Oh, sure, but I have to admit that I look on it as something like fantasy. Rhett is a common voice of sense through the whole thing, but none of those people are living in anything like the real world most of the time anyway.

Oh, and as to why the slaves who stayed, stayed? This is something I might have gone into more detail on in an expanded version of the racism section. Literally every slave in the book who’s described as staying with a former master was “special.” Mammy at one point says that she “done diapered three generations of this family’s babies.” Pork was Gerald’s personal slave who’s described in the book as being basically his partner in building up Gerald’s image. (Scarlett gives him Gerald’s watch, after her father dies.) At the beginning of the book, he buys Dilcey, Prissy’s mother, because Pork married her–and buys Prissy so Dilcey won’t pine after her even though she’s just at Twelve Oaks. Uncle Henry, Aunt Pitty’s slave, has taken care of her in a rather paternalistic way since she was a child. He’s actually treated in many ways as being better than she is–still a slave, but at least his intelligence is somewhat respected.

And that’s the entire list I can think of. Despite the fact that the O’Haras, Wilkeses, and so forth own among them probably literally thousands of slaves, you can count on one hand the number that stay. (And it’s one fewer in the movie, since they leave out Dilcey!) Big Sam puts in an appearance, but clearly, no matter how desolate he got, he never thought of going back to Tara, because there were people there who would have told him he could stay, but he’s in Atlanta. Not even the other house slaves have stayed. There are a dozen or so families mentioned in the book as living in the County, and the O’Haras are the only family that have any slaves at all stay. There are probably a dozen or so families in Atlanta mentioned, and Uncle Peter’s the only slave who stays.

It probably didn’t help that I’d just finished AP US History at the time. APUSH shatters illusions quite thoroughly about the grandeur of the past.

Yeah I think you said it: he walked the line well. I see a clear throughline from his concepts to what came to be known as total war–but I think he’d be horrified by Dresden, and would have wanted no part of it. (I am one of those who thinks that putting total war as a military concept at his feet is a bit unfair.) What did it gain the attackers? How did it save lives by hastening the war’s end?

I meant to add that in there, too, about his vocal, hard-minded criticism of the South’s even entering the war in the first place. Well said all the way around.

I love Sherman and believe he was one of the few people at the outset who knew what was happening – he didn’t want the war and knew it would be long and disastrous. When it did, he was damned sure to punish the people who started it. He knew beating the army in the field wasn’t enough. When the KKK was active during Reconstruction, he offered to Grant to take his troops out West and march back on the South (Grant declined). There is merit to the argument that he presaged the worst of WWII, and he follows in the tradition of Rome and the Mongols (great sackers of cities that they were), but I feel Sherman walked the line right well.

The novel and the movie are in many ways different animals. But I actually like them both.

Very true. But I feel she might have, honestly.

Wow, look at that fancy plantation. Sure is a lot of hidden blood on it though.

Everybody’s awfully calm for a war beginning, and Scarlett’s a petty idiot. “A war that could affect us personally has just started? Oh fiddle-dee-dee, I want to talk about the cotillion.”

You can’t fool us, Scarlett. We all know you’d be in bed with Ashley in a heartbeat if there wasn’t a war on, even if he is married to your best friend.

And here comes the war.

Oh god, this is gonna be a death-in-childbirth scene isn’t it? Mom, why did you drag me to this movie again?

The black people are free! Hooray! Sucks to be a plantation owner at this point, though.

WTF? Why did those people stay? They’re free now. They don’t have to stick around! Do they have Stockholm Syndrome or something?

Oh boo, hoo, you have to do actual work for once in your miserable lives. If your skin had been darker, you’d have done a lot more than this every day of your life until now. Suck it up.

Blah, blah, blah, Scarlett’s trying to have the same life she had before the war. Give it up, you fool; you can’t have that lifestyle without slaves, and there is no more slavery.

OMG, does she think Brett’s not gonna notice that the drapes are gone? Like, really?

Damn, Scarlett, you just brought an entire new human being into the world, and all you care about is that your waistline isn’t as tiny as it used to be? PRIORITIES!

Oh no, no! Not the kid! Not the only white person in this movie who’s totally innocent! Kudos for cutting away before the actual moment of death, though.

Ugh, Scarlett stop. OK, I think I want to see the kid moldering in the grave more than I want to watch this trainwreck.

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Never have I been happier about a fictional divorce.

Wha–NO! Damn it Scarlett, going back to Tara won’t make Brett care again! You fucked up! It’s over! WHY DO YOU MAKE SUCH STUPID DECISIONS?

In short, I saw it as a study in the kind of woman NOT to be like, and saw none of what my mom loved in the novel.

Should have pointed that out, but I wonder if she would have been inclined if use these sources if they had been available. As you point out, her perspective is pretty blinckered to sources that promote the “lost cuase” myth. As you state, the purpose of her research was to avoid offending the Daughters of the Confederacy mindset, which heavily controlled the way that the Civil War was taught in Georgia in the 30s.

She couldn’t. That project was from 1936, the year the book came out, to 1938.

If it were to revisit my high school and undergraduate work, , I’d focus on a different part of the narrative, life on the plantation itself. Many current discussions on plantation life focus on the intersectionality of slavery and patriarchy, and how the slaves negotiated relationships with the wives and daughters of the owners within this system . Mitchell probably made a number of assumptions about the relationship between Scarlett and the slaves that were fundamentally flawed because she did not look at, for example, the WPA slave interviews as part of her research.

Great idea of reposting our older work. I have some stuff appropos for February that I might put up here;.