Albion W. Tourgée
Albion Winegar Tourgée (May 2, 1838 – May 21, 1905) was an American soldier, Radical Republican, lawyer, judge, novelist, and diplomat. A pioneer civil rights activist, he founded the National Citizens' Rights Association and litigated for the plaintiff Homer Plessy in the famous segregation case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Historian Mark Elliott credits Tourgee with introducing the metaphor of "color-blind" justice into legal discourse.[1]
Tourgée was born in rural Williamsfield, Ohio, the son of farmer Valentine Tourgée and Louisa Emma Winegar. His mother died when he was five. He educated in the common schools in Ashtabula County and in Lee, Massachusetts, where he spent two years living with an uncle. Tourgée attended the University of Rochester in 1859, where he became interested in civil rights.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted in the 27th New York Infantry and was wounded in the spine at First Bull Run. He suffered temporary paralysis and a permanent back problem that plagued him for the rest of his life. After recovering enough to resume his military career, he was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. At the Battle of Perryville, he was again wounded. In January 1863, Tourgée was captured at the Battle of Stones River and was held as a prisoner-of-war in Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia, for six months before being released and paroled. He returned to Ohio and married Emma Doiska Kilbourne, with whom he had one child. He resumed his field duty and fought at the battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga.
After the war, he established himself as a lawyer, farmer, and editor in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he and his wife moved so he could live in a warmer climate on account of his war injuries. An active participant as a Reconstruction Carpetbagger in his new home, Tourgée had a number of inspiring and harrowing experiences that gave him ample material and impetus for the writing he would later undertake. In 1868 he represented Guilford County at the state constitutional convention, which was dominated by Republicans. There he successfully advocated for equal political and civil rights for all citizens; ending property qualifications for jury duty and officeholding; popular election of all state officers, including judges; free public education; abolition of whipping posts for those convicted of crimes; judicial reform; and uniform taxation. Nevertheless, he discovered that putting these reforms on paper did not translate into an ease of putting them into practice.
As a Republican-installed superior court judge from 1868 to 1874, Tourgée confronted the increasingly violent Ku Klux Klan, which was very powerful in his district and repeatedly threatened his life. Among his other activities, he served as a delegate to the 1875 constitutional convention and ran a losing campaign for Congress in 1878. Success came the next year with A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools, based on his experiences of Reconstruction, which sold 200,000 copies. Its sequel, Bricks Without Straw (1880), was also a bestseller.
In 1881, Tourgee moved to a lakeside home in Mayville, New York, making a living as a writer and editor of the literary weekly Our Continent until it failed in 1884. He wrote many more books and essays in the 1880s and 1890s, many about the Lake Erie region. In 1897, President William McKinley appointed him U.S. consul to France, where he lived and served in Bordeaux until his death.
In early 1905, Tourgée became gravely ill for several months, but then he appeared to rebound. His semi-recovery was only momentary, though, and he succumbed to acute uremia resulting from one of his Civil War wounds.
He was interred in Mayville, New York.
References
- Mark Elliott, Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (2006). An award-winning biography of Tourgée.
- Michael Kent Curtis, "Tourgée" in The American National Biography. (2000)
- Otto Olsen, Carpetbagger's Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgée (1965)
- Roy F. Dibble, Albion W. Tourgée (1921)
- J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina (1914)
- "Albion W. Tourgée Dead.", The New York Times, May 22, 1905, p. 7.
- Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, William S. Powell, Ed., "Albion Winegar Tourgee", (North Carolina Press 1979)
Notes
- ^ Elliott, Color Blind Justice....