Written as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, this is the author's story of Reconstruction in post-Civil War South in which the Ku Klux Klan is considered heroic and blacks are depicted as savage beasts, a threat to white women and American civilization. The Leopard's Spots is the first novel in Dixon's "Klan trilogy" which became the source for W.D. Griffith's film 1915, Birth of a Nation.