In practice, of course, what we see is a further development and refinement of the Lincoln legend. While Lincoln did indeed hope to treat the South with considerable leniency, he never had the time to develop a truly coherent policy. The war effectively ended with Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, and Lincoln was assassinated just five days later. The South generally had very little of “Lincoln’s fostering hand” to encourage it, and the reaction of Dr. Cameron to the news of Lincoln’s assassination (“Our best friend is gone. What is to become of us now?”) is frankly absurd (shot 617). What Griffith was doing was in essence displacing the notion of Lincoln as a unifying national figure—a perception many Southerners had also come to share by 1915—onto the closing moments of the Civil War.67 “His” Lincoln, ironically, is presented as a hero to the hostile Southerners he has spent the last four years trying to subdue.
Shot of Ford’s Theatre just before the assassination sequence. (Epoch/The Kobal Collection)
The “Tragic Era” Legend of Reconstruction
Most of the controversy surrounding The Birth of a Nation both at the time of its initial release and later did not have to do with its depictions of slavery and the origins of the Civil War, the war itself, or Lincoln’s leadership. It arose from the second part of the film dealing with the era of Reconstruction in the South and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
In its spring 1947 issue, the British film journal Sight and Sound published a letter from D. W. Griffith. The director was writing in response to a hostile article by Peter Noble, criticizing Griffith as a “pioneer of prejudice” who, in The Birth of a Nation, had produced a film that had viciously distorted the facts, caricatured blacks, and made heroes of the Klansmen who had invented the horrors of lynching. Historians, Noble observed, had been “quick to point out the many inaccuracies in the film.” Griffith rejected the idea that he was anti-black: his attitude toward African Americans, he insisted, had “always been one of affection and brotherly feeling.” But it was the accusation that his greatest film was historically inaccurate that seemed to anger him most. In Birth of a Nation, Griffith argued,
I gave to my best knowledge the proven facts, and presented the known truth, about the Reconstruction period in the American South. These facts are based on an overwhelming compilation of authentic evidence and testimony. My picturization of history as it happens requires, therefore, no apology, no defence, no “explanations.”68
The fact that Griffith referred only to his treatment of the Reconstruction period (in a film that spanned the antebellum and Civil War years) showed how aware he was of the controversy attached to the second part of his film. Yet at the time The Birth of a Nation had been made, the view it offered of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War had not been very different from the dominant “Dunningite” view among professional historians. The term “Dunningite” referred to the followers of William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University who in his books—Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (1897) and Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (1907)—had argued that the Reconstruction process after the Civil War had been a mistake. Radical Republicans, motivated by hatred of the white South, had imposed the corrupt rule of blacks, scalawags, and carpetbaggers on the states of the old Confederacy. In the end, that rule had been brought to an end, sometimes peacefully and sometimes violently, by decent Southern whites. Dunning’s many graduate students, including Walter L. Fleming, James W. Garner, J. G. de Roulac Hamilton, Charles W. Ramsdell, and C. Mildred Thompson, had reaffirmed his critical view of the Reconstruction era. In 1929, Claude G. Bowers would recapitulate the arguments of the Dunningites for a popular audience in his highly critical best seller, The Tragic Era.69 Even in 1947, Griffith was by no means the only Southerner still to be defending what had come to be known as the critical “Dunningite” or “Tragic Era” interpretation of Reconstruction. Writing in the introduction to the volume he published that year on the history of the South after the Civil War, Georgia historian E. Merton Coulter declared in a phrase strikingly similar to Griffith’s that “there can be no sensible departure from the well-known facts of the Reconstruction program as it was applied to the South.”70
In January 1948, six months before his death, Griffith began to dispose of his library. He gave much of it away to his acolyte and supposed biographer, Seymour Stern, with the suggestion, which Stern acted on, that the books he could not store be donated to the Hollywood Public Library. Among the works now given to him, Stern identified five that Griffith had used in researching the Reconstruction period: Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People, Vol. V, Reunion and Nationalization; Albion Winegar Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand and The Invisible Empire; J. C. Lester and D. L. Wilson, Ku Klux Klan—Its Origins, Growth and Disbandment; John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865–1877; and Testimony Taken by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States (the volume on North Carolina).71 Stern also listed a pamphlet entitled The Prescript of [the] Ku Klux Klan by West Virginia history professor Walter L. Fleming, an unpublished paper on the uniform of the Klan by Elizabeth M. Howe, and a collection of “original documents” on the Klan, including handbills, notices, and warnings that had been given to Griffith by Dixon.72 In a letter of 1915, J. J. McCarthy, a leading publicist for Griffith’s film, also cited Walter L. Fleming’s “Reconstruction in South Carolina”73 and James S. Pike’s The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government as the sources for Griffith’s film.74
What is intriguing about the works Griffith apparently used in his preparation for shooting Birth is that not all of them were favorable to or romanticized the Klan. Testimony Taken by the Joint Committee—unofficially known as the “Ku Klux Report”—was published by Congress in 1872 as a justification for the Federal Force Acts of 1870 and 1871, which had been used effectively to destroy the Klan. The report reprinted testimony from countless victims of Klan outrages. Anyone reading it objectively would surely have reached the conclusion that the Klan was a brutal, violent, and degraded organization.
Even more interesting, in some ways, was the inclusion of Tourgée’s The Invisible Empire. Besides Woodrow Wilson, he was the only writer to be mentioned by name in the second part of The Birth of a Nation. Immediately after the “Little Colonel” has the inspiration for the Ku Klux Klan, the Klan is described in an intertitle as “the organization that saved the South from the anarchy of black rule, but not without the shedding of more blood than at Gettysburg, according to Judge Tourgée of the carpet-baggers” (shot 925). The intertitle does not make clear whether Tourgée is being cited as the source both for the assertion that the Klan had rescued the South and the assessment of the human cost (“more blood than at Gettysburg”), or only for the latter. It brings together in the same phrase two deeply untrue propositions: that there was ever “black rule” in the South and that it had produced “anarchy.” It exaggerates the casualties involved in the Klan campaign75 while leaving unclear precisely just whose blood has been spilt—that of the Klansmen or blacks or both—and whether Tourgée approves or disproves of the Klan’s actions. Indeed, the only reasonably accurate parts of the intertitle were the identification of Tourgée as a judge and as belonging to the “carpetbaggers” (as mentioned above, this was the term of opprobrium applied by native white Southerners to all Northerners who arrived in the South during Reconstruction).
Tourgée, a one-eyed Ohioan of French Huguenot stock, had enlisted in the Union Army at the start of the war. In July 1861, he was seriously injured at the first battle of Bull Run. Although discharged from the army as a result, he reenlisted as a lieutenant in July 1862. At the battle of Perryville, Kentucky, in October 1862 he was again injured. He recovered quickly, only to be captured by the enemy in January 1863. Tourgée remained a prisoner in Tennessee until May, when he was exchanged. He went back briefly to Ohio, where he married, before returning to duty. He fought in many battl
es over the next few months. Resigning from the army in December 1863, he returned to Ohio where he was admitted to the bar. Still suffering the effects of his wartime injuries, he began to dream of a place where he could both recover his health and make his fortune. In October 1865, he settled with his wife in North Carolina. He did not, as John Hope Franklin pointed out, fit the Southern stereotype of the impecunious carpetbagger, since he arrived with $5,000 which he invested, and eventually lost, in a farming business.76 Over the next two years, Tourgée became deeply involved in Reconstruction politics. He organized the Union League in his county and for six months edited a newspaper that campaigned for a more sweeping approach to the Reconstruction of the South. Tourgée got his wish in March 1867 when Congress passed the first of a series of Reconstruction Acts. Existing state governments across the South were dissolved and conventions, elected on the basis of black suffrage, were called to draw up new state constitutions. Tourgée was elected to the North Carolina constitutional convention of 1868 and appears to have played a major part in its deliberations. Soon afterward, he was elected to the Superior Court, on which he served for six years. From the bench he attacked white North Carolinians, and especially the Klan, for their treatment of African Americans. After 1870, when the Democrats came back into power in the state, bringing the Reconstruction process there effectively to an end, Tourgée came under increasing pressure from his enemies. In 1876, he was given a federal job as a pension agent by President Ulysses S. Grant. Three years later, he finally gave up the idea of living in the South and moved back North with his family.77
In November 1879, Tourgée published A Fool’s Errand: By One of the Fools, a semifictionalized account of the failure of Reconstruction in North Carolina. Although not in the strict sense autobiographical, the main character, Comfort Servosse, the fool of the title, is plainly modeled on Tourgée. Many of the incidents in the book closely paralleled Tourgée’s own experiences, including the threats made by the Klan against Servosse and his family and the story of a failed murder plot.78 Throughout the book, Tourgée described the activities of the Klan in detail. Much of this material was based on a systematic record of the activities of the Klan he had made during his time as a judge.79 In 1880, when A Fool’s Errand was republished, Tourgee added a second part to the book, an appendix entitled “The Invisible Empire.” It was this edition that Dixon had given to Griffith as he started work on what became The Birth of a Nation.
Griffith’s use of Tourgée in an intertitle suggests that he was familiar with the book. Seymour Stern also asserted that he used material from “A New Institution” (Chapter 27 of A Fool’s Errand) and “The Invisible Empire” “both in scenes and in subtitles of the unabridged version” of Birth.80 Since whatever longer version of the film he referred to has long disappeared, it is difficult to assess the accuracy of the claim. Moreover, because the view of the Klan in Birth was so different from that in Tourgée’s writing, it is plain that ideas derived from the book would need considerable transformation before they could be included in the film. The chapter of A Fool’s Errand entitled “A New Institution,” for example, is about an attack on a muscular African American blacksmith, Bob Martin, by the Klan. During the course of the attack, Martin’s one-year-old son is killed. Martin himself is tied to a tree and whipped. A courageous man (he fought in the 54th Massachusetts regiment during the war), he dismisses the mythology surrounding the Klan (“I didn’t ’bleve any nonsense about ther comin’ straight from hell, an’ drinkin’ the rivers dry”).81 Griffith takes elements from this chapter and inverts them totally to fit his own perspective. The black man tied to a tree and whipped in Birth is Jake, the Camerons’ “faithful soul,” and he is beaten not by the Klan but by other blacks who want to punish him for not voting for the radical regime (shots 824–30). Two blacks, one identified as a “barn burner,” clearly are terrified by three Klansmen, one of whom endlessly drinks water from a bucket (927–37). And Bob, the powerfully built black blacksmith, is reincarnated in Birth of a Nation as Jeff, the brave white blacksmith who dies trying to apprehend the evil Gus, the black soldier who has driven Flora Cameron to her fate (shots 1104–33).
In “The Invisible Empire,” Tourgée insisted that A Fool’s Errand had been closely based on fact—drawn “either [from his] personal cognizance or authentic information.” “The Invisible Empire” set out to show that the Klan really had been as evil as the novel had suggested. It republished voluminous extracts from the 1872 majority report by the congressional committee of inquiry into the Klan.82 Although most of the testimony included related to Alabama and Georgia, it offered glimpses into the workings of the Klan that Griffith could use (in suitably refashioned form) in his film. Tourgée stressed the importance of threats and warnings issued by the Klan to groups and individuals, and the attempt to exploit superstition by suggesting that the ghostly figures menacing blacks were the spirits of Confederates who had been killed in battle.83 These themes were echoed in the above-mentioned shot of the Klansmen threatening the “barn-burner.” Three other points made by Tourgée were also reflected in the film. He noted that Klansmen were almost invariably mounted on horses (which Tourgée believed emphasized that they “had the co-operation and approval of the better classes”).84 He underlined the importance the Klan attached to disarming African Americans.85 In the film, this is the first thing done by Klansmen once Elsie Stoneman and the party in the cabin have been rescued (shots 1578–79). Finally Tourgée commented on how easily the Klan disguise could be carried around; it was worn only for Klan meetings and rides.86 (In Birth of a Nation, the costume is initially carried by the “Little Colonel” in a paper bundle to a meeting with Elsie, and then hidden under his coat. Later, Margaret Cameron hides it under her skirt and both she and Flora are shown concealing the robe inside a pillowcase [shots 954–59, 983, 1186, 1188]).
If Tourgée’s book influenced a number of features of the Klan’s portrayal in Birth of a Nation, it does not appear to have affected the actual appearance of Klansmen in the film. Tourgée, citing testimony given to the “Ku Klux” committee, claimed that the actual Klan’s disguise differed from state to state. Walter L. Fleming, in a reprint of Lester and Wilson’s 1884 book on the Klan, included lithographic prints that supported this idea. Klansmen from Mississippi and west Alabama were shown to have worn much darker and more elaborate costumes than those from Tennessee and northern Alabama. The common factor was that all were wearing white hoods on top of darker, floor-length gowns.87 Griffith seems to have rejected these uniforms (and the one described in Elizabeth Howe’s eyewitness account88) in favor of his own design (perhaps influenced by recollections of the Klan passed on to him by Thomas Dixon). Almost all the Klansmen in Birth of a Nation wear long white gowns decorated with crosses on an oval dark patch across the chest (Ben Cameron has two patches, other Klansmen only one). Some (again including Ben) have smaller crosses on their sleeves. Klansmen wear either a rounded white helmet with a spike and a face mask or a conical hat. The horses they ride are similarly dressed all in white and often seem (because of the holes cut for their eyes and ears) to have crosses on their foreheads. Some display other crosses or the emblem “K.K.K.” on their sides.89
Although unlike Tourgée he was not mentioned in an intertitle, James Shepherd Pike was perhaps the most influential writer on Reconstruction so far as Birth of a Nation was concerned. Born in Maine, Pike had by the 1850s become a leading Republican champion of antislavery and a writer for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. As his biographer observes, however, Pike’s dislike of slavery “was accompanied by a strange indifference, even hostility” to blacks. Nevertheless, by the end of the Civil War (which he spent as American minister to Holland), he had become convinced of the necessity for the new freedmen to be given the vote. During the late 1860s, Pike was associated with the radical Republican position on Reconstruction, but by the early 1870s he had become far more skeptical. In the 1872 election, he supported the Liberal Republican movement which
, among other things, proposed to end Reconstruction in the South. In January 1873, he traveled south to write the series of articles for the Tribune that would become The Prostrate State.90 Characterized by an intense and virulent racism—it sought to defend white “Anglo-Saxons” against “black barbarism” or “Africanization”—Pike’s book foregrounded what he saw as the manifest evils of Reconstruction in South Carolina.91 A key text in the development of the Dunningite or “Tragic Era” legend of Reconstruction,92 The Prostrate State affected Birth of a Nation both indirectly and directly. The indirect influence came through Thomas Dixon, who claimed to have researched The Clansman for a year. Clearly, The Prostrate State was one of his sources since parts of the novel bore a very close (if unacknowledged) relationship to Pike’s work.93 The direct influence came via Griffith, who seems to have used it both to confirm and to elaborate on Dixon’s story.
In South Carolina, according to The Birth of a Nation, the process of Reconstruction begins after Stoneman “sends Lynch South to aid the carpetbaggers in organizing and wielding the power of the negro vote” (shot 668). Once he arrives in the state, Lynch and his helpers try to persuade blacks to stop work and join in the celebrations. What African Americans can now hope to receive is painted as a legend on a billboard: “Forty Acres and a Mule” (shots 680–88). The Freedmen’s Bureau is shown distributing free supplies to clamorous blacks, confirming the idea that they can now expect to live without working (“The charity of a generous North misused to delude the ignorant,” as an inter-title expresses it) (shots 689–90). A squad of black soldiers, accompanied by Lynch, dominates the sidewalk, preventing Ben and Flora Cameron from entering the street (shots 691–93). Before the planned elections, the Union League holds a rally with Stoneman as the guest of honor. Signs in the hall demand “Equality” in rights, politics, and marriage, and again, “FORTY ACRES AND A MULE for every colored citizen” (shots 722–740). All blacks are enrolled to vote, though many clearly have no idea what this means: one elderly man refuses to register to vote “Ef I doan’ get ‘nuf franchise to fill mah bucket” (shots 741–44). Election day dawns: blacks vote early and often (one man is shown stuffing extra ballots into the box) and “leading whites,” including Dr. Cameron, are physically prevented from voting by armed black soldiers (shots 784–87). Unsurprisingly, “negroes and carpetbaggers sweep the state,” Lynch is elected lieutenant-governor, and—as a large crowd of blacks celebrate—he is borne away by cheering supporters (shots 788–92, 794–95, 797, 806–809). In the aftermath of the election, the “Little Colonel” describes a series of outrages that have taken place: a black man has been acquitted by a black magistrate and jury, black soldiers have pushed a white man and his two children off the sidewalk, and a dispossessed white family have been pushed and jeered by soldiers as they abandon their former home. While he is speaking, his loyal black servant, Jake, is being tied up and whipped by black soldiers for refusing to vote “with the Union League and Carpetbaggers.” An elderly man who tries to rescue him is killed (shots 811–34). The Prostate State provided justification for many of these incidents. For example, Pike had written about black dreams of equality, the promises made by the Union League to provide land for the freedmen, corruption in South Carolina elections (including repeat voting), the intimidation of blacks who had not supported Republican candidates, and the unfairness toward whites of a judicial system increasingly dominated by African Americans.94
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