Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books.

“Good God! Why don’t they buy another cook?”

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No wife has ever changed a husband one whit, and don’t you be forgetting that.

“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything,” he shouted, his thick, short arms making wide gestures of indignation, “for ’tis the only thing in this world that lasts, and don’t you be forgetting it! ’Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for — worth dying for.”

And to anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother.

For a woman, love comes after marriage.”

he could never learn to lose money with good humor or good grace.

Like most girls, her imagination carried her just as far as the altar and no further.

You all don’t know what war is. You think it’s riding a pretty horse and having the girls throw flowers at you and coming home a hero. Well, it ain’t.

Can’t I make you see that a marriage can’t go on in any sort of peace unless the two people are alike?”

Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.

Nor would they go through the formal and protracted courtships which good manners had prescribed before the war. They were likely to propose in three or four months. And girls who knew very well that a lady always refused a gentleman the first three times he proposed rushed headlong to accept the first time.

Letters from men at the front complained constantly of shoes that wore out in a week, gunpowder that would not ignite, harness that snapped at any strain, meat that was rotten and flour that was full of weevils.

Sometimes the rallying cry is ‘Save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!’ Sometimes it’s ‘Down with Popery!’ and sometimes ‘Liberty!’ and sometimes ‘Cotton, Slavery and States’ Rights!’”

the fat Dutch woman who is sitting on the throne is a God-fearing soul and she doesn’t approve of slavery.

I think the Yankees have us. Gettysburg was the beginning of the end.

the Yankees are buying soldiers from Europe by the thousands! Most of the prisoners we’ve taken recently can’t even speak English. They’re Germans and Poles and wild Irishmen who talk Gaelic.

Grant was a butcher who did not care how many men he slaughtered for a victory, but victory he would have. Sheridan was a name to bring dread to Southern hearts. And, then, there was a man named Sherman who was being mentioned more and more often. He had risen to prominence in the campaigns in Tennessee and the West, and his reputation as a determined and ruthless fighter was growing.

What better way can an old man die than doing a young man’s work?”

Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia?

Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked backward, to dead times, to dead men, evoking memories that hurt and were futile, bearing poverty with bitter pride because they had those memories.

These were the only things worth fighting for, the red earth which was theirs and would be their sons’,

“For ’tis the only thing in the world that lasts . . . and to anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother. . . . ’Tis the only thing worth working for, fighting for, dying for.”

Ellen was the audience before which the blustering drama of Gerald O’Hara had been played. Now the curtain had been rung down forever, the footlights dimmed and the audience suddenly vanished, while the stunned old actor remained on his empty stage, waiting for his cues.

the South was being treated as a conquered province and that vindictiveness was the dominant policy of the conquerors.

Military orders had been promulgated concerning the schools, sanitation, the kind of buttons one wore on one’s suit, the sale of commodities and nearly everything else.

the way the Yankees have framed up that amnesty oath, can’t nobody who was somebody before the war vote at all. Not the smart folks nor the quality folks nor the rich folks.

Gotterdammerung.”

“Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool can be brave on a battle field when it’s be brave or else be killed.

And now this class, the lowest in the black social order, was making life a misery for the South.

Neither life nor property was safe from them and the white people, unprotected by law, were terrorized. Men were insulted on the streets by drunken blacks, houses and barns were burned at night, horses and cattle and chickens stolen in broad daylight, crimes of all varieties were committed and few of the perpetrators were brought to justice.

“Do you think I’d trust my babies to a black nigger?” cried the Maine woman. “I want a good Irish girl.”

“I assure you that darkies aren’t cannibals and are quite trustworthy.”

“An’ dey call me a nigger an’ Ah’ ain’ never been call a nigger by no w’ite folks, an’ dey call me a ole pet an’ say dat niggers ain’ ter be trus’ed! Me not ter be trus’ed! Why, w’en de ole Cunnel wuz dyin’ he say ter me, ‘You, Peter! You look affer mah chillun. Tek keer of yo’ young Miss Pittypat,’ he say, ‘‘cause she ain’ got no mo’ sense dan a hoppergrass.’ An’ Ah done tek keer of her good all dese y’ars —”

They didn’t understand negroes or the relations between the negroes and their former masters. Yet they had fought a war to free them. And having freed them, they didn’t want to have anything to do with them, except to use them to terrorize Southerners. They didn’t like them, didn’t trust them, didn’t understand them, and yet their constant cry was that Southerners didn’t know how to get along with them.

Georgia had been declared in rebellion and put under the strictest martial law. Georgia’s very existence as a state had been wiped out and it had become, with Florida and Alabama, “Military District Number Three,” under the command of a Federal general.

Trainloads of negroes had been rushed from town to town, voting at every precinct along the way. Of course, Bullock had won.

Especially in view of the embarrassing circumstance that his first-born was a girl and not a boy.

Word had been spread among the negroes that there were only two political parties mentioned in the Bible, the Publicans and the Sinners.

They had no difficulty at all in obtaining the state’s money for building railroads that were never built, for buying cars and engines that were never bought, for erecting public buildings that never existed except in the minds of their promoters.