Albion W. Tourgée
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Albion Winegar Tourgée (born 1838, in Williamsfield, Ohio; died May 21, 1905 in Bordeaux, France) was an American abolitionist, lawyer, and novelist.
Tourgée served in the Civil War, being wounded at Bull Run and Perryville and being held in Libby Prison for six months. After the war he settled as a lawyer, farmer, and editor in Greensborough, North Carolina.
He was an active participant in Reconstruction as a Carpetbagger in North Carolina, about which he wrote the novel A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools. In 1868 he represented Guilford County at the state constitutional convention. He successfully advocated 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. He was an active Republican, serving as a superior court judge from 1868 to 1874, where he confronted the violent Ku Klux Klan, which was very powerful in his district and made several attempts to capture him. He was not reelected, and a small business failed. He was a delegate to the 1875 constitutional convention, and was defeated in a race for Congress in 1868. Success came with A Fool's Errand, which sold 200,000 copies.
In 1881 he moved to Philadelphia, making a living as a writer and editor of a literary weekly until 1897, when President William McKinley appointed him U.S. consul in Bordeaux, France. He held this post, with an interruption during which he served as consul general at Halifax, Nova Scotia, until his death in Bordeaux. Tourgée died of acute uremia, the result of an old wound. He became seriously ill some months before his death. His condition then improved, but took another serious turn for the worse before he died.
Tourgée represented Homer Plessy in the landmark supreme court case Plessy v. Ferguson.
[edit] References
- Curtis, Michael Kent (2000). Tourgée in the American National Biography.
- Otto Olsen, Carpetbagger's Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgee (1965), the standard biography
- Roy F. Dibble, Albion W. Tourgee (1921)
- J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina (1914)
- "Albion W. Tourgee Dead.", The New York Times, May 22, 1905, p. 7.
