Published by The History Press
Charleston, SC 29403
www.historypress.net
Copyright 2014 by Tom Elmore
All rights reserved
First published 2014
e-book edition 2014
ISBN 978.1.62585.040.9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Elmore, Tom (Historian)
The scandalous lives of Carolina belles Marie Boozer and Amelia Feaster : flirting with the enemy / Tom Elmore.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
print edition ISBN 978-1-62619-510-3
1. Boozer, Marie, -1908. 2. Feaster, Amelia, 1819-1870. 3. Women--South Carolina--Columbia--Biography. 4. United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Women. 5. United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Biography. 6. Columbia (S.C.)--Biography. I. Title.
F279.C7E38 2014
975.7030922--dc23
[B]
2014006740
Portions of this book previously appeared in Lurid Legends of a Wayward Woman, which was published in Civil War Magazine in August 1997.
Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
To my parents,
Roy and Connie Elmore,
for giving me a love of books and history.
Contents
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the following people and institutions for helping make this book possible:
Kent Book, librarian, Union League of New York, for answering my requests of information.
Dr. Chester DePratter of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology for sharing some valuable leads.
Chad Rhoad of The History Press for having the patience of Job.
The South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, Columbia, South Carolina, for allowing the use of the images of Camp Sorghum and Camp Asylum.
The South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina.
The South Caroliniana Library of the University of South CarolinaColumbia, in particular, Graham Duncan.
The Southern Historical Collection of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Walker Family and Local History Research Center at the Richland County Public Library, Columbia South Carolina, for the use of several images.
Civil War historian Eric Wittenberg for sharing with me a letter to Amelia Feaster.
Mr. James Young of sc-families.org.
Speedy and Sassy for protecting me from nasty noises.
My mother-in-law, Pat Wood, for looking over and proofreading the text for me.
My wife, Krys, for her cheerleading, editing, patience and love.
And last but not least, Marie and Amelia for leading such interesting lives and giving me my start as a published writer.
Introduction
[Marie Boozer was] one to be spoken [of] in whispers but never, oh never, out loud. Elizabeth Boatwright Coker
We live in a celebrity-obsessed world, constantly bombarded by supermarket tabloids, entertainment news shows, websites and reality series, many of which are devoted to people who are famous only for being famous. This is not a new phenomenon; in the nineteenth century, people visited wax museums or magic lantern shows to see images of the famous (or infamous) people of the day. Similar gratification could be found in the spoofs of celebrities performed in burlesque, music hall and vaudeville shows, or you could see their lives re-created in melodramas.
Or for those with a literary bent, there were dime novels containing exaggerated or fabricated tales of such men of action as William Buffalo Bill Cody. There was also the popular National Police Gazette, which lured readers with shocking stories of murders, outlaws and sex scandals, accompanied by drawings of skimpily clad strippers, burlesque performers and prostitutes.
And for those nineteenth-century Americans with a taste for sensationalism, there was the yellow press, which relied on scandalous headlines and newspaper stories with little, if any, legitimate research, using instead gossip, scandals or exaggerations to back their claims. For this ilk, Marie Boozer and her mother, Amelia Feaster, were the perfect subjects.
When reviewing their lives, one can see a number of similarities between Marie and Amelia and Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner. Both mothers have shamelessly self-promoted their daughters and ridden on the coattails of their daughters to fame. Both young ladies have been linked to famous and wealthy men and have been the subject of endless gossip. But try to ask someone on the street how these women became so famous, and the most likely answer you would get is, I dont know.
While some of Kim and Kriss fame has come from their television shows, Maries is a little harder to figure out. She never fired a gun in battle or served in combat during the Civil War. There is no evidence that she even served as a spy. In fact, the only contribution we can safely say Marie made to the Civil War effort was to volunteer as a nurse. However, during the war and for decades afterward, Marie was a popular subject of gossip, books and magazine articles. Had the National Enquirer or TMZ existed in the late nineteenth century, she would have been featured regularly.
I first came to know of Marie back in the early 1990s while researching my book A Carnival of Destruction: Shermans Invasion of South Carolina, though I had been aware of her existence since the late 1970s, when my mom brought home a copy of La Belle, a novel loosely based on Maries life. Though at best a minor figure of the war, her name kept popping up in more places than I ever would have expected and was written about more than some Civil War generals. Consequently, I started collecting her stories and, eventually, put them together in the first magazine article I ever sold: Lurid Legends of a Wayward Woman for Civil War Magazine in August 1997. This was the most accurate and fact-based account of her life ever published until now. To this day, I still keep a framed image of her on my wall out of gratitude.
Since the publication of that article, I have continued to collect information about her life. Thanks to the Internet and the proliferation of genealogy websites, more information about Marie has surfaced, filling in many of the gaps in her story.
Originally, my plan was to do an updated version of the 1997 piece as an appendix in Carnival. However, at the last minute, due to lack of space, I removed the update and replaced it with an all-too-brief recap of Maries life in the main text.
In retrospect, I made the right call. People as colorful as Marie and Amelia deserve their own biographies. Thus, almost twenty years after I started my romance with Marie, I find myself revisiting her, still trying to present the most complete and accurate account of her and her mothers lives.
