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Margaret Mitchell said that 'Gone With The Wind' was just a bunch of stories she heard while she was growing up and strung together to make a novel. With that in mind, I reread the book a couple of years ago, staying detached from the plot, and just soaking up the individual incidents. Read that way, the book is more like oral history. History is not only what happened, it is what people thought and how they reacted to what happened. IMO, GWTW gives a picture of how upper class Southerners remembered the Civil War and the years immediately following it. It is not surprising to me that they saw themselves as the oppressed instead of as the oppressors. Slave owners, as a general rule, believed they behaved in a novelty manner. They did not see themselves as evil nor slavery as an evil institution. They were wrong about the latter.

When criticized about some of the historical details of the Little House books, the author, Laura Inglis Wilder, said she didn't know she was writing history. She thought she was just writing stories. I dare say Margaret Mitchell would say the same...

Slave owners, as a general rule, believed they behaved in a novelty manner.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr. Spell check zapped me. Somehow it managed to change the work 'benevolent' (which I had misspelled) to 'novelty'...and it posted when I went to change it back. I hate it when that happens. So when reading the above post, replace 'novelty' with 'benevolent'.

You are right in your interpretation, that Mitchell put together a string of family histories that was'nt meant to be a factual history. That being said, from the general perspective the book is remarkably accurate.

In general, the hardship after the war in the book is not overstated. There was a die off of the older people (like Scarletts parents) in the years after the war. The surviving adults took a hardline no-nonsense practical attitude that lasted for generations, and were often
brutal in their efforts to hold everything together. Regarding the Reconstruction, all of that really did happen. And for the blacks, at first they were as confused as everyelse in the South. Their birthrates dropped quickly in the 10yrs after the war. Many returned to their former master, some became parts of the carpetbagger govts, and others roamed the rural parts. In truth, the re-segregation of the blacks did not come until about 1895, by then many believed it necessary because the post war recovery was too slow.

When criticized about some of the historical details of the Little House books, the author, Laura Inglis Wilder, said she didn't know she was writing history. She thought she was just writing stories. I dare say Margaret Mitchell would say the same...

That reminds me of a story I heard about a World War II veteran that was giving a talk at a University history class about his wartime experiences. The class know-it-all kept correcting him about minor historical details.

Finally, the veteran said, "You'll have to excuse me, son. I only fought in World War II. I never majored in it." :-)