Toward the end of the film, Thaddeus Stevens and his Black housekeeper Lydia Hamilton Smith are portrayed as romantic partners. Although there is no officially documented evidence in real life that the two had anything more than an employer/employee relationship, the two were the object of much speculation and rumor during and after their many decades of cohabitation. Some unusual aspects of their living arrangements that contributed to the contemporary rumor that they were romantically involved included the facts that she moved from separate servants' quarters behind the house into Stevens's main house; she frequently served as the hostess for events held at his house; and several of his family members referred to her in terms usually reserved for spouses in their correspondence. Stevens provided generously for Smith in his will, to the extent that after receiving the inheritance he left her, she was able to buy his house. Stevens and Smith were also depicted as lovers in the 1915 silent film Nascita di una nazione (1915), although contrary to this film's reasons for the inclusion of a romantic relationship between them, that movie's director, D.W. Griffith, used their relationship as racist propaganda and as supposed "proof" of the North's degeneracy.

Film

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