Two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine. When Confederate colonel Ben Cameron is captured in battle, nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions for his pardon. In Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, battling Elsie's congressman father and his African-American protégé, Silas Lynch.

A sequel to DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, by the same author, and now lost. It is considered the first film sequel ever made and recounts a fictional invasion of America by a united army from Europe.