The two families, abolitionist Northerners the Stonemans and also Southern landowners the Camerons, intertwine in director D.W. Griffith's controversial Civil War epic. Nurse Elsie Stoneman petitions because of his pardon, when colonel Ben Cameron is recorded in conflict. In Reconstruction-era Sc, Cameron founds the Ku Klux Klan, combating the congressman father and his African American protégé of Elsie.