Albion Tourgee-An Unsung Hero
Albion Tourgee-An Unsung Hero
Albion Tourgee was, in his own time, one of the most loved and most hated men in America. He served as a jurist, a best-selling writer, an outspoken advocate for civil rights, and later a United States ambassador; yet he remains far less familiar than contemporaries such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Tourgee deserves a place in our classrooms, but Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina largely leave him out of their history curricula, even though Ohio was his home state and North Carolina was the center of his political life. So why has a figure of his stature faded from common study? Part of the answer lies in a label meant to dismiss him: carpetbagger. Most people know the word, and most connect it with the postwar South. Wherever you hear it, the term carries a sneer.
Tourgee was born in 1838 in northeastern Ohio, the son of Valentine Tourgee and Louisa Emma Winger Tourgee. He enjoyed a fairly typical childhood and showed an early enthusiasm for life and for the written word. As a vigorous teenager, he often found himself on the wrong end of misadventure. The mishap that shaped him most came at fourteen, when a percussion cap accident left him permanently blind in his right eye. Years later, he managed to hide that handicap from the Army. At the Kingsville, Ohio Academy, Tourgee became a popular student and met Emma Kilbourne, whom he later married. In 1859, he finished at Kingsville and entered the University of Rochester as a sophomore. At Rochester, he developed a stronger interest in politics and joined a Republican organization. When the war began, he enlisted in the Union Army. During the First Battle of Bull Run, a gun carriage struck him and left him with a serious spinal injury. Doctors discharged him because they believed he would never walk again. He returned to Ohio, continued his studies, and began treatment with a back specialist. By June 1862, he could walk, and shortly afterward, he received his degree from Rochester. He then joined the 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry and earned appointment as a lieutenant. At Perryville, he was wounded again, and the following January, he was captured while leading a patrol. After four months in a POW camp, he went out in a prisoner exchange. Tourgee later joked that during that period, he had only two enjoyments: cursing the Confederacy and smoking. After his release, he returned to Ohio, and he and Emma married on May 14, 1863. Two weeks later, Tourgee rejoined the 105th and proved himself a brave and efficient officer. His injuries, however, began to affect his performance, and on December 6, 1863, he resigned his commission for the good of the service.
During his military service, Tourgee became acutely aware of the suffering of enslaved people in the South and helped when he could. After his discharge, he returned to Ohio and opened a law practice, making a point of assisting escaped slaves as they entered the state. He soon grew dissatisfied with legal work and tried several other jobs, but none held his interest. The war had taken a lasting toll on his body, especially his back. His doctor advised a milder climate, so Tourgee wrote to North Carolina’s governor to ask about opportunities there. By June 1865, he received a reply from Governor William W. Holden promising that "every favor" would be shown to the Tourgee family. Tourgee welcomed the invitation, gathered Emma and their belongings, and moved to North Carolina, settling outside Greensboro.
Tourgee and two associates formed A. W. Tourgee and Company to practice law and manage an orchard. Through his business dealings, he built relationships in both the Southern Unionist and African American communities, connections that soon became political allies. By 1866 he had entered politics. He also found the treatment of freedmen intolerable and often represented enslaved people in disputes formerly. His partners did not share his convictions, and the partnership dissolved. Even so, Tourgee continued to fight for the rights of African Americans and of poor white Unionists who had opposed secession. Those beliefs placed him in direct conflict with Jonathan Worth, who summed up conservative resistance bluntly: "We who were born here will never get along with the free Negroes, especially while the tools and demagogues of the North insist they must be our equals. This will not be tolerated." Tourgee’s insistence on equality was enough, by itself, to isolate him.
Worth’s election as governor, along with the return of other prominent ex-Confederates whom Tourgee considered traitors, enraged him. Even Holden, who had welcomed Tourgee to North Carolina, failed to win Tourgee’s endorsement for the Union Party because, in Tourgee’s view, Holden had acquiesced to Confederate authority during the war. Tourgee therefore counted Holden among the Confederates, and that judgment opened a rift within the coalition opposing the conservatives.
By the close of the 1866 constitutional convention, North Carolinians counted Tourgee among the state’s political leaders. In 1867, North Carolina Unionists helped build a new government that granted formerly enslaved men the right to vote. Before North Carolina could reenter the Union, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867. The act placed the ten unreconstructed former Confederate states into five military districts, each overseen by a general charged with supervising new constitutions and ensuring that African Americans could participate in government. After a state completed that process, ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment cleared the final hurdle to readmission.
In North Carolina, the constitutional convention opened on January 14, 1868, with 120 delegates. Tourgee was the youngest delegate, but he quickly became one of the most active. Delegates elected him Assistant Secretary pro tem. He served on several important committees and chaired the committee that drafted the article on local government. After the convention, he returned home satisfied with the work. Soon afterward, Governor Holden recommended him for a vacant Superior Court judgeship, but General Edward Canby, the military governor of North Carolina, rejected the appointment.
Tourgee next sought the Republican nomination for the United States House of Representatives, and again, party leaders turned him aside. He then received an unexpected appointment as one of three commissioners charged with preparing the state’s new legal codes. Not long after, Republicans asked him to accept their nomination for Superior Court judge in the Seventh Judicial District, the very position Canby had denied him. Tourgee returned to Greensboro, encouraged by the nomination, and wrote to a former military acquaintance, "I think we shall have a human country here sometime..." When returns from the April 21-23, 1868, election came in, Republicans held a smaller majority than they had in 1867. Still, Tourgee won his seat, Holden defeated Worth for governor, and voters approved the new constitution.
By 1870, Republicans had lost control of the North Carolina legislature, though they still held the governor’s mansion and the judiciary. As the 1870s opened, much of the country paid less attention to the South, and Republican governments established only a few years earlier came under siege across the region.
North Carolina soon implemented the new legal codes. Both sides criticized them at first, but by 1870, they had gained wide acceptance. Conservative lawyer Samuel Phillips even remarked, "All the lawyers in old North Carolina would never have framed as good a code in a century." By 1870, the commission’s work was winding down, and in 1873, the state abolished the commission.
After he completed his first circuit, Tourgee turned his attention to the Ku Klux Klan. In May 1870, he wrote to his friend General Joseph Abbott about the murder of their mutual friend John Stephens, a state senator. Tourgee meant the letter to be a simple notification, but he soon poured out his frustration with the Klan’s violence and with the limits of local enforcement. The Klan supplied alibis for its members, intimidated or murdered hostile witnesses, and obstructed investigations.
The problem was not a lack of evidence of Klan terror; the problem was the judiciary’s inability to secure convictions under those conditions. Even so, Tourgee’s letter made an impression. Senator John Pool shared it with other members of Congress, and soon after Stephens’s murder Congress passed the first federal law aimed at suppressing the Klan. That statute could not undo crimes already committed in North Carolina, but it did authorize the use of federal power to combat the organization. Pressure mounted on Governor Holden to stop Klan activity. Holden called on Union veterans from the mountains who had served under Colonel George W. Kirk, along with the Third North Carolina United States Volunteers. They quickly arrested suspected Klan leaders and held them without formal charges or trial. Over Tourgee’s objections, the prisoners secured writs of habeas corpus, and Holden had to release them. On August 6, 1870, conservatives carried the state.
After conservatives gained control of the legislature, Klan activity declined, but the organization remained a thorn in Tourgee’s side. Josiah Turner, a member of the Guilford County bar and reputedly a Klan leader, petitioned Tourgee for a bench warrant for assault and false imprisonment arising from the Kirk episode. Tourgee refused to issue the warrant.
For all the turmoil and loss Tourgee endured in 1870, the year ended on a high note. On November 19, 1870, Emma gave birth to their daughter, Lodolska Tourgee, known as Lodie. Her arrival seemed to energize Tourgee. By late January 1871, he had entered a new business venture with H. W. Snow, founding the Greensboro Spoke and Handle factory. By the fall of 1872 the company merged with a competitor to become the North Carolina Handle Company. The business prospered until the Depression of 1873, which wiped out most of Tourgee’s money and property. That same year he began feeling pain that started in his blind eye and soon spread to his good eye. An eye specialist recommended replacing the blind eye with a prosthetic, and the procedure relieved strain on his good eye. Tourgee did not let the setback slow him down.
Tourgee had experimented with writing for years, but his first major literary break came in 1873 with his novel Toinette. In it, he tells the story of a North Carolina planter who falls in love with an enslaved woman named Toinette. Others "clean her up" and train her in the ways of polite society, and with help from friends in Ohio, she enters that world. She refuses the planter’s proposal until he accepts her as his equal. Tourgee published the book under a nom de plume, but his authorship soon became widely known. Rivals seized on the scandal, and the Charlotte Observer claimed that Tourgee’s real purpose was to promote interracial marriage in North Carolina. Toinette did not match the sales of his later novels, but it earned promising reviews. In part because of the controversy surrounding Toinette, Tourgee’s political career in North Carolina collapsed in 1874. He again failed to win the Republican nomination for Congress, and his term as judge ended with no realistic hope of reelection. For the first time in six years, he held no political office, and financial trouble followed. He joined the Lyceum lecture circuit, speaking on Southern humor and on modern civilization. In the spring of 187,6 he found work as a federal pension agent, which required the family to move to Raleigh. Even there, Tourgee campaigned tirelessly for Republican victory and defended Republican policy.
In 187,8 Tourgee lost his job as a pension agent, but he still managed to publish his digest of cited cases that same year. In 1879, he took a position editing the evening edition of the Denver Times. He soon headed to New York, however, because his second novel, Figs and Thistles, began selling well. Earlier that year, he had written his crowning literary achievement, A Fool’s Errand. Although the novel drew loosely from his own life, he published it anonymously, setting off a scramble in newspapers across the country to identify the author. A Chicago critic even argued that the book resembled Uncle Tom’s Cabin so closely that Harriet Beecher Stowe must have written it. Tourgee’s friends and relatives recognized his voice immediately. A Fool’s Errand became a best-seller, and his next novel, Bricks Without Straw, sold widely as well. Fame and royalties gave Tourgee national influence, which he used to campaign for improved education in the South. Though he no longer lived there, he kept working for the betterment of his former home, and he never stopped fighting for the rights of African Americans. Tourgee nevertheless hit a financial low point in 1884 and had to mortgage the revenue from his new book, An Appeal to Caesar. As always, he persevered.
In 1891, Tourgee helped found the National Citizens’ Rights Association (NCRA), an organization dedicated to publicizing oppression and attacking segregation. Notable figures such as Ida B. Wells, Charlotte, and Francis Grimke joined the association. Within a year, it claimed more than 10,000 members across forty-two states. Tourgee also served as counsel in a test case challenging Louisiana’s "separate but equal" law. On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy bought a train ticket in New Orleans and sat in the whites-only car, an act that violated Louisiana’s segregation statute because Plessy was one-eighth African American. Police arrested him and charged him under state law. Before Judge John H. Ferguson, Tourgee argued that the statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Ferguson ruled against him. Tourgee appealed the decision, and the case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court. Tourgee lost at every level, but the publicity helped expose the realities of segregation in the South. He continued to fight for Black civil rights. In 1897, the government appointed him consul to Bordeaux, where he served until his death on May 21, 1905.
Throughout his life, Tourgee worked to make the United States a better place for everyone. He matched and in many ways surpassed the contributions of other Americans who still fill our textbooks. Yet the contemptuous label of carpetbagger pushed him to the margins of public memory. Had Tourgee gone west, to a place like Idaho, and made the same contributions he made in North Carolina, Americans might celebrate him as a hero. Because he chose the postwar South, many later generations forgot him. As Eric Foner has noted about the vilification of carpetbaggers, politics drove much of it. We can begin to correct that injustice by bringing Albion Tourgee back into our study of Reconstruction and civil rights, where he belongs.
Bibliography
“Albion Winegar Tourgee: Radical Republican and Civil Rights Advocate.” North Carolina State University. Accessed October 1, 2012. http://history.ncsu.edu/projects/cwnc/archive/files/e86c8255fdf8480a6819fdc569c7e099.pdf.
“Chapter 113. Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies Subchapter C. High School.” Texas Education Agency. August 23, 2010. http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter113/ch113c.html.
Current, Richard Nelson. Those Terrible Carpetbaggers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Foner, Eric. “Reconstruction Revisited.” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 82.
Fredrickson, George M. Introduction to A Fool’s Errand: A Novel of the South During Reconstruction, by Albion W. Tourgee. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1991.
“Judge Tourgee’s Troubles.” New York Times. November 26, 1884. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9507E2D6113EEF33A25755C2A9679D94659FD7CF.
“Ohio’s New Learning Standards: K-12 Social Studies.” Ohio Department of Education. October 2013. http://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Ohio-s-New-Learning-Standards/Social-Studies/High-School_American-History_Model_Curriculum_Aug2014.pdf.aspx.
Olsen, Otto H. Carpetbagger’s Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgee. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965.
“United States History Curriculum Document.” North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. 2007. http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/docs/curriculum/socialstudies/secondary/ushistorysupportdoc2007.pdf.
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