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But Mary Boykin Chesnut of South Carolina would have given a damn about Scarlett, the petulant poster child of an imaginary antebellum South.
She was insatiably curious about all human beings. And she was a writer. She recorded their foibles, hypocrisies and complexities in hundreds of pages of diaries. Today, her words serve as blockade runners into the mysterious mind of the South during her lifetime of 1823 to 1886.
Her diaries won the Pulitzer Prize, as edited by preeminent historian C. Vann Woodward in the 1981 book, "Mary Chesnut's Civil War."
No one's words were used more than Chesnut's in Ken Burns' blockbuster documentary, "The Civil War."
Now her wit and charm will come to Beaufort County in one of the first commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.
Chesnut will be portrayed by actress, director and writer Chris Weatherhead of Folly Beach in a one-woman show titled "Mary Chesnut's Road to Fort Sumter."
Weatherhead previously adapted Mary Chesnut's "Diary From Dixie" into a play for the Actors' Theatre of South Carolina called "Mary Chesnut's War For Independence!" She has acted on stage, film and television for years, most recently as co-star and director of an independent film "All For Liberty," about the sacrifice of South Carolinians in the American Revolution. It debuted in Beijing.
"Mary Chesnut was a self-styled investigative reporter," Weatherhead said. "Playing her is like playing 50 women."
Chesnut was born to privilege in historic Camden, her father a U.S. congressman and senator, and the 52nd governor of South Carolina. She was educated well in a Huguenot school in Charleston. Her husband, who she began dating at 14 and married when she was 17, was born into plantation society and also served in Congress.
Because of those connections, and maybe because she never had children, Chesnut was everywhere. She was in Washington, Camden, Columbia, Charleston, Montgomery and Richmond. She was friends of Jefferson and Varina Davis, and she witnessed the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the match that lit the Civil War.
"She gave us behind-the-scenes, eyewitness descriptions of generals, war strategists, bureaucrats, society people and every level of her culture through the rise and fall of the Southern Confederacy," Weatherhead said.
But Chesnut was an enigma.
She detested slavery. Her account of an African woman being sold on a block, a scene she stumbled upon on a back street of Montgomery, is chilling. Like few of her generation, she saw slaves as human beings. Yet her family owned slaves, and she thought the Confederacy would, in its own time, end the scourge. She taught slaves to read when the law forbidding it was harsh. She wrote that as a child, "I read novels to them -- they knew the old books pretty well, and asked for the tales they liked best."
Chesnut biographer Elisabeth Muhlenfeld writes: "The willingness of otherwise honorable men to own slaves was, for her, a profoundly disturbing hypocrisy -- one over which she agonized throughout her life."
Chesnut also was a feminist.
"You have to remember that she had no vote," Weatherhead said. "She was very, very observant. She had a brilliant mind. She was able to observe many people who had power. But she had no power. The only power she had was to write."
Few of her words were published when Chesnut died, left impoverished by the war. She edited her diaries and worked on three novels. She knew her writing was for future generations.
Today, as the Civil War is re-examined on its sesquicentennial, Chesnut's words can set the tone. We don't need any more about an imaginary antebellum South. We need Chesnut's ability to see hypocrisies, even our own.
