This carefully crafted ebook: “A FOOL'S ERRAND & BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. “A Fool's Errand. By One of the Fools” – After the American Civil War, Comfort Servosse, a Yankee gentleman, decides to purchase a Southern Plantation for himself and his family. But unlike other white owners, Servosse is actually interested in the well-being of his black subjects to the extent of calling the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) a terrorist organisation and blaming Theodore Roosevelt for the failure of Reconstruction of South! Soon enough, Servosse finds himself amongst his angry white neighbours and things take a dramatic turn… “Bricks Without Straw” (A Sequel) – In a chilling sequel to “A Fool's Errand”, Albion Winegar Tourgée shows how KKK unleashed their terror on a group of emancipated slaves who want to start their life afresh by buying new land and starting their own businesses. Suddenly out of nowhere, Klan's terrorism begin new wave of slavery and nothing seems to stop them! Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838–1905) was an American soldier, Radical Republican, lawyer, writer, politician, and diplomat. A pioneer civil rights activist, he founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, established the historically black women's college Bennett College, and litigated for the plaintiff Homer Plessy in the famous segregation case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Historian Mark Elliott credits Tourgée with introducing the metaphor of "color-blind justice" into legal discourse.

"A Fool's Errand. By One of the Fools" – After the American Civil War, Comfort Servosse, a Yankee gentleman, decides to purchase a Southern Plantation for himself and his family. But unlike other white owners, Servosse is actually interested in the well-being of his black subjects to the extent of calling the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) a terrorist organisation and blaming Theodore Roosevelt for the failure of Reconstruction of South! Soon enough, Servosse finds himself amongst his angry white neighbours and things take a dramatic turn… "Bricks Without Straw" (A Sequel) – In a chilling sequel to "A Fool's Errand", Albion Winegar Tourgée shows how KKK unleashed their terror on a group of emancipated slaves who want to start their life afresh by buying new land and starting their own businesses. Suddenly out of nowhere, Klan's terrorism begin new wave of slavery and nothing seems to stop them! Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838–1905) was an American soldier, Radical Republican, lawyer, writer, politician, and diplomat. A pioneer civil rights activist, he founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, established the historically black women's college Bennett College, and litigated for the plaintiff Homer Plessy in the famous segregation case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Historian Mark Elliott credits Tourgée with introducing the metaphor of "color-blind justice" into legal discourse.

A classic of American political fiction first published in 1880, a mere three years after Reconstruction officially ended, Bricks Without Straw offers an inside view of the struggle to create a just society in the post-slavery South. It is unique among the white-authored literary works of its time in presenting Reconstruction through the eyes of emancipated slaves. As a leading Radical Republican, the author, Albion W. Tourgée, played a key role in drafting a democratized Constitution for North Carolina after the Civil War, and he served as a state superior court judge during Reconstruction. Tourgée worked closely with African Americans and poor whites in the struggle to transform North Carolina’s racial and class politics. He saw the ravages of the Ku Klux Klan firsthand, worked to bring the perpetrators of Klan atrocities to justice, and fought against what he called the “counter-revolution” that destroyed Reconstruction. Bricks Without Straw is Tourgée’s fictionalized account of how Reconstruction was sabotaged. It is a chilling picture of violence against African Americans condoned, civil rights abrogated, constitutional amendments subverted, and electoral fraud institutionalized. Its plot revolves around a group of North Carolina freedpeople who strive to build new lives for themselves by buying land, marketing their own crops, setting up a church and school, and voting for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Klan terrorism and the ascendancy of a white supremacist government reduce them to neo-slavery. This edition of Bricks Without Straw is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s introduction, which sets the novel in historical context and provides an overview of Albion W. Tourgée’s career, a chronology of the significant events of both the Reconstruction era and Tourgée’s life, and explanatory notes identifying actual events fictionalized in the novel.

Albion W. Tourgée, a former Union officer from Ohio, came to North Carolina in search of economic opportunity after the collapse of the Confederacy. A young man and a fearless advocate of freedmen’s rights, he soon became a radical Republican leader and a prominent figure in local politics. After he quit the South in 1874, Tourgée published a succession of novels and stories which made him famous. Bricks Without Straw, one of his two best-selling novels, is not only a moving story but an important commentary on the Reconstruction process in the South. This new edition of the book remains faithful to the original, which appeared in 1880. In his introduction, Profession Otto H. Olsen gives a comprehensive evaluation of the book and its author, and their impact on the era of Reconstruction. Tourgée was an astute and reliable observer of the Reconstruction scene. In Bricks Without Straw he concentrated on the problems and the continuing dilemma of freed slaves. Led by Nimbus Ware, a “good enough nigger but might aggravating to the white folk,” and Eliab Hill, a crippled mulatto preacher, former slaves begin their postwar experience by availing themselves of the educational, economic, and political opportunities of freedom. But as soon as federal protection is withdrawn, their existence becomes precarious in the face of the Ku Klux Klan and resentful southern whites. The novel conveys a true sense of the trials and accomplishments of a severely handicapped black population caught in the oppressive racist environment of the postwar South. But, as Professor Olsen points out, the book’s pioneering—and still pertinent—literary achievement is its repudiation of racist stereotypes and its effective portrayal of the essential humanity of the freed black slaves.

"A Fool's Errand. By One of the Fools" – After the American Civil War, Comfort Servosse, a Yankee gentleman, decides to purchase a Southern Plantation for himself and his family. But unlike other white owners, Servosse is actually interested in the well-being of his black subjects to the extent of calling the KKK (Ku Klux Klan) a terrorist organisation and blaming Theodore Roosevelt for the failure of Reconstruction of South! Soon enough, Servosse finds himself amongst his angry white neighbours and things take a dramatic turn... "Bricks Without Straw" (A Sequel) – In a chilling sequel to "A Fool's Errand", Albion Winegar Tourgée shows how KKK unleashed their terror on a group of emancipated slaves who want to start their life afresh by buying new land and starting their own businesses. Suddenly out of nowhere, Klan's terrorism begin new wave of slavery and nothing seems to stop them! Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838–1905) was an American soldier, Radical Republican, lawyer, writer, politician, and diplomat. A pioneer civil rights activist, he founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, established the historically black women's college Bennett College, and litigated for the plaintiff Homer Plessy in the famous segregation case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Historian Mark Elliott credits Tourgée with introducing the metaphor of "color-blind justice" into legal discourse.

Reconstruction-era literature helped shape an ongoing national debate about proper remedies to racial wrongs. In this powerful book, Brook Thomas revisits the contested era of Reconstruction. He evokes literature’s immediacy to recreate arguments still unresolved today about state versus federal authority, the government’s role in education, the growing power of banks and corporations, the paternalism of social welfare, efforts to combat domestic terrorism, and the difficult question of who should rightly inherit the nation’s past. Literature, Thomas argues, enables us to re-experience how Reconstruction was—and remains—a moral, economic, and political debate about which world should have emerged after the Civil War to mark the birth of a new nation. Drawing on neglected nineteenth-century historiographies and recent scholarship that extends the dates of Reconstruction in time while stretching its geographic reach beyond the South, The Literature of Reconstruction uses literary works to trace the complicated interrelations among the era’s forces. Thomas also explores how these works bring into dialogue competing visions of possible worlds through chapters on reconciliation, federalism, the Ku Klux Klan, railroads, and inheritance. He contrasts well-known writers, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Dixon, and Charles W. Chesnutt, with relatively neglected ones, including Albion W. Tourgée, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Some authors opposed Reconstruction; others supported it; and still others struggled with mixed feelings. The world Thomas conjures up in this groundbreaking new study is one in which successful remedies to racial wrongs remain to be imagined.