Yeah, like I said, it's the winners who write the history. I'm sure the members of the Confederacy weren't a bunch of card-carrying, mustache-twirling villains who hated black people. But since you bring it up, the very interesting thing about the film from the perspective that you bring up is that the film, ultimately, is very overt about being pro-federal government over states' rights, which is probably very surprising considering how pro-Confederacy, pro-KKK it is. In fact, that's where the title The Birth of a Nation, comes from. It states that, before the Civil War, the United States were mere individual states, but that it took all the KKK triumphantly defending itself from Reconstruction (film's view) in order to create a unified nation. I'm really not sure how those two ideals mesh together at all. It seems to me that, whatever you think of the KKK, they were still defending states' rights, but Griffith was apparently very pro-Federal Government and saw the struggles as necessary to bring the union together. Interesting... Hell, this film, the psychological motivatioin behind its viewpoints and its history could fill several theses, methinks, which is probably why I'm so keen to talk on it. I was also very surprised at how anti-war the film was too. I believe it explicitly states its purpose at the beginning to show the horrors of war in the hopes that war will never occur again.