suffering a crippling reinjury of his back. So at last he left the army, studied
law in Ohio, and in moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, to practice
and attend to the business of completing the development of democracy
for all in the South. He became a founder of the North Carolina Republi-
can Party; served in the ‘‘radical’’ constitutional convention of ; wrote
law transferring local authority from the legislature to the counties, towns,
and cities; and manfully resisted constant threats to himself and his family
from the Ku Klux Klan. Tourgee served on the state’s superior court past the
return of conservative Democrats to power, and after President Grant con-
ferred an appointment to a pension commission in Raleigh, he persisted
in a place ceaselessly hostile to him. He was a brave, determined, and im-
petuous man, not unlike southern white extremists who had lost the war
but were determined to win the peace. Finally, after fourteen years, Tourgee
and his wife, who was pleading for peace elsewhere, moved to New York.
There, ultimately, lawyer-judge Tourgee became a literary man, what he had
always wanted.^32
The title ofA Fool’s Errandmore than suggested the failure of civil rights
and justice in the South following the war. So didBricks without Straw. The
North and the federal government failed black and unionist white south-
erners; Reconstruction was a brick that crumbled too easily before the re-
lentless opposition of defeated but brash ex-secessionists. Neither Tour-
gee during the s nor his principal twentieth-century biographer (Otto
Olsen) nor the literary historian Edmund Wilson (both writing during the
s) felt a need to explain the allusion of the novel’s title. Now (I sus-
pect) one does. It was the Old Testament’s second book, Exodus—most
dramatically the fifth chapter. The Hebrews had long been in Egyptian cap-
tivity. Moses, an escapee, met the Lord, Jehovah, who conferred upon him
a magical rod, an eloquent spokesman named Aaron, and the mission to
free his people. So, returning to Egypt, Moses commanded Pharaoh to ‘‘let
my people go’’ (:), but Pharaoh instead ordered his subalterns to harden
slaves’ principal task, the manufacture of bricks, by requiring ‘‘them to
gather straw for themselves’’ (:). Ancient Egyptians (and modern ones,
too) sun-dried clay brick shaped in forms. Nile alluvium was their clay,
and the ancients learned that when the alluvium was too rich in clay—
that is, lacking sand and impurities—bricks dried too slowly, shrank, and
lost shape or crumbled. Chopped straw became the essential additive for
regularity of size and dependable strength; straw might also be added as a
simple binder that, combined with the heat of baking, made the product
long-lasting.