Margaret Johnson Erwin Dudley

Margaret Johnson was born on March 4, 1821. Her father, Captain Henry Johnson, was a large landowner and slaveholder in Washington County, Mississippi.[1] Her mother was Elizabeth Julia Flournoy.

Her paternal grandfather, Robert Johnson, was a Kentucky pioneer and surveyor.[1] One of her paternal uncle, Richard Mentor Johnson, served as the ninth Vice President of the United States from 1837 to 1841, under President Martin Van Buren.[1]

Her maternal grandfather, Major Matthew Flournoy, served in the Indian wars.[2]

Like all Southern belles, Margaret learned to speak French fluently and studied French culture.[3] 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.[3]

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.[1] She paid US$100,000 for it.[1] With 100 slaves, she became "among the top 1 per cent of all slaveholders in Mississippi" according to Civil War historian John Y. Simon.[1] After she remarried in 1855, an Italianate mansion was erected on the land.[1]

Mount Holly in 1937

Margaret was critical of the South, which she described as "stagnant."[4] She was a "staunch supporter" of abolitionist politician Abraham Lincoln.[1] She corresponded with Ellen Ewing Sherman, the wife of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman.[1] She criticized Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe as "jejune, sentimental, and piffling".[1] She freed her slaves in 1858, prior to the American Civil War.[4]

She believed men and women ought to be on the same level.[4] She was described by Civil War historian John R. Brumgardt as "an independent southern woman who disrespected convention."[4] She often took trips to Europe with Caroline Wilson, a friend from Philadelphia.[1]

She married James Erwin, the son of Colonel Andrew Erwin, a politician from Tennessee, in 1843.[1] His former wife was Ann Brown Clay, the daughter of Henry Clay,[5] and his brother, John Patton Erwin, was the editor-in-chief of the Nashville Whig newspaper and served as the Mayor of Nashville, Tennessee from 1821 to 1822, and from 1834 to 1835.[1] Moreover, his sister married Thomas Yeatman and later John Bell.[1] They had a son, James William Erwin, who died as an infant, in 1851.[1] Meanwhile, her husband died in 1851.[1]

She remarried in 1855 to Dr Charles William Dudley, the son of Kentucky surgeon Benjamin Winslow Dudley.[1] They lived at Mount Holly.[1] They had a son, Charles Wilkins Dudley Jr., who died in 1911 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

She died on August 28, 1863.[1] She was forty-one years old.[1] She was buried at the Lexington Cemetery in Lexington, Kentucky.[1]

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.[1] Irwin transcribed the letters in shorthand, then owned by collector A. S. W. Rosenbach.[1] Their location is now unknown.[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.[1] It contains many factual errors.[1]

The Mount Holly mansion burned down on June 17, 2015.[6]