 It emphasized an independent political spirit and economic self-reliance.Northerners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled in and wrote about the 1850s South, through the early 20th-century historians such as William E. Dodd and Ulrich B. Phillips, assessed common southerners as minor players in antebellum social, economic, and political life of the South.Twentieth-century romantic portrayals of the antebellum South, such as Margaret Mitchell's novel "Gone with the Wind" (1936) and the 1939 film adaptation, mostly ignored the yeomen.