"Not trust a darky! Scarlett trusted them far more than most white people. ... They still stuck with their white folks and worked much harder than they ever worked in slave times."
In both the book and the movie, the character Mammy had more sense than all the white characters combined. She spoke more for the social traditions of the South than anyone else.
Not everyone in the South treated their slaves [and then former slaves] well; however, in my research, I have found countless examples where freed slaves chose not to leave their former owners or the plantations on which they lived. Others left but found really hard times ahead of them.One very telling example is a story related to me recently by a 94 year old friend:
She was working for the local doctor in this rural county when a very elderly black man came in one day, with his hat in his hand, and said, "Excuse me, Miss, but they tell me you are Miss Austinia's granddaughter". She replied, "Yes, I am." He then told her, "We went North after the War. We were terribly poor and there was no work. If Miss Austinia had not taught me how to read, I never would have made it ...".In this state, and probably in others as well, it was against the law to teach blacks to read. Schools were conducted on many plantations and children from surrounding farms were educated there. In any number of cases I have run across, black children were taught to read as well.
The South is much maligned and unrightly so. Slavery would have died a natural death as it had become un-economical in an increasingly industrial age. The history of this country was forever changed, and not for the better, by the deaths in the Civil War of a generation of the best young men ... South and North.