A minstrel troupe is embarking for a tour of the South. Henry Clay appears on the scene wearing the frayed coat of a Confederate General. He borrows a guitar from one of the minstrel men and begins singing "Way down South in Dixie," and the story unfolds.

While many men think they can manage a hotel, a theater, or a newspaper, they are in the minority compared with those low-browed addle-pates who believe they could run the government.

Granny Willard, seeing the end of her days approaching, begs to leave her bed and sit in her old armchair, the bumble throne about which three generations have assembled. Her favorite grandson, Tom Willard, has come in from the farm with his buxom wife to visit. So the strong arms of youth carry old age gently to the armchair in the sunlit room for a last meeting with all her kith and kin. There came the rural types known to that modest old cottage, and then that more sacred circle of grandsons with their wives and little ones.