Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine in manager D.W. Griffith's contentious Civil War epic. Nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions due to his pardon when colonel Ben Cameron is recorded in battle. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, combating Elsie's congressman father Silas Lynch, and his Africanamerican protégé.