Jefferson Davis and the Ruins of Richmond, Virginia

 

If you’ve ever read a Tom Clancy novel, you know that roughly half the book is a gripping fictional story, while the other half is a detailed primer on modern warfare—its strategies, tactics, and technology. Clancy’s works are both thrilling narratives and textbooks on military operations.

 

The same dual nature applies to Margaret Mitchell’s, Gone with the Wind. On one level, it’s a sweeping fictional saga about the collapse of the South during the Civil War. But much of the novel also functions as a prolonged lecture—delivered through Rhett Butler—to the Confederate elite. He warns the South’s leaders not to go to war, arguing that global powers, particularly those controlling finance and trade, have no real interest in the South’s survival. These forces, he implies, see the region as a means to greater wealth and influence through cotton and agriculture and therefore world power brokers needed to collapse its trajectory.

 

Despite Rhett’s urgent warnings that defeat would be swift and total, the South’s rulers charged into war anyway—likely blinded by arrogance, economic self-interest, and a culture built on the brutal exploitation of an enslaved Black population. 

 

The southern people though steeped in fervent Protestant faith, the society invoked divine favor while perpetuating profound moral sin. In the end, that culture—flawed to its core by its treatment of the Black community—was one that, in the novel’s moral framework, even God could not allow to endure unchanged.

 

Yet in Mitchell’s moral universe, the war’s true victors were neither blue nor gray. All but the selfish and manipulative—and more than likely ungodly—controllers of the Southern states were crushed. Through their hollow faith, they believed God rode with them. In the end, God became the actual winner of the Civil War.

 

The southern people, displaced from their mineral-depleted thousand-acre tracts, the old planters scattered. The newly completed transcontinental railroad carried them west to the rich farmlands of California’s Central Valley. And from the end of the Civil War to the present day, those once-enslaved acres—now reborn under irrigation and science—have fed the world, supplying fully one-third of its produce.

 

It’s strange that you’ve likely witnessed Hollywood’s version of Gone with the Wind, because it minimized and trivialized the voice of Rhett Butler while magnifying and empowering the persona of Scarlett O’Hara. The book itself is quite different. I found Scarlett’s character to be the worst scoundrel in all of American literature, and Rhett Butler’s warnings—delivered with the moral clarity and rhetorical force of Ayn Rand’s John Galt—to be the true heartbeat of the story. Most of history is just his-story, most obvious in Hollywood’s rewrite of great works of art.