Two families, abolitionist Northerners that the Stonemans and Southern landowners that the Camerons, intertwine in manager D.W. Griffith's contentious Civil War epic. Nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions because of his pardon when Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is caught in battle. In Reconstruction-era Sc, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African American protégé, Silas Lynch.