Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. (1864 -1946) was an American Baptist minister, playwright, lecturer, North Carolina state legislator, lawyer, and author. Dixon was ordained as a Baptist minister on October 6, 1886. Dixon is remembered for his talent as a lecturer. In his "Trilogy of Reconstruction" consisting of The Leopard's Spots, The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907). Dixon used historical romance to present Negroes as inferior to whites and to glorify the antebellum American South. While he claimed to oppose slavery, he believed in racial segregation. Dixon viewed Southern black Americans with contempt. He had seen and heard a white woman claim her daughter had been raped by a black man. The man was shot and hung in the town's square by the Ku Klux Klan. His mother told them that in desperate times this group would protect them. This attitude would be seen in many of his novels. The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln was first published in 1913.