Bricks Without Straw: A Novel by Albion Winegar Tourgee
F Tourgee, A.
The Reconstruction era was the period after the American Civil War. During this time, the South was in political, social and economic turmoil, and eleven Confederate states had seceded from the Union during the wartime unrest. In response, the Union implemented a controversial Reconstruction plan to regain order in the Confederate states. One of the first attempts to establish order in the South was the creation of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was created on March 3, 1865, just one month prior to the official end of the Civil War. The purpose of the organization was to assist freed slaves with food, medical care and resettlement, and it was charged with establishing schools. While the Freedmen’s Bureau worked to help southern blacks, opposition to their new freedom was mounting. After the Civil War ended on April 9, 1865, several southern states passed legislation creating Black Codes. Depending upon the state, these laws generally restricted the right to own property, controlled where blacks were allowed to live, established a curfew and forced blacks to work as agricultural laborers or as domestics. Albion W. Tourgee sought to explain the undermining of the Reconstruction era in his novel Bricks Without Straw. Just as Tourgee fashioned his characters to counter the prevalent stereotypes of African Americans, he devised his plot to rewrite the history of Reconstruction. Instead of showing misgovernment by blacks, he shows that Reconstruction can best be understood as an opposition to self determination. The first part of the novel highlights the black freed people’s progress toward economic self-sufficiency and political autonomy; the second part dramatizes their spirited resistance to the tactics white supremacists use to regain authority over blacks; and the last describes their relapse into semislavery once their resistance has been crushed. With the celebration of black suffrage cancelled, Tourgee’s revisionist history of Reconstruction moves from chronicling the ex-slaves’ accomplishments after their emancipation to dramatizing the harassment, economic coercion, electoral fraud and sheer terrorism through which white supremacists recaptured power, reversed black gains and drove the freed people back into slavery. As I read this book over the past few weeks and listened to the radio, the election of Barack Obama and America’s reaction to this election reminds me of the turbulent times that are described in this novel and how Obama’s presidency is being undermined daily by people who never see blacks on equal footing. - Donald Bradsher Fiction 11