Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourgée

by Mark Elliott (Editor), John David Smith (Editor)

Overview

A leading proponent of racial equality in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, Albion W. Tourgée (1838--1905) served as the most articulate spokesman of the radical wing of the Republican party, and he continued to advocate for its egalitarian ideals long after Reconstruction ended. Undaunted Radical presents Tourgée's most significant letters, speeches, and essays from the commencement of Radical Reconstruction through the bleak days of the era of Jim Crow.
An Ohioan by birth, Tourgée served in the Union army and afterwards moved to North Carolina, where he helped draft the 1868 state constitution. Within that and other documents he proposed free public education, the abolition of whipping posts, the end of property qualifications for jury duty and office holding, and the initiation of judicial reform and uniform taxation. Tourgée also served as a Republican-installed superior court judge, a position that brought him into increasing conflict with the Ku Klux Klan. In 1879, he published A Fool's Errand, a bestselling novel based on his Reconstruction experiences. Although now often overlooked, Tourgée in his lifetime offered a prominent voice of reason amid the segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, racial propaganda, and mythologies about African Americans that haunted Reconstruction-era society and Gilded Age politics.
These thirty-four documents elaborate the reformer's opinions on the Reconstruction Amendments, his generation's racial and economic theories, the cultural politics of North-South reconciliation, the ethics of corporate capitalism, the Social Gospel movement, and the philosophical underpinnings of American democratic citizenship. Mark Elliott and John David Smith, among the foremost authorities on Tourgée, have brought these writings, including the previously unpublished oral arguments Tourgée delivered before the U.S. Supreme Court as Homer Plessy's lead attorney in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), together in one volume.
The book also includes an introductory overview of Tourgée's life and an exhaustive bibliography of Tourgée's writings and related works, providing an essential collection for anyone studying Reconstruction and the early civil rights movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807147238
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2010
Series:	Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Mark Elliott, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is the author of Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson.
John David Smith, Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, is the author of An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865--1918 and Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

I The Ordeal of Reconstruction

1 To the Voters of Guilford (1867) 25

2 The Reaction (1868) 28

3 Speech on Elective Franchise (1868) 35

4 Letter to the North Carolina Standard (1870) 43

5 Letter to Senator Joseph C. Abbott (1870) 47

6 Letter to Martin B. Anderson (1874) 52

7 Letter to E. S. Parker (1875) 54

8 Root, Hog, or Die (ca. 1876) 58

II Remedies For Racism

9 Aaron's Rod in Politics (1881) 65

10 The Veto of the Chinese Bill (1882) 88

11 The Apostle of Evolution (1882) 91

12 From An Appeal to Caesar (1884) 93

13 Shall White Minorities Rule? (1889) 112

14 From Pactolus Prime, or the White Christ (1889) 123

15 From Murvale Eastman, Christian Socialist (1890) 140

16 The Negro's View of the Race Problem (1890) 152

III History and Public Memory

17 From 'Toinette: A Tale of the South (1874) 173

18 From The Veteran and His Pipe (1885) 182

19 The South as a Field for Fiction (1888) 203

20 From A Memorial of Frederick Douglass from the City of Boston (1895) 212

21 The Literary Quality of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1896) 229

IV Race and Citizenship in the 1890s

22 A Bystander's Notes: White Caps (1888) 237

23 A Bystander's Notes: The Kemper County Affair (1889) 240

24 A Bystander's Notes: The Afro-American League (1889) 246

25 Is Liberty Worth Preserving? (1892) 252

26 Letter to Professor Jeremiah W. Jencks (1892) 276

27 Letter to Louis A. Martinet (1893) 282

28 That Lynching: Judge Tourgée Writes Gov. McKinley and the Editor of "The Gazette" (1894) 289

29 Brief of Plaintiff in Error (1895) 296

30 Oral Argument of A. W. Tourgée (1896) 328

V Coda: Letters from Bordeaux

31 Letter to President William McKinley (1898) 343

32 Letter to Ferdinand L. Barnett (1900) 346

33 Letter to President Theodore Roosevelt (1901) 351

34 Letter to E. H. Johnson (1902) 356

Bibliography 379

Index 389