Elizabeth Avery Meriwether Born: 1824 Died: 1916

Elizabeth Avery was born in Bolivar, TN on January 19, 1824 the son of Nathan Avery and Rebecca Rivers Avery.  Nathan was a physician and farmer who died early in 1847.  Her mother followed her father the next year.  These early deaths  caused the family to scramble for solvency.  The family moved to Memphis and took a job teaching students in the family home.  The older brother worked and the family did well enough until Elizabeth married Minor Meriewether in 1852.

Minor was a good husband.  He was civil engineer and he, like she, had a mixed attitude toward slavery.  Upon their marriage they sold part of Minor's inherited land to free his slaves and repatriate them to Liberia.  On another occasion however Elizabeth acceptepted the gift of a house slave from her brother.  In time she would win back her property from the Union army by going to court and pleading that she had taken an "abolitionist stand".  Then like now positions were often fuzzy.

Minor and Elizabeth both were happily married.  The marriage bore three sons: Avery (1857), Rivers (1859) and Lee (1862; was named after General Robert E. Lee, he would later be an author in his own right.  When the Civil War began Minor joined the officers corp and served under Nathan Bedford Forrest.  The Union Army banished Elizabeth from the city setting her afoot while pregnant and mothering two children.  This may have been because of her vocal attitude during the northern occupation or just part of the practice the Union Army had of turning the wives of Confederate Soldiers out when Union soldiers were killed in the area.

After the war the Meriwethers bought a small home on what is now the site of the Peabody Hotel.  Minor assisted Nathan Forrest in forming the Ku Klux Klan.  One of the early meetings was in the Meriwether kitchen.  Although Elizabeth did not protest the Ku Klux Klan she did challenge the men on women's suffrage which was to be her lifelong crusade.

After Elizabeth successfully regained title to her girlhood home, claiming she had taken an "abolitionist stand" she used that status as a landowner to obtain a voter's registration in 1872.  In that same year she published a small newspaper named "The Tablet" which showcased her views of suffrage, equal pay and divorce law.  She and her sister-in-law Lide Meriwether were very active in the Women's Christian Temperance Union which sought to prohibit liquor.  Elizabeth presented unsuccessful suffrage petitions at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 1880.

Elizabeth published two novels, The Master of Red Leaf in 1872 and Black and White in 1883.  Apart from several short stories she also published a play, The Ku Klux Klan, or The Carpetbagger in New Orleans.  Her non-fiction works include Facts and Falsehoods about the War on the South (under pen-name George Edmonds) in 1904 and The Sowing of the Swords, or The Soul of the Sixties in 1910.  Her last written work was a memoir entitled Recollections of 92 Years. 

Elizabeth Avery Meriwether lived 92 years in good health.  Her son Lee also lived to a ripe old age and was a published author in Memphis.