Rebecca Latimer Felton: First Woman Senator, Last Slaveholder in Congress

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Rebecca Latimer Felton was born in 1835 in Decatur, Georgia, to a prosperous merchant and planter family. She graduated first in her class from Madison Female College in 1852 at 17 and a year later married Dr. William Harrell Felton, settling on his plantation near Cartersville, where they held enslaved people. Only one of her five children survived childhood, and the Civil War destroyed the plantation, leaving the couple to open a school. She ran her husband's campaigns for the U.S. House and the Georgia House, then built her own platform through the Women's Christian Temperance Union from 1886 and the suffrage movement from about 1900. Her feminism, the episode stresses, was limited to white women.

Felton was also an outspoken white supremacist. In an August 1897 speech on Tybee Island she called for mass lynching, and when the speech was reprinted in 1898, editor Alex Manly's rebuttal was used to incite the Wilmington Massacre. In September 1922 Senator Thomas E. Watson died, and Governor Thomas W. Hardwick appointed the 87 year old Felton to the seat to court women voters. Walter F. George won the special election, and on November 21, 1922, he allowed Felton to be sworn in for a single day. She became the first woman senator, the oldest freshman senator, and the last member of Congress to have owned slaves. She died in 1930 at 94.

• At a 1915 legislative hearing she was allotted 30 minutes to the anti-suffragists' 45, and she spoke 15 minutes longer anyway.
• Georgia used procedural delays to keep women from voting in 1920; they could not cast ballots until 1922.
• She publicly said Alex Manly deserved to be killed and celebrated the 1899 mob killing of Sam Hose.
• In a memoir written in her 80s, she called the war for slavery a mistake and condemned the removal of the Cherokee.
• Fox Movietone News filmed her at home in 1929, at 93, discussing her political career.