Introduction

Albion Tourgee was a Union soldier, political activist and finally author who used his experience living in the North amidst an abolition movement and time spent building relationships with fugitive slaves to frame his books. Though A Fool’s Errand, Bricks Without Straw and An Appeal to Caesar are technically fiction novels, he drew upon his observations in order to write about the tumultuous race relations which were a reality in the time surrounding the Civil War. Tourgee’s aim in writing was to work towards the advancement of the civil liberties of African Americans and he did so by addressing the ways in which northerners and southerners saw this group and assessed their abilities.  While doing so Tourgee wrote largely on three topics which will be addressed in this paper on how African Americans were depicted as incapable of holding rights, the intrinsic inferiority of African Americans and descriptions of this group based on validation from the Christian church.