Gone with the Wind portrays how the Civil War and Reconstruction transform the South. Before the war, wealthy Southerners led lives of luxury, leisure, and beauty on sprawling plantations such as Tara. The war, however, brings this way of life to an end, though most Southerners refuse to admit that this is happening. Rather, throughout the war, Southerners display pride in the Confederacy that at times seems willfully ignorant. The Union army steadily corners the Confederates and takes Southern cities, but the Southerners don’t consider the possibility that they could lose until they have no other choice but to accept the truth that they’ve lost. The war sweeps across this landscape, burning plantations, impoverishing the Southerners, and ultimately depriving plantation owners of their labor forces by freeing enslaved Black people. The poverty that many formerly wealthy Southerners find themselves in leaves many with nothing but their willpower to survive; the ones who manage to adapt to a new lifestyle prevail by creatively making money in Atlanta, while the ones too attached the old life struggle or, in some cases, fail entirely. In this way, the Civil War materially decimates the South and forces it to start anew.
While the war physically destroys the South, Reconstruction attempts to force Southerners to entirely change their morals and their views. Reconstruction directly follows the Civil War; it refers to the government policy that sought to rehabilitate the South by putting Northerners, or Union sympathizers, in power to transform the South’s values and bring the South back into the Union. Gone with the Wind shows how the Freedman’s Bureau, led by Carpetbaggers, Scallawags, and previously low-class white Southerners, overturns the racial and hierarchical structure that guided life in the prewar South—something the formerly wealthy white Southerners find abhorrent. Many of Reconstruction’s changes to the South have to do with money: for instance, the Republican government in postwar Georgia encourages Northerners and freed Blacks to participate in a society in which gentility is no longer a matter of birth but a matter of ingenuity and a person’s willingness and ability to make money. Ashley and other former plantation owners resent this new system, as they consider making one’s own money as unseemly and beneath them. And yet, they can’t escape that in the Reconstruction-era South, their deeply held views about what makes a person gentile are no longer in favor.
However, at the end of the novel, this Yankee government crumbles under its own corruption, allowing the Democrats to retake Georgia and reinstate the Old South’s racist and classist values. In this way, Gone with the Wind portrays both the Civil War and Reconstruction as ultimately unsuccessful at meaningfully changing white Southern life and values.
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The Civil War and Reconstruction ThemeTracker
The Civil War and Reconstruction Quotes in Gone with the Wind
“I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who’d be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—all the things we haven’t got. Why all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They’d lick us in a month.”
Even now the Southern ranks might be falling like grain before a hailstorm, but the Cause for which they fought could never fall. They might be dying in thousands but, like the fruit of the dragon’s teeth, thousands of fresh men in gray and butternut with the Rebel yell on their lips would spring up from the earth and take their places. Where the men would come from, no one knew. They only knew, as surely as they knew there was a just and jealous God in heaven.
Why had he gone, stepping off into the dark, into the war, into a Cause that was lost, into a world that was mad? Why had he gone, Rhett who loved the pleasures of women and liquor, the comfort of good food and soft beds […] who hated the South and jeered at the fools who fought for it? Now he had set his varnished boots upon a bitter road […] and the end of the road was death.
What a little while since she and everyone else had thought that Atlanta could never fall, that Georgia could never be invaded. But the small cloud that appeared in the northwest four months ago had blown up into a mighty storm and then into a screaming tornado, sweeping away her world, whirling her out of her sheltered life, and dropping her down in the midst of this still, haunted desolation.
Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind that had swept through Georgia?
Nothing her mother had taught her was of any value whatsoever now and Scarlett’s heart was sore and puzzled. It did not occur to her that Ellen had could not have foreseen the collapse of the civilization in which she raised her daughters, […] that Ellen looked down a vista of placid future years, all like the uneventful years of her own life, when she had taught her to be gentle and gracious, honorable and kind, modest and truthful.
“[before the war] there was a real beauty to living. […] And now it is gone and I am out of place in this new life, and I am afraid. Now, I know that in the old days, it was a shadow show I watched. I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital. […] I tried to avoid you too, Scarlett. You were too full of living and too real and I was cowardly enough to prefer shadows and dreams.”
She came to the end of the long road which had begun the night Atlanta fell. She had set her feet upon that road a spoiled, selfish and untried girl, full of youth, warm of emotion, easily bewildered by life. Now, at the end of the road, there was nothing left of that girl. Hunger and hard labor, fear and constant strain, the terrors of war and the terrors of Reconstruction had taken away all warmth and youth and softness.
The former slaves were now the lords of creation and, with the aid of the Yankees, the lowest and most ignorant ones were on top. […] Many loyal field hands refused to avail themselves of the new freedom, but the hordes of “trashy free issue niggers,” who were causing most of the trouble, were drawn largely from the field-hand class.
Already many other Southern states had illiterate negroes in high public office and legislatures dominated by negroes and Carpetbaggers. But Georgia, by its stubborn resistance, had so far escaped this final degradation. For the greater part of three years, the state’s capital had remained in the control of white men and Democrats.
The hate that enveloped the Bullock regime enveloped her too […] Scarlett had cast her lot with the enemy and, whatever her birth and family connections, she was now in the category of a turncoat, a nigger lover, a traitor, a Republican—and a Scallawag.
