A Fool's Errand: A Novel of the South During Reconstruction (Cosimo Classics Literature)

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. American abolitionist and lawyer ALBION W. TOURGÉE (1838-1905) also wrote Figs and Thistles (1879).