Gone with the Wind

Gone With the Wind is best known now as  the famous movie from 1939, but before being made into a movie, it was a very popular novel  by Margaret Mitchell. I picked the book up a few days ago after not having read it since I was in junior high.  Then, as well as I remember, I paid attention mainly to the colorful story of the two main characters. This time I noticed some of the ideas and opinions.

The book was published in 1936. Appomattox was nearer in time to that year than the end of World War II is to today.  Strong feelings and even passion about the events of the Civil War and reconstruction were common among people in the south. The author was a southerner, a Georgian, and she peppered  the book with propaganda and apologetics  for the old south and its “glorious cause”.

Some of it is plausible or accurate. The life of some plantation owners was elegant and genteel. There probably were some dashing cavaliers and charming ladies. Some of the northerners who came south during reconstruction were shifty crooks on the make.  Some freed slaves did become criminals.

However much of it is false and/or wrong and  often offensively so.  There is the old claim  that the southern states left the union over states’ rights. Andersonville is excused and even blamed on President Lincoln for ending the practice of exchanging prisoners of war in 1863 without mentioning that  the Union army  stopped exchanging prisoners because the confederates would not exchange black Union soldiers – seeing them as slave property rather than prisoners of war.  Slaves are almost uniformly presented as well treated, content,  and devoted to their owners, and the  liberated  black people during  reconstruction usually  presented as lost, shiftless, alienated, often dangerous, and generally worse off and less happy than when they were in bondage.  The author justifies the Ku Klux Klan as a beneficial force for law and decency, necessary to protect southerners and especially southern women from the depredations of black ex-slaves, carpetbaggers,  and Union soldiers.  The Georgia legislature’s refusal to ratify the 15^th Amendment is hailed as a gallant and bold  though futile act honorable defiance.  She bemoans the fact than many ex-confederate officers were not allowed to vote during reconstruction, ignoring that  these men were traitors and as such were handled leniently by victors who refrained from hanging or imprisoning them.  She treats the planters’ post war loss of wealth as sad and almost tragic rather than a  consequence of the war the confederates started and a natural  result of freeing the human beings who produced and made up much of that wealth.  

The author seems fine with the institution of slavery and definitely nostalgic for a society based on it.  The book was a bestseller (and won both the national book award and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction), and the ideas and opinions  it displays were  held by many people, both at the time of its publication and later. The story is  colorful, and Rhett and Scarlett are interesting  characters, but the pleading and propaganda do get in the way.  All in all it can make a person even more appreciative of William Tecumseh Sherman.