I haven't seen many Civil War movies, but I know that more recent pop-culture movies and TV shows about the south usually show it in a positive light - "Designing Women," "Fried Green Tomatoes," etc. They usually show at least one black and one white character who get along well, and at some point the white character does something to prove how non-racist he is.
I liked "Gettysburg" over "Glory" for many reasons. First, the scope was accurate. Second, I think Sam Elliot's speech as Gen. Buford, his reaction when he sees the infantry finally arrive, and Jeff Daniels' Chamberlain scenes were fantastic. I especially liked the speech Chamberlain made to the recalcitrant troops. But the movie DID appropriately present the Southern position and its arguments. (The beards were terribly fake, though, and the Martin Sheen/Lee scene with the troops cheering could have been edited to half its length).
You are suggesting that Margaret Mitchell was a racist? There has probably never been a stronger woman in American literature than the black house slave Mammy who seems to have no compunctions (and rightfully so) chastising Rhett Butler or even treating him as something of an equal in the red petticoat scene. She has competition from Miss Melanie. As I remember it, the field slave Big Sam, well after being freed by the work of Mr. Lincoln and reduced to living in a shanty town, saves Scarlett from a fate worse than death and probably from death too, if the perp had anything to say about it, and Big Sam cheerfully does so because, like Mammy, he is a pillar of moral virtue.
There are white villains too like the Union Army scavenger who is killed by Melanie at Tara.
Just because a politically correct New Jersey government college teacher (Rutgers is a state university) wants to write a book review for the equally politically correct Atlanta Urinal-Constipation, doesn't mean that Gone With the Wind is not highly accurate and the great American novel.
Even Ted Turner (barf) did a very good job with Gettysburg and is now working on Gods and Generals which will cover Stonewall Jackson, one of the most gallant Americans to ever have graced our continent. If and when a movie tells you that, before taking up his responsibilities as Lee's strong right arm, Jackson was threatened with prosecution and jail for teaching slaves (other people's) to read the Bible in his capacity as a Presbyterian elder and responded by defying those local authorities in western Virginia to put him before a jury of Virginians for the "crime" of teaching slaves to read the Bible. believe it because it was so, according to the magnificent recent biography by Professor James Robertson.
Sorry, but Margaret Mitchell was setting the record straight. One of the major underlying themes of her novel was also the fact that while the pre-war planter/aristocrats of the South were indeed often cavaliers, their time had to come to an end as a practical matter and that the Ashley Wolkes type would be replaced by the Rhett Butler type of Bourbon Democrat.
As Margaret Mitchell well knew, the Bourbon Democrats were the practical men of business who would largely set aside romantic nostalgia for ante-bellum days in favor of getting the North off the South's neck and re-establishing the South by commerce and industry. The Bourbon Democrats were not Klansmen. The Bourbon Democrats were replaced, after they ended Reconstruction, by Klansmen including such leftists as Senator Pitchfork Ben Tillman of South Carolina who, in addition to his race-baiting Klan involvement and demeanor, was also a devotee of such as the Wobblies or International Workers of the World. We make the mistake of believing our enemies in thinking that racism is always or evn normally a rightist phenomenon. Not long after Tillman came the virulently anti-Catholic bigot Hugo Black who did so much for prying God out of government schools lest the agenda of the left be impeded.
If anything, Margaret Mitchell's Rhett Butler and his real life Bourbon Democrat counterparts were, in the context of their time, libertarians.
Sam Waterston may not have been the best Lincoln, but Lincoln was the best Sam Waterston. In other words, you couldn't follow Waterston's career without thinking that at some point he'd have to play Lincoln, even if what you got wasn't the best portrayal of the real or historical Lincoln.
I don't remember if Mary Tyler Moore was a good Mary Todd Lincoln. I think someone may have gotten carried away with the 3 name thing.