Albion Winegar Tourgee

Background

Albion Winegar Tourgee was born on May 2, 1838, in Williamsfield, Ohio, United States. Tourgee was the son of farmer Valentine Tourgee and Louisa Emma Winegar. His mother died when he was five.

Education

Albion attended common schools in Ashtabula County and in Lee, Massachusetts, where he spent two years living with an uncle. Tourgee entered the University of Rochester in 1859. Interestingly, he showed no interest in politics until the university attempted to ban the Wide Awakes, a paramilitary campaign organization affiliated with the Republican Party. He took on the administration and succeeded in reaching a compromise with the University president. Due to lack of funds, he left the university in 1861 without attaining a degree. As was common practice at many universities at that time, Tourgee was awarded a Bachelor's degree in absentia in June 1862.

Career

After attending the University of Rochester for two years, Tourgee enlisted in the Union Army in 1861. After seeing action in several important battles, including the First Battle of Bull Run, he resigned from the army due to spinal injuries. During his service he spent four months of 1863 in a Confederate prison, and would soon find himself immersed in the politics of the wartorn South. Admitted to the bar in 1864, he had difficulty finding clients and settled on a plan to pursue the life of a Yankee entrepreneur in North Carolina. He hoped in doing so to contribute to the plight of former slaves and see the South follow a path of reintegration into the Union. His views were far from popular with many of the people with whom he expected to live, and his bold conduct and outspoken criticism earned him enemies right away. In his support of equality, Tourgee took on Negroes as law clients and employees and made himself a vociferous critic of the Ku Klux Klan. After an initial alliance with Southern Unionists, he became disillusioned when he saw that they were not committed to helping former slaves adjust to their newfound freedom. He joined the Republican Party in 1867 and earned a name that was spoken with hatred throughout the South, “carpetbagger.”

Tourgee became a delegate to the North Carolina constitutional convention of 1868, where he was honored with an appointment to rewrite the legal codes of the state. Even his enemies admitted him to be a man of extraordinary talents, and he was elected a state superior court judge in 1868, where he used his position to challenge the escalating power of the Ku Klux Klan. His time on the bench pricked the ire of North Carolinians. The fact that they saw him acquiring wealth through rampant corruption in the administration of the courts made him an unbearable figure to many. Tourgee and his wife were ostracized, slandered, and forced to endure constant threats to their personal safety.

It was during this time that Tourgee began his literary career, writing novels and publishing controversial political articles. In 1878 he anonymously published a series of brilliantly written attacks on the Democrats known as the ‘C Letters' in a Greensboro newspaper. In 1874 he lost his seat on the bench and dedicated himself completely to writing. Published under the pseudonym of Henry Churton, his first work was a fictional account of Reconstruction entitled Toinette: A Novel. Soon after his return to the North, a second novel, Figs and Thistles: A Western Story appeared, but it was his next work, A Fool's Errand: By One of the Fools, which made him famous. In the brand of realism espoused by such writers as William Dean Howells and Henry James, Tourgee found much to criticize. He rejected the focus on the sordid side of life found in work of the former and felt that James's psychological novels lacked spiritual life. Tourgee was convinced that romanticism revealed a more accurate picture of life for him, holding that the romantic approach was not inconsistent with the presentation of historical truth. In A Fool's Errand he depicted the struggles of an idealistic carpetbagger fighting for justice in a hostile Southern world. A sequel, Bricks without Straw, explored the life of a Southern black man in his attempt to achieve selfhood. To these two novels he brought a preacher's zeal and intensity, a penchant for melodrama, a forceful style, and a penetrating if occasionally biased reading of the political climate in the south of the 1860s and 1870s.

In 1881, Tourgee used the money earned through the success of A Fool's Errand to start a weekly magazine, Our Continent, later renamed the Continent. It eventually failed due to lack of capital in 1884, but while running contained much work of interest not only by Tourgee, but of such contributors as Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Joel Chandler Harris. After the collapse of his magazine, Tourgee went back to writing novels, but critics rejected his later work as too derivative of James Fenimore Cooper, Tourgee’s literary model.

Tourgee continued to involve himself in the political causes dear to his heart, becoming involved in protests against the Jim Crow Laws. He fought the “separate but equal” philosophy presented in the famous Plessy v. Ferguson case, carrying the case of Homer Adolph Plessy all the way to the United States Supreme Court. His appeal was rejected, but his argument that such laws were unconstitutional was a prescient one. For his campaigning on behalf of William McKinley, Tourgee was honored with an appointment as consul to Bordeaux, France, where he died in 1905.

Achievements

• Albion Tourgee was an outspoken civil rights advocate and a novelist who pioneered in social criticism. His best known novel is A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools, which was published in late 1879. He established the black women's Bennett College, and litigated for the plaintiff Homer Plessy in the famous segregation case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

Works

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  • The War of the Standards: Coin and Credit Versus Coin Without Credit 1896
  • Figs and Thistles 1879
  • Black Ice 1888
  • Bricks Without Straw 1880
  • The story of a thousand 1896
  • John Eax and Mamelon 1882
  • Toinette 1874
  • Hot Plowshares 1883
  • Button's Inn 1887
  • With Gauge And Swallow, Attorneys 1889
  • Murvale Eastman: Christian Socialist 1890
  • Pactolus Prime 1890
  • A Son of Old Harry 1892
  • Out of the Sunset Sea 1893
  • An Outing with the Queen of Hearts 1894
  • The Mortgage on the Hip-Roof House 1896
  • The Man Who Outlived Himself 1898
  • The Code of Civil Procedure of North Carolina 1878
  • An Appeal to Caesar 1884
  • The Veteran and His Pipe 1886
  • Letters to a king 1888

Politics

Tourgee was a vocal and persistent advocate of black equality, in spite of increasing national indifference. Historian Mark Elliott credits Tourgee with introducing the metaphor of "color-blind justice" into legal discourse.

Views

Quotations: There are two kinds of Fools. The real Fool is the most sincere of mortals; the Court Fool and his kind - the trifling, jesting buffoon - but simulate the family virtue, and steal the family name, for sordid purposes.

Membership

Tourgee was a founding member of the National Citizens' Rights Association.

Connections

Albioin married Emma Doiska Kilbourne, his childhood sweetheart, in 1863, with whom he had one child.

Father:

Valentine Tourgee

Mother:

Louisa Emma Winegar

Spouse:

Emma Doiska Kilbourne

References

• Albion W. Tourgee
• Carpetbagger's Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgee
• Contemporary Authors