Austin Stoneman – Northern political leader who advocates and implements Reconstruction in the conquered Southern States introduces bill to impeach President Andrew Johnson.In addition to concerns that The Clansman would stir up political and racial tensions in the South, Dixon's portrayal of the Klan as chivalrous freedom fighters was ridiculed as absurd. The book and its stage and film adaptations were highly controversial in their time, and continue to receive criticism for their espousal of racist and Neo-Confederate sentiments. In Dixon's characterization, the Klan's job is to protect white Southerners from the carpetbaggers and their allies, black and white. His goal is to punish the Southern whites for their revolution against an 'oppressive' government (the Union) by turning the former slaves against the white Southerners and using the iron fist of the Union occupation troops to make them the new masters. Dixon portrays the Radical Republican speaker of the house, Austin Stoneman (based on Thaddeus Stevens, from Pennsylvania), as a rapacious, vindictive, race traitor, mad with power and eaten up with hate. He claimed that 18,000,000 Southerners supported his beliefs. ĭixon wrote The Clansman in support of racial segregation, as it showed free blacks turning savage and violent, committing crimes such as murder, rape, and robbery far out of proportion to their percentage of the population. Griffith in the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation. The novel was adapted as a play and a film, first by the author as a highly successful play entitled The Clansman (1905), and a decade later by D. Chronicling the American Civil War and Reconstruction era from a pro- Confederate perspective, it presents the Ku Klux Klan heroically. (the others are The Leopard's Spots and The Traitor). The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is a novel published in 1905, the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas Dixon Jr.

Mistica by Thomas G. Dixon