Mitchell, who was born in Atlanta in 1900, grew up hearing from her family their firsthand accounts of the Civil War and its effects. During the war’s final stages, about 40 percent of Atlanta had been burned by Union forces at the start of William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea, which brought fighting to a close in Georgia and helped the Union win the war. Sherman’s scorched-earth campaign had a lasting effect across the South, and it contributed to the mythical Lost Cause interpretation of the war, which romanticized “Southern honor” in the face of claimed Northern depredations and fueled the South’s violent opposition to Reconstruction.
Mitchell, who as a child played among surviving Civil War fortifications in Atlanta and rode horses with Confederate veterans, would have been exposed to a range of views on the war. Gone With the Wind shows the influence of the Lost Cause interpretation that the novel also perpetuated.