Background
Margaret Johnson was born on March 4, 1821. Her father, Captain Henry Johnson, was a large landowner and slaveholder in Washington County, Mississippi. Her mother was Elizabeth Julia Flournoy.
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Margaret Dudley
Edit ProfileEducation
Like all Southern belles, Margaret learned to speak French fluently and studied French culture.
Career
The owner of Mount Holly from 1854 to 1863, she was one of the largest slaveholders in Mississippi. She freed her slaves in 1858, prior to the American Civil War. Her paternal grandfather, Robert Johnson, was a Kentucky pioneer and surveyor.
Her maternal grandfather, Major Matthew Flournoy, served in the Indian wars.
She disapproved of the French Revolution of 1848, which overthrew King Louis Philippe"s July Monarchy and established the Second French Empire led by Emperor Napoleon III. In 1854, she acquired Mount Holly, a 1,699-acre Southern plantation on Lake Washington with outbuildings, livestock and 100 African slaves, from her father. She paid United States$100,000 for lieutenant
With 100 slaves, she became "among the top 1 per cent of all slaveholders in Mississippi" according to Civil War historian John Y. Simon. After she remarried in 1855, an Italianate mansion was erected on the land.
Margaret was critical of the South, which she described as "stagnant." She was a "staunch supporter" of abolitionist politician Abraham Lincoln.
She corresponded with Ellen Ewing Sherman, the wife of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman. She freed her slaves in 1858, prior to the American Civil War. She believed men and women ought to be on the same level
She died on August 28, 1863.
She was forty-one years old. She was buried at the Lexington Cemetery in Lexington, Kentucky.
In 1981, her great-grandson John Seymour Irwin edited a collection of her letters entitled Like Some Green Laurel: Letters of Margaret Johnson Erwin, 1821-1863, published by the Louisiana State University Press. Irwin transcribed the letters in shorthand, then owned by collector A. South. West. Rosenbach.
Their location is now unknown.
The book is a biography, based on the letters but also on recollections from other descendants and documents about business and legal transactions he inherited. lieutenant contains many factual errors. The Mount Holly mansion burned down on June 17, 2015.
