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Book Reviews
A Carpetbagger's Legacy: Reconstruction to Martin Luther King, Jr.
| ELLIOTT, MARK. Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xi + 388 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, index. $30.00 (cloth) ISBN 0-19-518139-5.
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This award-winning biography is a superb study of one white man's fight against racism after the Civil War. For forty years, despite insult, slander, danger, and sacrifice, Albion Tourgée championed the equal abilities and equal rights of blacks only to see his hopes destroyed by the triumphant racism of the Gilded Age. He was then largely forgotten until changing attitudes in the 1950s sparked a new interest, primarily in his Reconstruction career and novels, but he has remained a neglected figure. Professor Elliott challenges that neglect by going beyond all previous studies to focus upon Tourgée's quest for racial equality and to provide a far more thorough study of the post-Reconstruction years. The result is a detailed, astute, and sympathetic, but not uncritical, account and analysis of the origins, achievements, and continuing significance of a truly remarkable career. |
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Elliott finds the origins of this unique crusade in rural, antislavery Ohio and New York where Tourgée imbibed a belief in equality and in the ability and responsibility of each person to seek and follow God's moral law and persuade others of its truth. Elliott believes this "radical individualism" governed Tourgée's lifelong behavior, while his experiences as a Union volunteer convinced him of the abilities of former slaves and the responsibility and right of the nation to defend them in their rights. Thereafter, this "radical individualist" would boldly assert the truth as he saw it, convinced that fully informed citizens, guided by conscience, would remedy social injustices with principled behavior and, when need be, with positive government action. |
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Migrating to North Carolina in 1865, Tourgée worked with blacks promoting education and land ownership. His initial hopes for racial reform dashed by a prevalent racism and elitism, he welcomed Reconstruction and fought for the rights of blacks as well as workers, farmers, women, and the poor, contributing to lasting legal and egalitarian reforms. Tourgée's tools were debate and the political process. His opponents responded with racism, distortion, brutality, and assassination. By 1876, Republicanism was shattered, although Tourgée fought on until 1879 when he left for Colorado to pursue a legal career. Though defeated and rejected, his experience had strengthened his egalitarian beliefs. |
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The same year that he left the South, Tourgée's autobiographical novel based on his Reconstruction experiences, A Fool's Errand By One of the Fools, unexpectedly became a runaway best seller. The resultant wealth and fame inspired a new writing career and crusade in the friendlier North. To Tourgée, the South's problem was not the ex-slave but the racism, poverty, and illiteracy imposed upon both races by slavery and now perpetuated by a landed elite. As a long-range, practical solution, he fought for federal voter protection and educational aid, only to see both narrowly defeated, after a ten-year struggle, by a sectional compromise that abandoned the nation's commitments to the former slaves of the South. |
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