This film portrays D.W. Griffith's racist vision of life in the South during and after the Civil War. The story depicts the war itself, the conflict between the defeated Southerners and emancipated renegade blacks, the despoiling of the South during the carpetbagger period, and the revival of the Southern white man's honor through the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan. Based on the novel The Clansman, by Reverend Thomas Dixon.