Margaret Johnson Erwin Dudley

Margaret Johnson Erwin Dudley (1821-1863) was a Southern belle, planter and letter writer in the Antebellum South.

Her father, Captain Henry Johnson, was a large landowner and slaveholder in Washington County, Mississippi.

[1] Her maternal grandfather, Major Matthew Flournoy, served in the American Indian Wars.

[3] In 1854, Dudley acquired Mount Holly, a 1,699-acre Southern plantation on Lake Washington with outbuildings, livestock and 100 enslaved people, from her father.

[1] With 100 slaves, she became "among the top 1 per cent of all slaveholders in Mississippi" according to Civil War historian John Y.

[1] She criticized Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe as "jejune, sentimental, and piffling".

[4] She was described by Civil War historian John R. Brumgardt as "an independent southern woman who disrespected convention.

[1] 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.