The Black Widow of Hazel Green uncovers the life and times of Elizabeth Dale, a white plantation mistress and slaveholder in antebellum Alabama who was married six times and to this day is rumored to have murdered some or all of her husbands. Her story spans our nation's history from the American Revolution to the Civil War, and upends traditional narratives of power, gender, and white women's complicity within the institution of slavery.

​The Black Widow of Hazel Green is a story of money, power, and prejudice in the antebellum South with a complicated woman at its center. Elizabeth Dale was both the victim of a patriarchal society’s injustices and the perpetrator of immeasurable injustice against others. She was an ambitious, assertive woman in a society that preferred its women subservient. She was also a slave-owner who built her fortune on the backs of men and women who served her against their will. This was not the romantic fantasy of Gone with the Wind. The antebellum South was a world built on violence, cruelty, and exploitation. Reconstructing the life of Elizabeth Dale Gibbons Flanagan Jeffries High Brown Routt inevitably means investigating the murder accusations that have haunted her memory for the past two centuries. But her story raises other, even more disturbing questions:

Who were the true victims of her quest for money, power and status?

And who paid the price for her crimes?