The Birth of a Nation (United Artists) (1915)

THE STORY OF THE PICTURE T HE FIRST ship that brought a cargo of African slaves to North America started the series of troublous events preceding the birth of a great nation. Abolition was subsequently advocated, but the idea of social equality was never considered. The South declared it would secede, if in 1860 a Republican president was elected. That president, Abraham Lincoln, issued a call for 75,000 volunteers. For the first time in American annals he used the Federal power to subdue the sovereignty of individual states. The Stoneman boys of Pennsylvania had been house guests at Piedmont, S. C., of their boarding-school chums, the Cameron boys. Phil Stoneman and Margaret Cameron, “fair as a flower,” had looked, longed and loved. Ben Cameron had never met Elsie Stoneman, yet the daguerreotype of her he had pilfered from Phil seemed about the dearest, sweetest thing in the world. The younger lads of the two houses—too young for sentiment and romance—frolicked like friendly young colts. Most charming and lovable of all the Cameron clan was the Doctor and Mrs. Cameron’s youngest daughter Flora. When War casts its shadow over the land, Phil and Tod Stoneman are summoned to fight for the Stars and Stripes; Ben Cameron and his two younger brothers, for the Stars and Bars. The grim years drag along. Piedmont gayly enters the conflict, but ruin and devastation follow. The town gets a foretaste of rapine and pillage in the raid of a mixed body of white and colored guerillas against it. The scale of events inclines to the Union cause. Southern wealth and resources are burned or com¬ mandeered by Sherman in his march to the sea. Meantime two of the Cameron boys have perished in battle, one of them face to face with his dying chum Tod. Grant is pressing the Confederacy in the famous campaign around Petersburg. When Confederate supplies are running low, one of the pro¬ vision trains is cut off and the “little Colonel,” Ben Cameron, is called upon by Gen. Lee to lead a counter attack and thus, by diverting the enemy, aid in the rescue of the train. We see the panorama of a battlefield flung over many miles of mountain and valley, the opposing intrenchments and the artillery fire, Col. Cameron and his men forming for the advance, their charge over broken ground, the grim harvest of death that swept most of them away, the bayonet rush of the devoted few right up to the trenches, the physical hand-grapple with the enemy, and Cameron, sole survivor, gaining the crest of the Federal works and falling wounded into the arms of Capt. Phil Stoneman, U. S. A., his erstwhile bosom friend. Prisoner in a Washington hospital, Ben Cameron slowly recovers from his wound. Like an angel of mercy Elsie Stoneman, Phil’s sister, appears in the role of a volunteer nurse. Poor Ben falls desperately in love with her whose picture he had carried about for years. She and Ben’s mother visit Lincoln, “the Great Heart,” who clears the “little Colonel” of an odious charge and hands Mrs. Cameron the boy’s papers of release. It seemed to Austin Stoneman, leader of Congress and Elsie’s parent, that Lincoln was pursuing too mild a policy with the prostrate South. “I shall treat them as if they had never been away” was Lincoln’s gentle answer to Stoneman’s demand that the leaders be hanged and measures of reprisal adopted. What was there in Stoneman’s life that made him so bitter to the Southern whites? Stone¬ man purposed to establish the complete political and social equality of the negr6es. He was grooming a half-breed protege, one Silas Lynch, to go South as the “leader of his people.” The War ends in 1865 with the encirclement of the Southern army and the surrender of Robert E. Lee to U. S. Grant in the historic house at Appomattox Courthouse. There follows a terrible tragedy— the assassination of President Lincoln by Wilkes Booth in the crowded scene of a festival performance at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. The South feels—and feels truly—that it has lost its best friend. A few years later comes the real aftermath. Austin Stoneman, now supreme through the Con¬ gressional power of over-riding President Johnson’s veto, goes south to supervise his “equality” pro¬ gramme. Elsie accompanies him, and so does Phil. They arrive in Piedmont and take a house next door to the Camerons. Elsie accepts the gallant little Confederate colonel, Ben Cameron, but the shadows of war-time hang too heavily over Margaret Cameron to permit her to make up at once with Phil. Meanwhile the reign of the carpet-baggers begins. The “Union League,” so-called, wins the ensuing State election. Silas Lynch, the mulatto, is chosen Lieutenant-Governor. A legislature, with carpet-bag and negro members in overwhelming majority, loots the State. Lawlessness runs riot. Whites are elbowed off the streets, overawed at the polls, and often despoiled of their possessions. Ben Cameron then leads the white men of the country in organizing the “invisible empire” of the Ku Klux Klan. Devoted women of the South make the white, ghost-like costumes behind locked doors. Austin Stoneman boils with rage over this newest development. Lynch’s spies Dring evidence that the garments are being made by the Camerons and that Ben Cameron is night-riding. Stoneman bids Elsie to disavow her “traitorous” lover, and she, astonished and wounded that Ben is engaged in such work, gives him back his troth. Little Flora Cameron, the joy and pride of the Cameron household, was sought after by the renegade family servant Gus, who had become a militiaman and joined Lynch’s crew. Often had Flora been warned by her brother and parents never to go alone to the spring in the woods hard by the cliff called Lover’s Leap. Little heeding the admonition, she took her pail one day and started off. Gus the renegade followed. Frightened by his approach, the little girl broke into a run. Gus ran too. Colonel Cameron, learning that she had gone alone, hastened forth and was the third per¬ son in the chase. Desperately the little girl zigzagged this way and that, dodging the burly pursuer.