Pactolus Prime

by Albion W. Tourgée

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

376 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1890

About the author

Albion Winegar Tourgée was an American soldier, lawyer, writer, politician, and diplomat. Wounded in the Civil War, he relocated to North Carolina afterward, where he became involved in Reconstruction activities. He served in the constitutional convention and later in the state legislature. A pioneer civil rights activist, he founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, and founded Bennett College as a normal school for freedmen in North Carolina (it has been a women's college since 1926).

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know a work from the 19th century could make me want to cry. Pactolus Prime is some of Judge Tourgee's best fiction and social commentary at the same time. Prophetic, as always, his protagonist, Prime, a black "boot black"in Washington, D.C., compels his privileged and powerful customers to consider life from the perspective of an ex-slave.

"[The American people] desire credit for having eradicated evil; but are unwilling to discountenance the impulse from which it sprung. They abolished slavery, but in the same breath said to those who had drenched a continent in blood in support of its infamies, in effect: '...We will not listen to their cries; we will not defend their rights; we will not redress their wrongs!' So the stock of slavery,-the underlying principle of the essential inferiority of a race,- being freely watered with the blood of freemen, is sending up new and more vigorous shoots, which are already yielding fruits hardly inferior in acrid horror to those which hung upon the tree which was cut down with such a show of earnest purpose to destroy."

"We forbade marriage to millions: will the marriage tie become a mockery with us? We falsified our religion and our laws, in order to make them an excuse and a justification for wrong: shall we suffer in our liberties and our faith? We robbed him of the proceeds of his toil; is it possible that we ourselves may become the victims of an intangible but irresistible translation of power from the hands of the many to the hands of the few?"