Publisher's Synopsis
The Colonel's Dream is a novel written by the African-American author Charles W. Chesnutt. The novel is published by Doubleday, Page, & Co. in 1905. The Colonel's Dream portrays the continuing oppression and racial violence prominent in the Southern United States after the American Civil War.The Colonel's Dream concerns Colonel Henry French and his attempt to refine Clarendon, North Carolina, the southern city in which he grew up, into a racially and socially equal society from the strictly segregationist ways of its past.The novel portrays the characters' intertwined lives through Charles Chesnutt's use of melodramatic subplots and provides a larger picture of life in post-Civil War North Carolina where black people as not given the same opportunities, offered the same fair wages, or treated fairly. In the novel, it is shown how white people have a general "fear of 'nigger domination'" specifically in politics, possibly giving reason for black oppression.
