Actor turned playwright Joseph A. Grismer collaborated with Clay M. Greene on this 1892 melodrama ostensibly exploring racial animosity in the South following the American Civil War. The U.S. government sends an army captain south to arrest moonshiners, but he falls in love with a local girl whose nefarious brother attempts to frame the captain for a murder he did not commit. However, the Southerners' resentments against him for sympathizing with African American agitators put him in great danger. Rife with racial stereotypes, this exploitive work was made into a 1916 motion picture, alternately titled The New South or Broken Chains.
The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater. James Fisher.