Albion Winegar Tourgée

Albion Winegar Tourgee (1838-1905) was born on a farm in Williamsfield, OH. He left college to enlist at the beginning of the Civil War, fought in several major battles, was wounded twice, and was a POW for a time. After the war he farmed in North Carolina and was appointed a Superior Court Judge, where he began a long career of activity on behalf of civil and voting rights for African Americans. In 1891 he was the lead attorney for Homer Plessy in the historic Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case, challenging a Louisiana “Separate but Equal” law. -from Wikipedia

A story of Mormonism in the early part of the century.

"The book presents an argument for the peaceful secession of the Southern States from the United States. A southern secret society joins forces with a pool of powerful northern industrialists. They use a communications blackout to take advantage of a constitutional loophole that leaves the nation without an executive branch following the 1888 election. In the final third of the novel, set in the future, secession is finally achieved. The story pits private wealth against a big government inflated by the demand for public services from America's lower classes"--Bookseller's blurb.

A thinly veiled account of Judge Albion W. Tourgee's own career as a forceful advocate of civil rights was a bestseller in the 1880s and continues to occupy a place in the history of American literature. Judge Tourgee's reflections on the fundamental post- abolition problem of how to build a bridge from black emancipation to black equality provide readers with a clear picture of the South during the Reconstruction era. Presented as a work of fiction, this engaging and provocative work discusses Reconstruction and the many problems surrounding it.

A novel set in the 1840s and 1850s, dealing with the issue of slavery.

"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"--Dukeupress