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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Call zone media.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
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.
I don't know.

**Samantha McVeigh** (0:28)
Hey, either way.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:29)
You added a your to that.

**Samantha McVeigh** (0:31)
You did.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
Yeah, I did. I was going to let it go. Stuff Mom Never Told You. Jesus.

**Samantha McVeigh** (0:35)
Stuff Mom Never Told You.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:36)
Close enough. It's early morning for me.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:39)
It's 1:13 p.m., friends.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
Yeah, well, I haven't slept in days. It's four o'clock in my time, so. Yeah. There you go.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:45)
Speaking of friends, hi, Sam.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:48)
Hi.

**Samantha McVeigh** (0:50)
How is everybody?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:51)
I'm good, Sam. I wanted to know, do you know anything about the first female senator?

**Samantha McVeigh** (0:58)
First, not that, see, now I'm confused because I would remember the Pantsuit Senator, which we do talk about, and I have to go back to my book.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:04)
This is the technical first female senator. 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 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 US Senator.
Now, that all sounds great, right? That doesn't sound like the subject for a Behind the Bastards 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, wasn't she? She was super racist. She grew up on a plantation racist.

**Samantha McVeigh** (1:50)
Georgia?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:51)
Oh, yeah. Oh, this is a Georgia story.

**Samantha McVeigh** (1:54)
The actual first senator I was thinking about was a Black woman, but maybe I'm wrong.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:59)
I don't know the elected first senator off the top of my head right now. I read about her when I was doing the research for this, but I'm purely focusing on the monster who technically claimed the term, because she fits for our purposes here on Behind the Bastards, right?

**Samantha McVeigh** (2:12)
I'm so excited to talk about racists. I love talking about racists. This is one of my favorite hobbies. Let's go.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:17)
All right.
So Rebecca Ann Latimer was born on June 10th, 1835, somewhere near Decatur, Georgia. Felton's family was rich. Oh, okay. Cool. Well, this is such a local story. I told you. This is too close to home.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:39)
This is full on a Samantha McVeigh episode.

**Samantha McVeigh** (2:41)
It's literally my home.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:43)
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.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:52)
Because it was after Rebecca Felton, there was a senator 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, right? She's a Decatur girl. Her family is rich as hell. And she was going to be raised and spend 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 you're in Decatur, you could go see the Latimer home. I feel like I know this name. Or at least it was existent 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 owned 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 and 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 in 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?