Any modern reader of Turn Homeward, Hannalee is going to wonder about the issue of slavery and why it does not appear in the novel. Beatty explains that she deliberately chose characters who would contrast with those in Gone with the Wind, which focuses on upper-class plantation owners. She wants to present lower-class figures in Turn Homeward, Hannalee, people often left out of historical fiction dealing with the Confederacy. The historical facts are that people like Roswell's mill workers owned no slaves.

Some of them even opposed slavery.

Few of them ever saw any slave close up; the lives of people like wealthy plantation owners were remote from their own existence. Beatty points out that people like Hannalee's father were motivated by loyalty to their regions; they saw themselves as Southerners first, even when, like Hannalee's father, they thought slavery was bad.

Thus, while slavery was...