No this movie will show the historical reality of the antebellum south which is something you are evidently not familiar with. You have bought into the simplistic, moralistic, history which was written by the victors. I can take you and show you the mass grave of 5,000 Irishmen who died of Yellow Fever digging the drainage ditches of New Orleans. Slaves were more valuable. Can we talk about the slave uprisings here in Louisiana in which white women were raped by black men? The whole point of having a historically realsitic movie about the antebellum south is to show that the reality is quite different from the hype. And, oh, oh, you might actually have to confront the fact that there were wealthy plantation owners here in Louisiana who were black and who owned slaves and who fought on the side of the Confederacy - reality not hype.
At my college, I get to teach the Civil War quite a bit, although I will admit, it’s a bit of a nightmare scenario being a northern carpetbagger from Minnesota living in Alabama! Pretty much whatever you say, someone’s gonna say you’re wrong. lol
I make sure to point out lots of different viewpoints. I make it clear that although slavery was a component of the Civil War, it was the underlying economic inequality that made the South almost a colony of the North that drove them to use more slaves, and really triggered the war. I point out the issues behind “Bleeding Kansas”, and that the “free state” group in Kansas that was against slavery was against it because they were so racist, they preferred to have no blacks in Kansas whatsoever. At the same time, I point out that there were units from every southern state except South Carolina that fought for the North, and in fact, there were more Union soldiers from Tennessee than Confederate soldiers (despite being a Confederate state). There were of course many Confederates from Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and the like as well. I also point out that most whites in the South were poor or lower middle class. There were actually surprisingly few people in the South with enough slaves to be considered real planters. In fact, here are the actual census figures:
To be considered a planter, one needed to own 20 slaves. Under that definition, about 1 in 30 southern whites in 1860 were considered planters (about 4%).
11,000 owned 50 or more
2,300 owned 100 or more
11 owned 500 or more
Only 1 ever owned more than 1,000
The total number of southern slaveholders in 1860 was 383,637 out of a total white population of 8 million. Assuming each family numbered five people, then about 1 in 4 whites owned at least one slave. The VAST majority of whites, however, either had no slaves, or owned one or two that worked right along side of them in the fields. They feared the end of slavery because the newly freed blacks would compete with them for scarce jobs. Poor whites resented planters almost as much as blacks did.
I will also point out that you are correct, there were black slaveholders (although some were really mulattoes), BUT… they were very uncommon. Between 1800 and 1860, there were just 3,775 blacks or mulattoes that owned 12,760 slaves. This is the total over a sixty year period. You will also note that that averages out to about 3 slaves per free black. This also includes a LARGE number of blacks that were considered slave holders because they bought their relatives to FREE them. This figure also includes some from the post-Revolutionary period in RI, CT, IL, NJ, NY, and the border states, so this figure is for the nation as a whole, not the South. There were a
few black that could be considered planters, primarily in Louisiana and South Carolina, but that tended to be less common the further one got from the Revolutionary era.
The problem with Civil War history is that our two stereotypes are Gone With the Wind and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Both are extremes that contain some elements of truth, but do not truly represent the reality of the South in any historically accurate way.
