Both books deal with slavery, yet Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone with the Wind paint strikingly different pictures of how white people treated enslaved Black people. The kind-hearted slaveholders and long-suffering slaves of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are hard to find in Gone with the Wind.
How Are the Two Books Different?
Uncle Tom’s Cabin portrays slaveholders who are generous to a fault. They let enslaved women live under the same roof, teach Black children to read, keep their slaves well fed and give them quarters that could even be called fairly comfortable.
But in Gone with the Wind, even the kindest slaveholders do no more than let the people they enslave sleep in shacks. Ashley and Melanie have their slaves sleep in the cellar. Melanie even insists that her children will never go to school alongside Black children, whom she refers to with a slur. And this is when the story has already moved into the Reconstruction era.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin paints a rather comfortable picture of the darkest chapter in the history of Black people in America. When an enslaved woman runs away, everyone she meets along the way is ready to help her. Some slaveholders even tell one another that if you don’t know how to value your slaves, you deserve to have them run off.
In Gone with the Wind, however, any slave who dared to run away had better be ready to be called “lazy,” “shameless” and “ungrateful.”
Clearly, Uncle Tom’s Cabin portrays the slaveholding South as far too pretty and compassionate. Meanwhile, what Gone with the Wind shows is already the moral ceiling of the plantation owners.
Look a little deeper, and you’ll see that Uncle Tom’s Cabin focuses less on condemning slaveholders and more on attacking the system itself. So the book’s overall argument leans toward this: there are still good people among slaveholders, but under financial pressure and a cruel system, they are forced to do wrong.
Gone with the Wind isn’t nearly so humane. The shamelessness of its slaveholders is sometimes pushed to extremes that leave readers deeply uncomfortable.
By today’s standards, the fact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin goes too easy on white slaveholders has significantly diminished its literary standing. The author held deep Christian convictions, so the book is written in a conciliatory spirit that tries to keep the peace. Everyone in the story has a good heart; it’s only their circumstances that force them to act as they do.
Even though it partly “whitewashes” these slaveholders, the book was for a long time bitterly hated by the very people it tried so hard to cast as good. That alone shows that the author’s efforts were ultimately in vain.
Gone with the Wind is the opposite. Its slaveholders may think and act oppressively, but that’s as far as it goes. The book completely ignores the tragic side of slavery and never digs into it. Instead, it condemns the irresponsibility of the Northern abolitionists, claiming that they fought for their own interests rather than out of genuine goodness. The proof, as the book sees it, is that they later left Black people to sink into destitution.
Placing them side by side makes it clear that neither book fully reflects the truth.
But that hardly matters. Generally, as long as the protagonists are only moderately flawed, mainstream readers don’t mind much (unless they’re too awful to defend). So even though Scarlett thinks freed Black people with no masters need a good whipping to cure them of their insolence, and Rhett shoots dead a free Black man for being insolent to a white woman, the book is still ranked among the classics and widely embraced.
If the Books Don’t Reflect Reality, What Did Reality Look Like?
Take Thomas Jefferson, the American president and a highly respected Southern gentleman. He had six children with an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings, four of whom survived to adulthood. Ironically, Sally was the half-sister of his wife, Martha Jefferson.
According to the later recollections of one of Sally’s sons, she became pregnant with Jefferson’s child while in Paris. She had intended to stay in France, where she could have been free for good. But Jefferson worked hard to persuade her to return to America. He promised that if she came back, all her children would be freed when they came of age, which at the time meant 21.
In other words, because Sally was the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law and an enslaved woman, she was still a slave. Jefferson essentially used her children’s future freedom as bait, or more accurately as leverage. This forced Sally to give up her own freedom, follow him back to America and serve as his slave for as long as he lived. Only after his death was Sally allowed to go free.
And that was about the best treatment an enslaved Black person could ever hope for.
