Gone With the Wind is my favorite book and even helped me understand the Civil War and the years following it, as a young girl. It talks of slaves that were happy with their condition and had love and loyalty for their masters, it goes into detail concerning Southern manners, parties, and courting, and it even describes specific battles. How historically accurate is it?
There, perhaps, were a few slaves with kind masters, who accepted their condition. They had no choice. Nonetheless, no human can rejoice in slavery, no matter how kind the owners. Many slaves were ill-treated. Southerners like to point out how happy most of the slaves were. Please.
I’m not a history student, or a Civil War buff, but I wouldn’t accept GWTW as historically accurate any more than any other period romantic novel. That would be like believing Peyton Place is an accurate depiction of small town life in the 50’s, or that Valley of the Dolls tells all you need know about Hollywood in the 60’s.
Bits and pieces of it were probably accurate for a few people (damn few), like barbitu8 said, but don’t use it as a reference point for a discussion about slavery, or what life was like for most people in the South before the war.
Accept it for what it is: one writer’s glamorized, romanticized, sanitized fairy tale vision.
Read William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner for another view. And Ian Frazier’s Cold Mountain. And Killer Angels by (forgot first name) Sharra (?).
It is fiction. Nuf said
I’m sure there were some slaves who felt loyal. The whole thing about the house servants being higher up than the field hands was definitely true. And there were “mammies”, who were probably more mothers to the children than their own. And I’m sure there were some slaves who stayed-the mammies especially, as they were probably emotionally attached to the planter’s children. Some who had perhaps grown up in the house, as opposed to the field, I would think would probably be very close to their “owners.” But I don’t think it was like Gone with the Wind, although the whole thing about the attitudes of the time-THAT was accurate. As well as Scarlett being scorned for being a successful business woman, and for not being demure and sweet like Melanie.
However, for the field hands, and other house servants, things were probably a lot worse.
(I love the book too-I’m rereading it right now.)
However, as far as Prissy goes-I think she was a total stereotype.
From what I have read, Margaret Mitchell did a great deal of research on the various battles she described, as well as details of geography, architecture, landscape, dress, etc. to get these descriptions as accurate as possible. However, as everyone else has already said, the accuracy of the depiction of attitudes and social interactions is far harder to rely upon.
Nonsense. There are many works of fiction that are historically accurate. Some titles include “The Killer Angels” by Michal Shaara (and the sequels written by his son), Solzhenitzn’s “August 1914,” Grave’s “I, Claudius” and “Claudius the King,” Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” and Malamud’s “The Fixer.” While the characters or their motivations on these were fictional, the historical events are accurately portrayed. In fact, it’s hard to get a historical novel published these days if you don’t get the historical background right.
GWTW is accurate as to the history, but the portrayal of slavery is very much a myth that was current during Margaret Mitchell’s lifetime. As a matter of fact, it could have been good research, since there were a lot of experts who claimed that the slaves were relatively happy with their lot. Modern historians think that image is pure fantasy, but it was still intellectually respectable in some quarters in the 1930s.
You know, no offense intended but when you state things like “Southerners love to point out…” it’s a stereotypical thing. I’m a Southerner, very proud of where I’m from and very proud of my people. I, however, have no illusions as to the feelings slaves had about their enslavement.
What I find most interesting is how the popular opinion on this subject seems to swing back and forth.
I guess when it was happening, a lot of folks thought that the slaves, especially slaves of many generations and house slaves were happy.
Then, after the war, the opinion changed… then it changed again at the turn of the century, then changed again, and again, and again, and again… but I’m sure you catch my drift.
Currently, the popular thing to believe is that all slaves were miserable, beaten and abused, and were all clamoring for freedom.
I wonder what the belief will be in 50 years?
oh, before I get jumped for cites, I don’t have specific sites, just long hours of conversation with several hard-core Civil War and Southern history buffs… really, really hard core, former re-enactors and the like… so that’s what I’m going off of, combined with what I’ve read from the different era’s.
Well, for comparison, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was actually written at the time in which the earliest chapters of GWTW were set. It even includes one “kind” white master (but one who still does not live up to his promises of freeing some of his slaves). However, it very strongly portrayed the attitudes of slaves as being completely at odds with the “happy darkie” that was favored by pro-slavery propaganda.
Huckleberry Finn was written shortly after the setting for the last scenes in GWTW (and looked back, itself, to a period several decades earlier). There are not any “happy colored folk” in HF, either.
I can’t speak for most of the titles mentioned by RealityChuck, but I must respectfully disagree with the assertion that Graves’s “I, Claudius” and “Claudius the King” were historically accurate.
Many of the incidents in both of the books (as well as the Miniseries) never happened. In particular, most of the murders attributed to Livia (Marcellus, Agrippa, Gaius, Lucius and Augustus), as well as Macro’s murder of Tiberius, were completely ahistorical. The most that can be said was that there were rumors that SOME of those deaths were murders, but such assertions were little more than gossip. There was little or no evidence that the individuals mentioned above were murdered.
None of this is meant to imply that the books are not well worth reading (I have read them, and they are HIGHLY recommended) or that the miniseries isn’t worth watching (it’s my personal opinion that it’s the greatest miniseries of all time). But I question the historical value of Graves’s novels.
With respect to Gone With The Wind, I think it’s pretty well accepted that many African American slaves in the South were much better treated and lived much better lives than their free Northern counterparts. Whether that “makes up” for not being emancipated is another question entirely.
“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”
–GWTW is a grand melodrama set in the Deep South. The book and the movie also give us a window of popular thought in the 1930s. I like to think “Birth of a Nation” is a window of popular thought of the early part of this century. Both spend little time on history and most of the time on relationships.
How historically accurate was it?
It was as accurate as it needed to be TO CARRY THE STORY at the time. Why not leave it at that?
I wouldn’t depend on a melodrama to get me a passing score on a history test. Would you?
Oh, and I defer to Tom.
In the meaning of: to yield.
To give way to argument, persuasion, influence, or entreaty
What I meant in I, Claudius was that the deaths and changes of power were based on history. Whether they were murders or not is another basis, but there are other examples of books that stuck to the historical facts while coming up with a fanciful explanation of the causes of the historical events.
For instance, see Tim Powers’s “The Stress of Her Regard,” which fit the historical facts of the lives of the romantic poets and postulated their genius was a matter of vampiric possession. The facts are accurate, but I doubt Keats, Shelley, and Byron were being attacked by vampires.
I purchased a book on how Mitchel researched GWTW when I visited Atlanta a couple of years ago (there was an entire “GWTW” store there!), but unfortunately lost the damned thing. I was pretty impressed with her historical research. It annoys me when people take her to task for inaccuracy (not only in this thread, but in books like “Don’t Know Much About the Civil War”). She did her homework. It was certainly colored by her own expectations and experiences (There’s a lot of Margaret Mitchell in Scarlett O’Hara), but that’s true of any novel. Her picture of Irish Catholic Southern gentry is unexpected (I was always taught that they were English-ancestored Protestants), but turns out to be quite true. I’m surprised no one has taken her to task over that.
People always says that she depicts “happy” blacks, and that’s the great sin. But she doesn’t, as far as I can tell. Neither the book nor the movie try to say that the slaves are happy in their position, IIRC. They don’t show them on the edge of mutiny, or depict the horrible outcome of slavery (families broken up, rape, etc.) or depict beatings and killings. But PEOPLE DIDN’T SEE THAT IN EVERYDAY LIFE, EITHER. If you were a Sourthern belle a slave revolt might be a discordant thought perpetually at the back of your mind, or something you learned in conversation, or a distant memory, but it wasn’t part of everyday life. The practice of slavery shocks us (how could civilized people in our own country DO something like this?), but it part of the ordinary and established order to the antebellum South. Mitchell and the studio shouldn’t be criticized for showing people taking slavery matter-of-factly. That’s the way it was. That, in fact, is why it’s so damned scary.
FWIW, I was listening to the local NPR station last Friday. I think it is All Things Considered that has a monthly story on people over 100 years old. Friday there was an interview with a 102-year-old Chicago woman whose grandfather was a slave. She said that her grandfather told her about slave life as he lived it. She said that he said he had a “kind master” who would not allow the slaves to be beaten or otherwise mistreated.
Of course there are many, many accounts of horrible mistreatment up to and including execution. (Sorry, no cites.)
I would be very cautious about reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin as history. It was written as a propaganda piece by the daughter of a prominent New England abolitionist. IIRC, the author had only set foot on a plantation on one occasion, and then only briefly.
I did some research of my own regarding master-slave relations when I was an undergraduate. The reseach utilized primary source materials, consisting mostly of letters written by slaveholders prior to the war.
My sense from reading those letters is that slave owners, at least, were getting (and sending) mixed signals about their relationships with their slaves. You see many stories that seem to depict the “happy slave” stereotype. (E.g. “Tom entertained us this evening with the fiddle. The servants danced with great energy and everyone was merry.” Not an actual quote, but it’s the type of thing you often see.)
On the other hand, the slaveowners were certainly cognizant that not all slaves were content with their lot. Nat Turner’s Rebellion was still fresh in their minds, as well as the successful slave revolt in Haiti, and you see passing references to both in the letters. Occasionally, there would be rumors of an imminent slave revolt, and curfews would be imposed, enforced by night-riding white men.
In spite of such incidents, the attitudes of the slave owners toward their own slaves tends toward the genial and paternal.
I suspect that some slaves, if not “content” with their lot, were at least resigned to it. (Remember that they had never known any other way of life.) Others were clearly unhappy with their lot. But I would wager that happy or unhappy, virtually all slaves put on a happy face for their masters. To act otherwise would be to invite suspicion and potential recrimination or punishment.
I frankly think that the pendulum of academic thought has swung too far, to the point that ill treatment of slaves is today presumed to have been the norm. Common sense dictates that the most successful slave owners would have been those who cultivated a firm but genial relationship with their slaves. A resentful or unhappy slave is not likely to be a productive slave, after all. Furthermore, the master would certainly have some incentive to avoid the expense caused by runaways. A cruel or oppresive master is not likely to be a successful one.
Also, there is a distinction to be made between the lot of slaves owned by small-time slave owners and the lot of slaves on the very largest plantations. Small-time slave owners (and there were many) would have been working side-by-side with their slaves in the fields, a circumstance which would lend itself to the development of emotional attachments and friendships or even love between the slave and the master.
On the larger plantations, by contrast, there was little direct contact between the master and the slaves. The slaves would have been managed by an overseer. Often, the plantation owner didn’t even live on the farm, but would have had a home in the city. The overseer, pressured by his absent employer to squeeze profits out of the plantation, might indeed become a hard taskmaster to the slaves under his charge.
The big plantations were for the most part in the flat and fertile southern regions of the southern states. In the hilly uplands, what slave owners there were (and they were a definite minority) would have mostly been small-time operators.
The notion that slaves were treated more poorly on the big plantations is lent additional creedence by the existence of the phrase still heard today: “sold down the river.” For a slave to be “sold down the river” would mean that the slave was being sent to one of the big plantations in the flatlands of the deep south. (The big southern rivers mostly flow N-S.) Obviously, being sold down the river was not a thing to be desired.
Bravo, Spoke–
For more information on how the Masters treated their slaves, believing the treatment to be benign (and how the slaves saw it as anything but), see the last chapter of Steven J. Nissenbaum’s “The Battle for Christmas”. An unexpected place to find this information. But Nissenbaum quotes from the writings of a slave-owner AND from his slave, and the contrast is striking. You should also read the writings of Frederick Douglass (especially his “Letter to My Master”, which Dougkass calls the first letter from chattel to his owner.) The bottom line – slaves clearly WEREN’T happy, but this frustration usually didn’t blossom into open rebellion. Just because slaves weren’t in revolt, or even surly didn’t mean they were happy. Just because masters generally treated their slaves in a way they considered “well” didn’t mean that they were innocent.
I would not hold either Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Huckleberry Finn forth as history. The object was to show different perspectives of slavery written closer to the period.
My memory is that the vast majority of slaves were actually held as single or very small group field hands on small farms. Simon Legree was not the norm. However, from a historical perspective, we can look at the Underground Railway. Those folks weren’t facing irons, dogs, the lash, and sundry other objects to dissuade flight because they were contented.
I didn’t mean any offense either, Social. I live in South Carolina. I should not have used the generalization, and should have said that a lot of Southerners.
Slavery, for those who may not know, was an economic thing. The farms had to be tended to and many of the small plantation owners could not afford to pay even a subsistence salary to anyone. After slavery was abolished, many of the plantations disappeared. Many former slaves became sharecroppers, as this was the way they could be paid. Sharecropping exists today, but there are no longer any “plantations,” just farms.