1 And raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.
2 Beatrice Tarleton was a busy woman, having on her hands not only a large cotton plantation, a hundred negroes and eight children, but the largest horse-breeding farm in the state as well.
3 They looked out across the endless acres of Gerald O'Hara's newly plowed cotton fields toward the red horizon.
4 The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet and maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches.
5 It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts, the best cotton land in the world.
6 The plantation clearings and miles of cotton fields smiled up to a warm sun, placid, complacent.
7 He cleared the fields and planted cotton and borrowed more money from James and Andrew to buy more slaves.
8 Tom Slattery owned no slaves, and he and his two oldest boys spasmodically worked their few acres of cotton, while the wife and younger children tended what was supposed to be a vegetable garden.
9 But, somehow, the cotton always failed, and the garden, due to Mrs. Slattery's constant childbearing, seldom furnished enough to feed her flock.
10 The sight of Tom Slattery dawdling on his neighbors' porches, begging cotton seed for planting or a side of bacon to "tide him over," was a familiar one.
11 All of the world was crying out for cotton, and the new land of the County, unworn and fertile, produced it abundantly.
12 There remained varicolored cotton dresses which Scarlett felt were not festive enough for the occasion, ball dresses and the green sprigged muslin she had worn yesterday.
13 Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance.
14 Only the older men, the cripples and the women were left, and they spent their time knitting and sewing, growing more cotton and corn, raising more hogs and sheep and cows for the army.
15 Before the war there had been few cotton factories, woolen mills, arsenals and machine shops south of Maryland--a fact of which all Southerners were proud.