Gone with the Wind is not accurate in its depiction of the Civil War and Reconstruction South, putting it simply. It draws on a (at the time of its release) decades-long effort by mainly white southern writers to reinterpret their history as glorious, noble, and ultimately faded: the myth of the Lost Cause. Margaret Mitchell (and the adapters of her work) were responding to the popularity of Lost Cause themes, “moonlight and magnolias,” by their usage of popular tropes of southern fiction: Southern belles, dashing southern gentlemen, contented slaves who live only to serve their white masters, the entire character of Mammy, the idea that the post-war south was a miserable wasteland dominated by white Republicans and uneducated black freedmen who oppressed whites, and so on. In the years before the release of the movie, you can see similar themes in other popular Hollywood films. For example, two Shirley Temple vehicles co-starring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson have her as a young southerner during and after the Civil War, the daughter of staunch Confederates and slaveowners, with Robinson as her friendly, doting slave/former slave who has no inner life and exists to demonstrate how enslaved people “actually” were treated as family by the people who enslaved them and loved them so much they even stayed with them after being freed. There’s no mention in either of these movies (The Littlest Rebel and The Little Colonel) that slavery had ever been a problem; the movies, like Gone with the Wind, portray the war, and northerners and abolitionists’s pesky desire to end slavery, as the real issues, disrupting a way of life that, they suggest, was better than the current situation of the South.

Many southern writers since before the war had even ended had been peddling some form of this lie. Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris are probably two of the most famous; looking at the tradition of white female writers such as Mitchell, we find women such as Augusta Jane Evans, Constance Cary Harrison, Grace King, and others. All of these authors were popular outside the former Confederacy. As Reconstruction ended, the nation’s mood turned from emancipationist to reconciliationist, and stories of heroic southerners appealed to white audiences who wished to “heal” from the war by ignoring black Americans in favor of racial solidarity. So out went slave narratives and Uncle Tom’s Cabin; in come Uncle Remus stories. Reconstruction was largely seen as a failure, and as white southern Democrats “redeemed” state governments by taking them back from the racially diverse Republican governments set up under Reconstruction, national opinion followed.

So in short, no, the book and movie are not accurate, and were both drawing off decades of southern fiction selling the same thing. While Gone with the Wind’s phenomenal popularity (adjusted for inflation it’s literally the highest grossing movie ever) surely contributed to modern ideas of the Civil War South, it was influenced by thousands of other works that featured essentially the same story, characters, and themes. It’s cut from the same cloth as the statues of Confederates in the news lately: they’re both rewritings of history meant to reinforce white supremacy, to justify the actions of the Confederacy, to provide slavery apologia, and to exclude African Americans from their version of history.

I hope this response wasn’t too rambling as it’s my first answer here. Aside from the movies mentioned, my sources are: Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight; Tara Revisited: Women, War, & the Plantation Legend by Catherine Clinton; Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline Janney; Blood & Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 by Sarah Gardner.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on white southern women’s fiction/nonfiction and the Lost Cause so if you have any other questions feel free to ask.