The Story of America's First Female Millionaire On 2/22/21 at 4:51 PM EST She was the first child in her family born free in 1867 in a part of the South—Louisiana—devastated by the Civil War. Many plantations had been burned down in the region, and nearly 4 million formerly enslaved freedmen and women in the South, where 90 percent of all African Americans in the country lived, were struggling to survive. They had little in the way of money, and at the end of planting seasons, they often had nothing to show for their work because they owed money to the plantation owners who'd been their former owners.