Scarlett: Slavery's Enduring Legacy in an American Family

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.