Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparrow
She does tackle what she sees as Northern misconceptions head-on; e.g.
"Accepting Uncle Tom's Cabin as revelation second only to the Bible, the Yankee women all wanted to know about the bloodhounds which every Southerner kept to track down runaway slaves. And they never believed her when she told them she had only seen one bloodhound in all her life and it was a small mild dog and not a huge ferocious mastiff. They wanted to know about the dreadful branding irons which planters used to mark the faces of their slaves and the cat-o'-nine-tails with which they beat them to death, and they evidenced what Scarlett felt was a very nasty and ill-bred interest in slave concubinage. Especially did she resent this in view of the enormous increase in mulatto babies in Atlanta since the Yankee soldiers had settled in the town.
Any other Atlanta woman would have expired in rage at having to listen to such bigoted ignorance but Scarlett managed to control herself."
In the UK, we were educated about the appalling treatment African slaves were forced to endure during capture, transportation and when they were put to work.
Mitchell presents aspects of that history that we weren't told about - how accurate it is though, I don't know. Certainly the field hands are not depicted as being well-treated.
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Slavery is such an emotion-laden topic that I don't know if we'll ever get an unbiased picture of what life was like under the American system. Furthermore, if we are ever presented with such a picture, how would we recognize it?
The horrors spoken of in Uncle Tom's cabin were all real. There really were people who used whips, chains, and dogs on slaves. The only question is how widespread these horrors were. Even in Harriet Beecher Stowe's book many slaveholders were depicted as kind and caring.