The Senate's first woman -- a Dem -- was also its last enslaver

When Rebecca Latimer Felton took the Senate oath of office on Nov. 21, 1922, the press was there to capture every moment. She posed for pictures at her desk and received huge applause from the packed gallery.

The next day, she gave a brief speech and then stepped down. She had been a U.S. senator - the first woman to hold the office - for one day. Newspapers gave glowing reviews to her historic moment, calling her "grand," "poised" and "dainty." Some noted she also held another record: At 87, she was the oldest freshman senator in history.

None mentioned another historic title she held: Felton - suffragist, writer, political insider and avid white supremacist - was the last member of Congress known to have once enslaved people.

The second-to-last enslaver, Rep. William Livingston of Alabama, had died in office in 1914.

Born in 1835 to a wealthy Georgia plantation owner, Felton grew up surrounded by enslaved people, received other humans as property as a wedding dowry, and lived on her husband's plantation, which was operated by enslaved people, for more than a decade before the Civil War.

After slavery's end, Felton remained a strong proponent of white supremacy, routinely advocating for more lynching of Black men, whom she called "beasts."

In her 1919 memoir, Felton described her youth on a Georgia plantation. Her family had been enslavers for generations, and one of her first memories was watching Cherokees being marched out of the area on the Trail of Tears. She attended private schools and graduated from Madison Female College at 17. The next year, she married William Harrell Felton, a wealthy doctor 12 years her senior.

Felton opposed secession, though her husband volunteered as a Confederate military doctor. The way she viewed slavery, there were "kind masters and cruel masters," and the Civil War was a punishment from God for the sins of the cruel ones - namely, white men who produced children with enslaved Black women. "There were violations of the moral law that made mulattoes as common as blackberries," she wrote. "The retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war."

In 1874, Felton ran her husband's successful campaign for Congress. Along the way, she gained a reputation: She was sometimes characterized as the brains behind her husband's political operation, and sometimes derided for stepping "out of her proper sphere," as the Savannah Morning News put it in 1879.

Felton's husband served three terms before being defeated by a fellow Democrat in an election his supporters claimed included fraudulent votes. He and Felton remained powerful in Georgia politics, supporting the temperance movement and women's suffrage.

In August 1898, Felton made a speech at an agricultural society meeting about the problems facing farm wives. The No. 1 problem, she claimed, was rape by Black men, and she endorsed a way to "solve" it: "[I]f 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."

Days later, Alexander Manly, a Black newspaper owner in majority-Black Wilmington, North Carolina, responded, writing that the rape of Black women by white men was the real problem, and that many white women had consensual sex with Black men.

Manly's op-ed was used as a pretext for the Wilmington insurrection in November 1898, during which white supremacists overthrew the multiracial elected government and killed between 60 and 300 people. Manly barely escaped with his life; according to historian David Zucchino, Felton told the press, "The slanderer [Manly] should be made to fear a lyncher's rope rather than occupy a place in New York newspapers."

Felton's husband died in 1909, but she remained a force in Georgia politics, particularly in women's suffrage. (Few white suffragists openly supported Black voting rights; many avoided the issue, while others, like Felton, argued that white women should be given the vote specifically to help maintain white supremacy in the Jim Crow South.)

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Then in 1922, Georgia's junior senator died unexpectedly. It fell to Gov. Thomas W. Hardwick, a Democrat, to appoint a replacement until an election could be held. Hardwick also decided to run in that election, so he was looking to use the appointment to his political advantage. First, he wanted to appoint someone who wouldn't compete with him in the election. He also wanted to curry the votes of newly enfranchised women; Hardwick had opposed the 19th Amendment, so he thought he needed to do something big to make up for it.

So he appointed Felton. For a few weeks, it appeared as though her appointment would be symbolic only: The Senate wasn't expected to be in session before the election that would replace her. She didn't bother traveling to Washington or taking the oath of office.

Then a couple of unexpected things happened: 1) The president called Congress to a special session to work on a ship-subsidy bill, and 2) Hardwick lost the election.

Seeing an opportunity, Felton kicked her campaigning skills into high gear, convincing the incoming senator to delay his inauguration so she could briefly occupy the seat. According to newspaper coverage at the time, even one objection from any senator could have stopped this plan, and a few of them had indicated they would oppose a woman on the Senate floor.

In the end, they stayed silent, and Felton was inaugurated as a Senate gallery packed with women watched and applauded.

The next morning, moments before she stepped down, she addressed her Senate colleagues, thanking them for their "chivalric" welcome and telling them that though she was now just a "remnant of the Old South," she was "the happiest woman in the United States."

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