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.
I have always given Griffith his due as an outstanding master of the bourgeois film, [but] this can in no way be applied to The Birth of a Nation. [The] disgraceful propaganda of racial hatred toward the coloured people which permeates this film cannot be redeemed by the purely cinematographic effects of this production.
— Sergei Eistenstein (1940)
