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The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux KlanThe Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is a novel published in 1905. It was the second work in the Ku Klux Klan trilogy by Thomas Dixon Jr. that also included The Leopard's Spots and The Traitor. It presents the Ku Klux Klan heroically. The novel was twice notably adapted, immediately by its author as a highly successful play entitled The Clansman (1905), and a decade later by D. W. Griffith in the 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation.

The play, being concerned with the KKK and Reconstruction, is adapted in the second half of The Birth of a Nation. According to Professor Russell Merritt, key differences between the play and film are that Dixon was more sympathetic to Southerners' pursuing education and modern professions, whereas Griffith stressed ownership of plantations.

Dixon wrote The Clansman in support of racial segregation, as it showed free black men turning savage and violent, committing crimes such as murder,robbery and rape of white women, and far out of proportion to their percentage of the population. He claimed that 18,000,000 Southerners supported his beliefs. Dixon portrays the Radical Republican speaker of the house, Austin Stoneman (based on Thaddeus Stevens, from Pennsylvania), as a rapacious, vindictive, negro-loving legislator, mad with power and eaten up with hate. 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. The Klan's job is to protect the white Southerners from the carpetbaggers and their allies, black and white.

Plot
Frontispiece to the first edition ofDixon's The Clansman, by Arthur I. Keller.
"The Fiery Cross of old Scotland's hills!"Illustration from the first edition of The Clansman,by Arthur I. Keller.Note figures in background.
In The Clansman, Reconstruction was an attempt by Augustus Stoneman, a thinly-veiled reference to Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, to ensure that the Republican Party would stay in power by securing the Southern black vote. Stoneman's hatred for President Johnson stems from Johnson's refusal to disenfranchise Southern whites. His anger towards former slaveholders is intensified after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, when he vows revenge on the South. His programs strip away the land owned by whites, giving it to former slaves. (See Forty acres and a mule.) Men claiming to represent the government confiscate the material wealth of the South, destroying plantation-owning families. Finally, the former slaves are taught that they are superior to their former owners and should rise up against them. These injustices are the impetuses for the creation of the Klan.

Similar to his statements about The Leopard's Spots, Dixon insists in a "To the reader" prologue that the novel is historical:

I have sought to preserve in this romance both the letter and the spirit of this remarkable period. The men who enact the drama of fierce revenge into which I have woven a double love-story are historical figures. I have merely changed their names without taking a liberty with any essential historic fact.

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