About the Author

Elizabeth Avery was born in Bolivar, Tennessee in 1824 to Nathan and Rebecca (Rivers) Avery. Her father was a physician and her mother was the daughter of a Virginia planter. After the family had relocated to Memphis, both parents died, leaving their five children destitute. To help support herself and her siblings, Elizabeth operated a small school for two dozen students in the family's dining room. She married Minor Meriwether, a railroad civil engineer, in 1852 and in fulfillment of his late father's will, the couple sold part of Minor's inherited land in order to free his slaves and repatriate them to Liberia. Elizabeth identified herself as an abolitionist, although she later acquired a household slave from her brother. When the war began, Minor joined the officer's corps of the Confederate army, serving with General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Elizabeth was such a vocal advocate of the Southern cause that General William T. Sherman ordered her to leave Memphis in December of 1862. After the war, she remained openly defiant during the Union occupation of Tennessee, and her kitchen in what is now the Peabody House in Memphis was the site of an early organizational meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. Elizabeth served as an officer of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1886, and was also involved in the temperance movement. In addition to two novels, Master of Red Leaf (1872) and Black and White (1883), she published Facts and Falsehoods Concerning the War on the South (1904) under the pseudonym George Edmonds, and Sowing of the Swords (1910). Her informal memoirs were published posthumously by her son in 1958. Elizabeth died in St. Louis, Missouri on November 4, 1916.