Rep. Austin Stoneman
Austin Stoneman is an anti-slavery member of Congress based on the historical figure of Rep. Thaddeus Stevens. Rep. Stoneman is pretty much the villain of the film as he becomes the representative of the film’s highly skewed and historically inaccurate story of America during Reconstruction which is portrayed here as a concerted effort by northerners to facilitate an ex-slave takeover of the south.
Elsie Stoneman
Austin’s daughter Elsie is the romantic protagonist of the film. Her loyalties are soon divided and tested as she falls in love with a man who represents everything that her father opposes.
Ben Cameron
Ben Cameron is a Confederate soldier wounded in the war and captured by Union forces. Scheduled to be hanged, Elsie—a nurse who has been tending his wounds—is able to use her connections to win a pardon for Ben from Pres. Lincoln. Elsie briefly breaks off their ensuing romantic relationship out of deference to her father when she learns that Ben has formed the Ku Klux Klan, but the film ends with their finally getting married.
Flora Cameron
Ben’s younger sister Flora becomes one of the most tragic victims of the film’s unabashedly racist views toward black. She is pursued by Gus, a former slave who has become a captain in the army, who expresses his intention to marry her. Spurred by fear, the chase climaxes with Flora jumping to her death, an event witnessed by Ben who then enacts vengeance ending with his being lynched by the KKK.
Phil Stoneman and Margaret Cameron
Phil and Margaret are essentially the mirror image of Elsie and Ben. The son of the firebrand abolitionist falling in love with the sister of the found of the KKK. And yet, somehow, both sets of siblings manages to over their difficulties to marry the other set of siblings in a double wedding that becomes the film’s final symbol not just of healing of north and south, but of how whites of both sides must presumably come together to fend off the threat represented by freed slaves.
Pres. Abraham Lincoln
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly for a film infamous—and rightly so—for its reprehensibly explicit racist ideology, Pres. Lincoln’s assassination is presented as great tragedy for both sides. In fact, the film’s most solidly admirable example of its equally renowned position in history as a revolution in the art of cinema is the extended assassination sequence which displays a flair for editing that is far more representative of filmmaking in 2015 than it does every other film produced in 1915. Lincoln's death also acts as the stimulus for the narrative to enter into its most egregiously racist imagery.
