Reflections On The Civil War – A Nation Divided

Seeing Gone with the Wind in the movies when I was about twelve made me a Margaret Mitchell fan forever. I hoped she would write a sequel, but that hope died with her death. I grabbed with interest Ripley’s sequel. I had been reading and rereading so many times GWTW, the historical novel about the Civil War and how it changed the country and a way of life, that it simply didn’t work for me.

I avidly read. Spirited, independent, capable Scarlett O’Hara was generations ahead of the woman’s liberation movement in this country. I often wondered who was the real life inspiration for her character. Certainly it would have been a young female who saw life as an entitlement disintegrate with the fall of the Confederacy and recover under Reconstruction. Surely it would have to be a woman whose perspectives change from her teen through middle age plus.

I myself do not enjoy reading history in a text book. I enjoy going through it instead. Civil War Battlefields like Gettysburg, Antietam, even Atlanta reflect the past. The past gives us insights; it helps us deal with the future. I was awed at Arlington and its Lee Museum. How terrible it must have been to be a nation divided, a nation where brother fought against brother!