Excerpt from Bricks Without Straw: A Novel Initially Tourgee's political involvement as a minority agitator and editor of a soon bankrupt radical weekly proved a costly embarrassment, but the enfranchisement of the freedmen in 1867 brought him prominence and success as a leader of the newly formed North Carolina Republican Party. As a delegate to the constitutional convention of 1868, Tourgee successfully promoted a wide variety of important reforms. Following that convention, he served on a commission entrusted with providing a new legal code for the state, and he was elected a superior court judge. Thereafter he also remained very much involved in the intricacies and excitements associated with Reconstruction poli tics, one of the most emotional and violent political episodes in the history of the United States. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.