BOOKS | Scarlett
University of Nebraska, Potomac Press, 2025
Published: November 2025
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Scarlett
Slavery’s Enduring Legacy in an American Family
“Many of us who came of age in the bruising, suffocating silence of an enslaver family are awakening to how this silence cripples us all and deeply endangers our nation. We become investigators, artists, filmmakers, scholars, truth-tellers, activists. Some of us write books.”
—Karen Branan, author of The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth
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—and about the Scarlett O’Hara of novel and movie fame who made their name known. But when Stainton set out to learn the truth about her enslaving forebears, she discovered the lurid facts behind Gone with the Wind’s Lost Cause fantasy. The centuries-long story of the real-life Scarletts is one of cruelty, greed, misogyny, rape, kidnapping, and theft, culminating in the legally sanctioned execution of an eighteen-year-old Black man in 1901—and in the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery on a former Scarlett plantation. If novelist Margaret Mitchell had chosen to tell the truth about an enslaving Scarlett, this is the story she might have written.
At its core is the riddle of Stainton’s Georgia-born grandmother, Mary King “Mamie” Hilsman Pettigrew, who embraced the Lost Cause of the Confederacy but was tormented lifelong by her suspicion that Scarlett men had engaged in racial violence in the twentieth century. Mamie gave Stainton her copies of Gone with the Wind and Fanny Kemble’s 1863 Journal of a Resistance on a Georgia Plantation, one of the most explosive indictments of American slavery ever written. These books informed Stainton’s quest to discover the truth about her Scarlett ancestors and her grandmother’s nightmare vision of racial violence involving her family.
By threading the stories of Margaret Mitchell and Fanny Kemble through the narrative of her Scarlett forebears, Stainton raises critical questions about the choices Americans have made, then and now, that have cemented the nation’s complicity in slavery’s persistent legacy.
“I’m a witness to immersion into the true history of enslaving ancestors. With history again being weaponized, it makes perfect timing 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
“Scarlett is both a deeply intimate family history as well as a candid consideration of the history of slavery and racism in the United States. Perhaps more importantly, Scarlett demonstrates the ways that these two histories are inextricably bound for American families on all sides of the color line. Much in the tradition of Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family, Scarlett faces a difficult history head-on, showing how slavery continues to reverberate in the lives of all Americans.”
—Jason R. Young, author of Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery
“This modern-day Fanny Kemble didn’t marry into the slavocracy of coastal Georgia; she inherited its wealth, its mythology, and its ‘Scarlett’ letters. Her lyrical and rewarding book, rich in historical detail, recounts with candor a brave journey of self-discovery. Stainton’s deeply personal odyssey links present to past and dares other privileged Americans with troubling family roots to do the hard emotional and archival work of confronting their real ancestral story. This way lies healing, for self and society.”
—Peter H. Wood, author of Black Majority: Race, Rice, and Rebellion in South Carolina, 1670-1740
“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’s beautifully written and heartfelt personal memoir about her own family’s history, so intertwined with American slavery, should be read by all those interested in the complicated nature of America’s racial past. As William Faulkner wrote, the past is neither dead nor truly past, and in engaging prose Stainton is keeping alive the memories of slavery and the white families who made its existence possible.”
—Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
“Beautiful, elegiac, and urgent, Scarlett resonates with tidal force. Leslie Stainton takes us on a search for the truth about her enslaving Georgia ancestors, the Scarletts, and a reckoning with the myths and distortions of their painful history from Gone with the Wind to today. In her family as in the American nation, the truth about slavery and segregation lay buried under denial, delusion, and pride. Pulling us all into its depths, this is a memoir that manages to be both bracingly honest and profoundly hopeful.”
—William G. Thomas III, author of A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War
“This engaging, well-written and well-researched book about the Scarlett family will draw you in quickly. The author is a talented storyteller, gradually revealing how this white Georgia family’s history is interwoven with stories of enslaving and what the lives of those enslaved persons were like.”
—Phoebe Kilbe, co-author with Betty Kilby Baldwin, of Cousins: Connected through Slavery, a Black Woman and a White Woman Discover their Past—and Each Other