A01=Leslie Stainton
American history
American racism
American slavery
American South
Author_Leslie Stainton
Category=NHK
Category=NHTS
Category=WQH
Civil Rights
Civil Rights history
Civil Rights movement
civil war history
confederate history
Discrimination
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
family history
Geneaology
Georgia history
Gone with the Wind
History
history of racism
history of slavery
Jim Crow
Jim Crow era
Lost Cause of the Confederacy
Race
racial violence
Racism in the U.S.
Racist Ideology
Slave
Slaveholder
slavery
Southern American literature
southern history
Women's history
Product details
- ISBN 9781640126756
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2025
- Publisher: Potomac Books Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A sixth-generation descendant of the Scarlett family of Georgia, Leslie Stainton grew up hearing about her heroic ancestors and their tragic plunge from wealth to poverty in the wake of the Civil War-and about the Scarlett O’Hara of novel and movie fame who made their name known. But when Stainton set out to learn the truth about her enslaving forebears, she discovered the lurid facts behind Gone with the Wind’s Lost Cause fantasy. The centuries-long story of the real-life Scarletts is one of cruelty, greed, misogyny, rape, kidnapping, and theft, culminating in the legally sanctioned execution of an eighteen-year-old Black man in 1901-and in the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery on a former Scarlett plantation. If novelist Margaret Mitchell had chosen to tell the truth about an enslaving Scarlett, this is the story she might have written.
At its core is the riddle of Stainton’s Georgia-born grandmother, Mary “Mamie” King Hilsman Pettigrew, who embraced the Lost Cause of the Confederacy but was tormented lifelong by her suspicion that Scarlett men had engaged in racial violence in the twentieth century. Mamie gave Stainton her copies of Gone with the Wind and Fanny Kemble’s 1863 Journal of a Resistance on a Georgia Plantation, one of the most explosive indictments of American slavery ever written. These books informed Stainton’s quest to discover the truth about her Scarlett ancestors and her grandmother’s nightmare vision of racial violence involving her family.
By threading the stories of Margaret Mitchell and Fanny Kemble through the narrative of her Scarlett forebears, Stainton raises critical questions about the choices Americans have made, then and now, that have cemented the nation’s complicity in slavery’s persistent legacy.
At its core is the riddle of Stainton’s Georgia-born grandmother, Mary “Mamie” King Hilsman Pettigrew, who embraced the Lost Cause of the Confederacy but was tormented lifelong by her suspicion that Scarlett men had engaged in racial violence in the twentieth century. Mamie gave Stainton her copies of Gone with the Wind and Fanny Kemble’s 1863 Journal of a Resistance on a Georgia Plantation, one of the most explosive indictments of American slavery ever written. These books informed Stainton’s quest to discover the truth about her Scarlett ancestors and her grandmother’s nightmare vision of racial violence involving her family.
By threading the stories of Margaret Mitchell and Fanny Kemble through the narrative of her Scarlett forebears, Stainton raises critical questions about the choices Americans have made, then and now, that have cemented the nation’s complicity in slavery’s persistent legacy.
Leslie Stainton has served on the board of directors of both the Slave Dwelling Project and Coming to the Table. She is a two-time Fulbright recipient and a former lecturer in creative nonfiction at the University of Michigan Residential College. Stainton is the author of Staging Ground: An American Theater and Its Ghosts and Lorca: A Dream of Life and has published essays in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the American Scholar, and other publications.
