In _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ Harriet Beecher Stowe gave a vivid picture of the Underground Railway through which slaves escaped to Canada. Among her characters were abolitionists who aided them and agents hired to recapture them. The historical aspects of slavery and emancipation were treated more fully, however, by Albion W. Tourgée. _A Fool’s Errand_ (1879) tells the story of a man with the improbable name of Comfort Servosse. A lawyer and ex-Union officer like Tourgée, he had moved to the South after the war, as did the author. Referred to by Tourgée as “The Fool,” Servosse attempts the difficult task of integrating himself and his family into the life of a Southern community while supporting the rights of the Negroes. His experience, extending from 1866 until his death in the late seventies, is one of progressive disillusionment. Thorough analyses of events support the conclusions he draws. Early in the book one reads a detailed account of President Johnson’s plan for Negro suffrage and also a statement of the supplementary Howard Amendment. Having discussed the role of the secret, pro-North “Union League” in the South during the war, Tourgée goes on to detail the rise of the Ku-Klux Klan. Later he analyzes the acts of amnesty passed by some Southern states to protect from prosecution members of secret organizations such as the Klan. By 1877 the South is in political control of its land again. Its policy of suppression has succeeded. This was the fault, Tourgée tells the reader, of stupid and foolish Federal policies: Reconstruction was never asserted as a right, at least not formally and authoritatively. Some did so affirm; but they were accounted visionaries. The act of reconstruction was excused as a necessary sequence of the failure of the attempted secession: it was never defended or promulgated as a right of the nation, even to secure its own safety.