Gone With The Wind was heavily idealized by Margaret Mead to the point of fiction. The grand manor house and hundreds of slaves was in reality not all that common. Reality was living quarters similar for all, owner, slave and even livestock, houses had a wooden floor and windows, barns didn’t, same German double-pen log structure though. They lived similarly and worked similarly, the life was not one of ease for anybody.
Roots was utter fabrication by Alex Haley from the start and is fiction. Routine mistreatment of slaves is depicted as the norm, when even a cursory, detached look into the situation would tell you that that would be highly counterproductive. Did it happen? Yes. Was it the norm? No.
Margatet Mtichell, sorry, need more caffeine I guess.
There were indeed people who lived the pampered life portrayed in GWTW.
Was it the norm? Not at all. But there were something around 2,000 families who owned more than 100 slaves each, and something like 5,000 to 10,000 who owned more than 50. (Not sure about this second number.) They totally dominated the economy and politics of the South.
Even though they were such a small percentage of the population, they were the ideal of “the southern way of life,” and thus the goal of just about all white southerners. They, and the less wealthy white southerners, and white northerners, thus all thought of them as the true representatives of “The South.”
This is similar to the way the nobility dominated Europe up through the 19th century, despite being a very small part of the people.