Slavery’s Enduring Legacy in an American Family
Written by a sixth-generation descendant of the enslaver Scarletts of Georgia, this powerful family history gives the real story of the people whose name inspired one of fiction’s most notorious protagonists.
“Scarlett faces a difficult history head-on, showing how slavery continues to reverberate in the lives of all Americans.” —Jason Young, author of Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry Region of Georgia and South Carolina in the Era of Slavery
“Both elegant and heart-breaking … Leslie Stainton’s exquisite writing and personal transformation shine a sure and steady light.” —Karen Branan, author of The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth
“Leslie Stainton ‘gets it.’” —Peter H. Wood, author of Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670–1740
A sixth-generation descendant of the Scarlett family of Georgia, Leslie Stainton grew up hearing about her heroic ancestors and their tragic plunge from wealth to poverty in the wake of the Civil War. But when she set out to learn the truth about her enslaver ancestors, Stainton discovered a lurid tale of greed, misogyny, rape, murder and theft—a story culminating in the legally sanctioned execution of an 18-year-old Black man in 1901, and the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery on land where the Scarletts once enslaved hundreds of human beings.
“With history again being weaponized, the timing is perfect for the release of Leslie Stainton’s vital story.”
—Joseph McGill Jr., founder of the Slave Dwelling Project and co-author, with Herb Frazer, of Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery
“Beautiful, elegiac, and urgent, Scarlett resonates with tidal force.”
— William G. Thomas III, author of A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War
“Scarlett exemplifies the kind of candor and courage we so urgently need if we are ever to undo the cruelties and lies of racism and heal as a nation.”
— Thomas Norman DeWolf, author of Inheriting the Trade
“Leslie Stainton has given us a remarkable, brave, and beautifully written book.”
—Scott Ellsworth, author of Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America
“Stainton’s beautifully written and heartfelt personal memoir, … so intertwined with American slavery, should be read by all those interested in the complicated nature of America’s racial past.”
—Jonathan Daniel Wells, professor of history, University of Michigan, and author of The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
