Carpetbagger's crusade;: The life of Albion Winegar Tourgée,

by Otto H. Olsen

Originally published in 1965. The Supreme Court's momentous school desegregation decision of 1954 was a postmortem victory for Albion Tourg�e. Just fifty-eight years earlier this once-famous carpetbagger's attack on segregation was crushed in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. His legal defeat in 1896 typified his frustrated but prophetic career. Tourg�e was an idealistic Union veteran who ventured south in 1865. As an advocate of civil rights, political equality, free schools, and penal reform, he was elected to North Carolina's Constitutional Convention of 1868. Olsen records both the fierce struggles and the impressive accomplishments that filled Tourg�e's fourteen years in the South. With the collapse of the Southern experiment, Tourg�e was inspired to turn to fiction to express his convictions. A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools and Bricks without Straw were classics of their day, providing absorbing accounts and defenses of radical Reconstruction. In 1879 Tourg�e went north, where he renewed and extended his crusade for Negro equality by writing, lecturing, and lobbying. For many years he was the most militant and persistent advocate of racial equality in the nation. He was also a vigorous critic of the industrial age, demanding the utilization of federal power in behalf of equality, democracy, and economic justice.

395 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1965

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered Albion Tourgée in Eric Foner's Reconstruction, as someone who remained committed to the rights of black people, and the possibilities for black advancement well after even most Republicans had given up on them. This book was the first admiring biography of Tourgée for a very long time. Like many "carpetbaggers", he has been vilified by people who presented him as a fanatic or even more inaccurately as someone who sought wealth or position. Olsen is very meticulous in outlining the career of Tourgée, in its phases. He gives us a good picture of how the Reconstruction in North Carolina played out, and the role Tourgée played in shaping the laws of North Carolina, and administering justice there as a judge. At least in the early stages, I would have liked more detail about his family life, but that is not a major complaint. As Reconstruction and Tourgée's career declines, we hear a lot more about Emma, his wife, and the role she played in keeping his work afloat. Later on, Tourgée wrote a number of fictional works, and wrote a good deal in support of black civil rights, which culminates in the role he played in the failed Lodge election bill and the better known case of Plessy v. Ferguson which settled the acceptance of "separate but unequal" (as it was in practice) facilities for black people which we now call segregation. Tourgée then ends up in France as a consul in Bordeaux. Again (though this is more important), I would have liked more detail on Tourgée's involvement in the fight against lynching and his connection with Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett. We do however get an account of Tourgée's struggle against the Atlanta compromise and Booker T. Washington's very different ideas of how to respond to the increasingly bleak landscape for black people in the South. This book is well worth reading for those interested in the Reconstruction and how it failed, as well as for those who are interested in Plessy v. Ferguson, its flaws, and its eventual overturning.