Reading Gone with the Wind

I began reading Gone with the Wind at the beginning of June. I am almost half way through. I'm an incredibly slow reader because I savor and make a study of text. I am amazed at just how much cultural information Mitchell's book contains. I am especially interested in what she suggests throughout her text, about class.

She helps us understand how it is that Gerald has come to be a slave owner and that, despite his success, he will always be confined to a certain class partly because of his Irish heritage. Gerald, she explains while giving the background leading up to his becoming a planter, didn't want to be "in trade" like his brothers. He didn't want a life of endless "bargaining."

I have been studying trade and bargaining. I am fascinated by these terms and their meaning in the context of nineteenth century America and, even more so, in the context of slave society. I first became familiar with this term, however, through my grandfather, a Mississippi expat, who always spoke of "trading" with certain grocers in Detroit. He had been a small grocer himself in both Mississippi and Detroit, but I suspect that he had learned the term in the South, where he had done much business with area whites in both the small town where he lived and in Memphis, where he traveled regularly to buy and sell cotton and cattle. Many times, I've come across historical writings in which trade and bargaining are mentioned. For instance, right now, I'm studying the Southern Claims Commission file of Cato Govan, a former slave who made a good deal of money during the Civil War hauling cotton to Memphis.

What intrigues me about Mitchell's commentary is that she places the planter far above that of the merchant. A good deal of Gone with the Wind is in fact spent telling a story that has this class problematic as its foundation. Gerald is not Ellen's social equal; Scarlett is not Ashley's equal, and Rhett, despite coming from a good family, is not received by any reputable families, so, in the end, he is not Scarlett's equal. I am interested in this issue for many many reasons as I have immersed myself in Southern culture of the twenty-first century, studying at the same time William Crump, who was an attorney but appears on the 1860 census as a grocer despite the fact that he was a relatively prosperous planter. What gives? Why would Crump self-identify as a grocer rather than as a planter, especially if the former was less respectable?

I have my suspicions about Mr. Crump given that I have read more than one account of his character and person. He appears to have been a Unionist of sorts. As I've been reading GWTW, I have compared him to the unforgettable Rhett Butler. Was Crump too all about profit? Was money everything to him? He was attorney for Elizabeth Hull, owner of my ancestors. Hull trusted him both to take care of her business and with her daughter, whom he married. It was apparently an unhappy marriage; Crump was thought to be uncaring. Elizabeth the younger died, it would seem, heartbroken. Neighbor Henry Craft's diary is one source for this view of the marriage.

My guess is that there were layers and dimensions to William Crump. These deserve to be investigated, for to do so would be to provide a more complex view of Southern society than most of us have received. This investigation may have capitalism as its foundation. Why was Crump Unionist? Was he simply the same pragmatist as the fictional Butler? Was he as dead set on survival as even our heroine Scarlett O'Hara Butler would come to be? How well did Crump come through the war?

In 1870, we find him living in a household led by Morris Anderson, a 32-year-old mulatto carpenter born in North Carolina. Crump, now 65, would appear to have a good amount of money relative to his neighbors. Perhaps he eschewed all social convention. This living arrangement would certainly seem to suggest such independence. I look forward to digging deeper to find out.