Born in 1900, Margaret Mitchell grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. More than thirty years before her birth, Atlanta had been burned to the ground by the Union army during the Civil War. It was rebuilt rather quickly, but memories of that era remained deeply etched in the minds of the Mitchells and other Southern families. As a child, the author heard many stories from older relatives who had lived through the Civil War in northern Georgia. Their stories helped her establish a life-like setting for her best-known work, Gone with the Wind.
The antebellum South. Agriculture formed the backbone of the Southern economy before the Civil War. The vast majority of Southern whites were modest farmers who worked small tracts of land with their own labor. Only one percent of Southerners owned large plantations with more than fifty slaves. Even so, this "aristocracy" used their wealth and property to exert a power and influence in Southern society far beyond their numbers.
large plantation, like Tara in Gone with the Wind, was nearly self-sufficient. It might employ as many as a hundred slaves to carry out a wide variety of duties.
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