Other editions of book A Fool's Errand

There had been rumors in the air, for some months, of a strangely mysterious organization, said to be spreading over the Southern States, which added to the usual intangibility of the secret society an element of the grotesque superstition unmatched in the history of any other.... Here and there throughout the South, by a sort of sporadic instinct, bands of ghostly horsemen, in quaint and horrible guise, appeared, and admonished the lazy and trifling of the African race... -from "Chapter XXVII: A New Institution" Subtitled "A Novel of the South During Reconstruction," this 1879 bestseller, by a participant in that great social experiment, is the barely fictionalized account of the career of a Northern lawyer in North Carolina after the Civil War. A champion of the poor and landless of any race, and a keen observer of the dilemmas facing uneducated Negroes in the postwar period, Tourgée offers us an important eyewitness account of one of the most tumultuous eras of American history, one that continues to influence the course of the American experiences of race and class to this day.

“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.

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