From “Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America” by Joel Edward Goza
The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden – 1865-1900 and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan are the first two installments of Dixon’s trilogy on Reconstruction. This trilogy attempted to enable the nation to see the post-Civil War world through Southern eyes and to create a national solidarity behind white Christianity, chivalry, and civilization. Buttressed by both academic histories and the racial sciences, the repeated theme of the trilogy is that without the positive influence and beneficent care of slave masters, Black Americans started to degenerate following emancipation. As freed people devolved, they came to pose an existential threat to America’s democracy and racial purity, forcing the pious South to arise and protect their way of life through virtuous acts of violence.
As political propaganda, Dixon’s novels operated on multiple levels. At the level of national reconciliation, they attempted to hasten the longing for reconciliation by turning the nation’s remembrances of the Civil War from the issues of slavery and treason toward empathy for Southern suffering and respect for Southern sincerity. By persistently eroding the memories of how slavery and treason combined to ignite the Civil War and fostering empathy and respect for the South, Dixon labored to position national reconciliation to take place on Southern terms.
At the level of securing white supremacy, Dixon’s propaganda provided the apologetics for the South’s emerging twin customs: segregation and lynching. In terms of the former, his novels framed segregation in the South as necessary protection from the depraved behavior of Black people during Reconstruction rather than a perpetuation of slavery’s rabid racism. In terms of the latter, according to Dixon’s own words, his trilogy aimed to provide “the best apology for lynching,” to instill “a feeling of abhorrence in white people, especially white women,” and to make the fear of miscegenation a national obsession.