There is a lesson here, since, as conservationists point out, extinction is forever. Should rightists or racialists be content that someone reduces the capital gains tax and opens the floodgates to third world immigrants at the same time? It has been entertaining to hear Republicans complain that Democrats wish to retain Clinton as president despite his manifest lawbreaking while defending the violation of immigration laws so they can have cheap nannies and yard men. “They’re hard working and good for business.”

When Mrs. Felton fixed her mind on a subject, she was not hesitant to express herself. No questions of “insensitivity” troubled her mind and bleached her speech. In her school days (about 1850) young Rebecca Latimer wrote: “In no respect is improvement more apparent than in the intellectual world. After a slumber of ages the mind of man has awakened to a realization of its power. This is especially true of the Anglo-Saxon race, for the mental powers of the Eastern nations are still folded in the Lethean slumber of ages” (Talmadge, p. 9).

This racial consciousness was to follow her all her life. Her temperance speeches were peppered with the proposition that permitting Negroes to consume alcohol only increased their criminal behavior and even precipitated attacks on white women. Indeed, the need to control Negro rapists played a major role in her most controversial advocacy: lynching as a preventative to antisocial African actions. In one of her articles she flatly stated that so long as Negro crime continued, lynching must continue. In a speech before the State Agricultural Society in 1897, she explained that women left alone in isolated farm houses faced a grave danger from roving Negro rapists and murderers. The men of Georgia, she explained, needed to protect their wives and daughters. Since religion and law could not put a stop to this behavior, then the White men must lynch these “ravening beasts a thousand times a week if necessary” (Talmadge, p. 114; also Atlanta Journal August 12, 1897).

This widely reported speech stirred the Holy North to righteous rage at the bestial South. Mrs. Felton began to engage in a newspaper war with the Boston Transcript in her usual direct and forceful language. Her biographer summarized her response as follows:

Bluntly she charged the Northern newspapers with encouraging those crimes that made lynching necessary. Their maudlin sympathy for the Southern Negro had made him restless and unruly. If Boston wanted mixed marriages, that was its business but it might as well understand that in the South a Negro who laid hands on a white woman was going to die. Of course, she had rather see the brute hanged legally, but if he confessed to a mob, then he stood condemned by civilization, with the possible exception of Boston. (Talmadge, p. 114)

A Negro editor in Wilmington, North Carolina, fired an incendiary response in paper to the effect that he agreed that the poorer classes of White women were entirely too free with clandestine meeting with Black men — just as White men were with colored women. The Black scribe advised the White people to begin at the fountainhead to purify the stream.

In November, 1898, the Republican administration of Wilmington departed office, and the sable sage immediately decamped for New Jersey’s more salubrious climes before a mob sacked the newspaper office and eleven other Negroes perished in the riots that followed.

Mrs. Felton continued to advocate lynching as a means of controlling feckless Negro criminal conduct. Even the self-confessed liberal author of Mrs. Felton’s biography was forced to admit that “[f]rom 1890 on into the first of the twentieth century there was an alarming outburst of Negro violence and white reprisals, both of which were probably brought on by the white man’s efforts to curtail the political and social advances made by the Negro” (Talmadge, p. 118).

It did not occur to him — or he thought it less than discreet to articulate it — that the reverse of the proposition was more likely true. The behavior of Negroes drove the Southerners to curtail their privileged status in post-Reconstruction society. Many Southerners, particularly prominent ones like Henry Grady, were willing to put race aside if it were shown to be workable and good for business. When experience proved otherwise, the Jim Crow laws were born. (A friend recently commented the invention of air conditioning made integration possible due to the olfactory considerations of association with Negroes — as well as Asian disdain for whites.)

While Mrs. Felton considered herself a devout Christian, she did not hesitate to open fire on the clerics of the day whom she suspected were but corrupt timeservers.

Dr. J. B. Hawthorne of the Southern Baptists entered the fray with Mrs. Felton by criticizing her for her remarks about lynching. Hawthorne and Felton had previously crossed before over Prohibition and woman’s suffrage. Hawthorne was quoted by Talmadge as stating “she represented ‘humanity verging toward the animal and the fiend’ in his sermon pompously titled “Christianity and Mob Law” (Talmadge, p. 115).

Never one to back down, she retorted that Hawthorne was but a “slick-haired, slick-tongued Pecksniffian blatherskite.” Felton claimed that lynch law had curtailed the level of Black-on-White crime. (When is the last time any public figure took umbrage at Black-on-White crime?) In the next exchange of fire, Hawthorne responded that he only sought to correct the bad press and bad reputation Georgia was getting in the Northern press. (Could be bad for business, you know.) As a proud Southerner, Felton replied that Hawthorne was truckling to the Yankees to get a higher salaried job. Hawthorne retired from the field — although he and Felton would feud again. Felton later discovered that he was paid to endorse patent medicine cures. The Godly Hawthorne was using his ministerial position to his personal profit by these endorsements — an early Jim Bakker.

Not long thereafter, another Negro outrage occurred in Coweta County, south of Atlanta. A local black by the name of Sam Horse murdered a White farmer and then raped his wife next to the farmer’s body. Horse then fled, and posses combed middle Georgia in pursuit. A large reward was offered for his capture.

Mrs. Felton urged the posses to simply shoot Horse down rather than capture him. That would spare the victim the necessity of testifying in open court. After a ten day search, Horse was captured and brought to the jail in the county seat of Newnan. On the next morning, a Sunday, the inevitable occurred. A mob pulled Horse from the jail, emasculated him, and then burned him alive. The North exploded. Most Southern papers did not comment, nor did Mrs. Felton.

Three years later, a self-hating Southerner by the name of Andrew Sledd penned a plea against lynch law. A liberal by the lights of his time, Sledd would be excoriated today by the left. He explained that Negroes were not fit for integration, and the North was wrong to attempt to force it on the South. However, the South was wrong to evoke the brutal reprisal of lynching to control Black behavior. Sledd particularly painted a poignant picture of the perpetrators of the death of Horse. All the worst aspects of mob behavior were paraded for the reader’s revulsion. (See Andrew Sledd, “The Negro: Another View,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1902.)

Felton leapt to the defense of Dixie. She pointed out that Sledd did not bother about the death of the farmer or the sufferings of his wife. The victims of Horse were ignored by the “sniveling ink-slinger” hireling of a Yankee magazine. She advised Sledd to head north to get a job with a Negrophile journal before his fellow Southerners accoutered him with tar and feathers.

As it developed, Sledd was a professor at Emory University, a Methodist school (actually attended by many Methodists at that distant time) then of some reputation for decency outside Atlanta. Felton began to agitate against his continued employment. Sledd resigned his professorship. He served his martyrdom by taking the Presidency of the University of Florida. After retiring from Florida, Emory would re-appoint him in 1915. His “courage” enabled him to bear up well under these terrible oppressions.

As bad as mob rule was and is, Felton’s point was that the primitive behavior of Blacks required the threat of immediate retribution in order to hope to put some brake on them. We have now escaped the bad old lynching days . . . or have we? Are whites the victims of lynching today instead of Blacks? Studies of crime records make it clear that today the Whites are the victims of Negro lynch mobs. Many articles on this subject have appeared in Instauration, American Renaissance, The Occidental Quarterly and other samzidat journals as well as Jared Taylor’s book Paved With Good Intentions (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992). You will serve in vain for those who boast of “the people’s right to know” exposing the public to these sordid facts. The differential rape rates are particularly illuminating. Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics show that about 100 white women are raped by Black men each day. The number of Black women raped by white men in an entire year can be counted on the fingers and toes of one person. “Wildings” are simply accepted as justifiable expressions of Black “rage.” Instead of being condemned, understanding is urged on behalf of the poor, misunderstood “youths” who behave just as their ancestors did a century or more ago.

When the New England salons of abolitionists, spiritualists, phrenologists, and transcendentalists idealized the Negro one could have hoped that experience would modify their prejudices. Instead, they have degenerated into liberals and progressives who are clearly impervious to rationality.

The lessons of Rebecca Latimer Felton’s life for us today are many. She worked long and unsparingly to the end of her days for the issues and causes that were important to her. She still was able to raise her family and run businesses. In theory, she ought to be one of those “Virginia Slims” role model women who “had it all.”

But she was an outspoken and courageous racialist even in a day when most assumed that America was and would always be a white country. Where the enemy raised a suggestion against that great fundamental principle, she would rush to the defense of her race. She did not care one whit for the accolades of her enemies. She never compromised with the enemies of her people.

Despite all these characteristics — which modern commentators would advise were guarantees of failure — she was successful. She and her husband advanced from honor to honor. When they each passed from this orb, they were genuinely mourned by those for whom they labored.

There are other “white racialists” of our own times whose careers stand in starkest contrast. The pathetic George Wallace comes to mind. Despite his earlier liberal views on race, he became identified as the foremost segregationist of the Southland. His charade of standing in the schoolhouse door was remembered while his instantaneous, pre-arranged departure from the transom was forgotten.

If Wallace ever truly believed in segregation, he should have had no apologies for it when integration was tried under every conceivable format and failed. He should have been willing — if not enthusiastically able — to enjoy that great human pleasure of saying: “I told you so.” Instead, in his declining days he lacked the fortitude to be a John Randolph of Roanoke, Cicero, Cato, or Demosthenes in the dying days of our Republic. He groveled and cowered like a whipped cur begging the media not to beat him any more.

This psychological prostration was to no avail. He was whipped. He will always be whipped as a confessed failure. “A man who saw the light too late.” “Even George Wallace admitted that integration was the right course.”

Wallace simply lacked character. His lack of character helped to place us in the situation we find ourselves today. He did not truly believe in what he did or said when he had power. Therefore, his resistance always ceased whenever the cost mounted. As a symbol, he was a terrible failure in the second Reconstruction.

In contrast, Rebecca Latimer Felton proved time and time again that she had the character and moral courage that elevated her to the Pantheon of heroes and heroines of our race. The Greeks believed that no one actually perished whose name was remembered. We should study the careers of our forebears such as Mrs. Felton. She fought heroically for us. She, and many others like her, deserve honor and remembrance. We should honor her by working, as she would have us to work, for our posterity as well.

Our fathers in a wondrous age,
Ere yet the Earth was small,
Ensured to us an heritage,
And doubted not at all

That we, the children of their heart,
Which then did beat so high,
In later time should play like part
For our posterity.

. . .

Then fretful, murmur not they gave
So great a charge to keep,
Nor dream that awestruck Time shall save
Their labour while we sleep.

Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year,
Our father’s title runs.
Make we likewise their sacrifice,
Defrauding not our sons.

Rudyard Kipling
“The Heritage”

The orignal version of this essay appeared in Instauration, April 1999.