Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée

Introduction

Literary Tourgée

Sandra M. Gustafson

and Robert S. Levine

On November 14, 1905, a remarkable group of mourners came together at the Methodist church in Mayville, New York, on the shores of Chautauqua Lake. Among those gathered to commemorate the passing in May of the writer and activist Albion Tourgée were Ida B. Wells-Barnett, best known for her antilynching crusade, and Charles W. Chesnutt, arguably the most accomplished Black fiction writer before the Harlem Renaissance. Tourgée had died in Bordeaux, France, where he was serving as US consul. The tribute that Wells-Barnett presented included a passage from a letter he had written from Bordeaux to her husband, Ferdinand Barnett, president of the Appomattox Club of Chicago, a civic organization for African Americans.¹ Tourgée’s own words in that letter, as they appear in the published In Memoriam pamphlet, provide a compelling overview of his career:

For more than a quarter century, I gave my best thought and energies to a study of race relations in the United States and the effort to establish conditions favorable to the enjoyment of equal rights, equal protection, equal opportunity, political and industrial by the colored citizens of the United States.

My reasons for devoting myself to this subject, to the practical exclusion of other personal interests, were

1. A love of justice, and a consuming hatred of injustice.

2. An abiding confidence in the justice of Almighty God as the shaper of National destiny, not by physical and intermittent miracle, but by the development of popular forces through the evolution of general principles.

3. An overwhelming pity for the inconceivable woes of the colored people in the United States.

4. A burning desire that American Christianity and American civilization should purge themselves from the shame and stain of such inconceivable atrocities as sprung from the root of slavery.

After quoting these lines from Tourgée’s letter, the pamphlet, which contains Tributes of Respect by Colored Citizens of Chicago, concludes: Presenting this creed to the American people, as a call to duty by a voice from the dead, we take comfort in the thought that though our friend and benefactor is dead, yet shall he live through the inspiration of his work and words. It is Tourgée’s words that are the focus of this volume on his literary engagements and achievements, but as Tourgée himself suggested, those words cannot be separated from his quest for racial justice in the post–Civil War United States.

Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) was a major force for social, legal, and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. His prominence at the time of his death can be gauged from the fact that on the Thanksgiving following the memorial service in Mayville, branches of the Niagara Movement led by W. E. B. Du Bois held memorial meetings for three friends of freedom: William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Albion Tourgée. Garrison and Douglass remain familiar names. To the extent that Tourgée is remembered at all today, it is for his Reconstruction novels A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880) and for his role as lead counsel for the African American Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court case on the constitutionality of state-mandated racial segregation in public facilities. Less well known is that Tourgée was a prolific writer who published more than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as nonfiction works on history, law, and politics.

An Ohio native, the son of a farmer, Tourgée enrolled at the University of Rochester in 1859 and then dropped out in 1861 to enlist in the Union Army. He was severely injured during the Battle of Manassas, but after recuperating he reenlisted and was captured during the Battle of Perryville, spending four months in Confederate prisons before being released as part of a prisoner exchange. After the war, Tourgée moved to North Carolina with his wife, Emma Kilbourne, and devoted himself to the Reconstruction effort as a judge and politician.

While there he also wrote a number of his major Reconstruction novels, starting with Toinette in 1874. In 1881, he moved from North Carolina to the small town of Mayville, located on the train line from Buffalo to Chicago and a few miles from Chautauqua Institution, then emerging as a national arbiter of culture. Known as the sage of Mayville, Tourgée wrote novels and short fiction on a range of topics, such as early Mormonism and Christian socialism. He also continued to write fiction about slavery and its legacy, including a historical novel, Hot Plowshares (1883), on the antislavery movement. In 1882, he launched Our Continent: An Illustrated Weekly Magazine, an ambitious periodical that featured fiction, poetry, and nonfiction until it folded in 1884. He continued to publish in a variety of journalistic outlets, notably the influential Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, where his widely read Bystander column addressed such topics as lynching, disfranchisement, civil rights, and trends in American literature. The column was reprinted in the African American press, and even as he was involved with developing arguments against separate but equal for the Plessy case, he collaborated with Ida B. Wells on her antilynching campaign. He also worked closely with Charles Chesnutt to build support for other African American journalistic and literary projects.

Figure 1. Emma K. Tourgée and Albion Winegar Tourgée, 1865. (Dolph Brothers, Erie, PA. Courtesy of the Chautauqua County Historical Society, McClurg Museum.)

Tourgée has attracted a burst of scholarly attention in recent years. There have been two conferences devoted to his legal career and civil rights activism, as well as a 2019 conference that the coeditors organized at Chautauqua Institution on Literary Tourgée. The past two decades have also seen two highly influential biographies of Tourgée—Mark Elliott’s Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (2006), and Carolyn L. Karcher’s A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy (2016)—along with a volume of his writings and speeches, Mark Elliott and John David Smith’s Undaunted Radical (2010); Carolyn Karcher’s edition of Bricks without Straw (2009); Brook Thomas’s major study The Literature of Reconstruction (2017), which mainly focuses on Tourgée; and Steve Luxenberg’s Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson (2019), which looks at Tourgée’s career in the context of the Plessy case. Much of this scholarship has addressed Tourgée’s Reconstruction and civil rights activism. There has been relatively little attention to him as a literary figure or to the strong interconnections between his literary work and his work as a social reformer.

This collection—the first to address the literary Tourgée—aims to change the way that we view one of the most important, and still relatively neglected, writers of the nineteenth century by highlighting Tourgée’s contributions as a novelist and editor and as a supporter of African American writers. Tourgée is one of the great writers of fiction about the Reconstruction era—arguably the greatest for the wide historical and geographical sweep of his novels and his ability to work with multiple points of view, whether white or Black, northern or southern, rich or poor. As Reconstruction has come to take center stage in our understanding of nineteenth-century US history—with the idea that the nation has failed to live up to the promise of Reconstruction—Tourgée can serve as our literary guide to the racial, political, and economic issues that are a legacy of slavery.

That was certainly the case in Tourgée’s own time, when he was celebrated, somewhat in the manner of Harriet Beecher Stowe, as the nation’s most important writer on these crucial social topics. According to Carolyn Karcher, Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand sold several hundred thousand copies during his lifetime. Though he never achieved such popular success again, he continued to be a widely read novelist who was strongly supported by his publisher—Fords, Howard & Hulbert—which brought out his novels and nonfiction through much of the 1880s and into the 1890s. These books came festooned with blurbs culled from newspaper reviews and personal testimony, along with assertions from the publisher (which can’t be completely trusted) about Tourgée’s wide sales. In the unpaginated ad at the end of Tourgée’s 1891 novel Murvale Eastman: Christian Socialist, for example, the publisher claimed that readers of Tourgée’s novels "number more than a million of our people—North and South, East and West. Comparing Tourgée favorably to Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, and Stowe, the publisher says of his best-known novel: It is safe to presume that every intelligent person has heard of ‘A Fool’s Errand,’ even if he has not read that famous book which has made its author’s name known all over the land. Shortly before his death in 1885, former president Ulysses S. Grant proclaimed about that novel, in a blurb that Tourgée’s publisher affixed to a number of his books: I read ‘A Fool’s Errand’ with deep interest, and shall keep this volume in my library as a souvenir of the author, whom I remember to have met during the time he so admirably and graphically depicts." Taking advantage of Tourgée’s popularity, his publisher marketed his major novels of the period—Hot Plowshares, Figs and Thistles, A Royal Gentleman, A Fool’s Errand, Bricks without Straw, John Eax, and Black Ice—as an extraordinary line of Novels that told the story of the nation from abolitionism to Reconstruction."²

Reviewers of the time hailed A Fool’s Errand and Bricks without Straw in particular as the two major novels of Reconstruction. TheNew York Times called A Fool’s Errand one of the most notable books that have appeared in this country for many years. The New York Commercial Advertiser agreed with that assessment and termed Bricks without Straw a greater work than ‘Fool’s Errand.’ Referring to both of these novels, the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican told its readers: Scarcely anything in fiction so powerful has been written from a merely literary stand-point, as these books.³ The reviewer’s use of the phrase merely literary stand-point is worth noting, for it speaks to a certain prejudice against fiction while failing to see that, for Tourgée, there was nothing merely about the literary standpoint. There is considerable evidence, beyond the many years that Tourgée devoted to his fiction writing, that he regarded the literary as just as important, if not more important, than the work he did as a judge, politician, and lawyer. At the very least, that literary work was integral to what he was trying to accomplish as a reformer.

Tourgée speaks directly to the importance of the literary, specifically fiction writing, in his 1883 Hot Plowshares, a novel that begins in 1848 in the Mohawk Valley of New York with the rise of the Free Soil Party and ends with the trial of John Brown. At a time when Tourgée concluded that Reconstruction had failed, he used his novel to remind readers about the main ideals of the antislavery struggle, which he believed should remain central to the post–Civil War period. In the preface to the novel, he makes one of his strongest arguments for the importance of fiction as a genre with implications for his current moment. History, he says, gives only the outlines of the world’s life, and biography both supplements and obscures History. But fiction, he maintains, labors under no such disadvantages. It fills out the outlines History gives, and colors and completes its pictures.… It vivifies the past of which History only furnishes the record. But that isn’t all. Tourgée’s larger point is that fiction can be part of a broader commitment to social activism and the principles of racial equality. Thus, he states that he has been writing novels inspired by the Anti-Slavery struggle in order to provide a truthful picture … of the growth of its influence and its character as a preparation for the struggle in which those whose thought had been moulded by its sentiments were destined to engage.⁴

And it is here where Tourgée may have got into trouble with twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers. This is a writer who was doing what the critic Jane Tompkins calls cultural work in novels that typically were over four hundred pages.⁵ Why read long didactic fiction about race relations and the failure of Reconstruction when we can read the more elusive and suggestive fiction of such writers as Charles Chesnutt and Toni Morrison? The immediate answer is that Tourgée’s fiction is not so didactic after all. His best novels address large cultural issues through dialogue and conflict in the tradition of the realist novel, as Carolyn Karcher emphasizes in the introduction to her 2009 edition of Bricks without Straw. Amanda Anderson productively challenges today’s dominant aesthetic criteria in Bleak Liberalism (2016), in ways that could open up new readings of Tourgée’s works. His fiction manifests many of the same concerns with ethos and character that Anderson examines in her discussion of liberalism and high realism, and he employs the techniques of dialogue and argument that she identifies as a dominant feature of the political novel.⁶ It is worth noting that until 2009, when Karcher brought out her edition, all modern reprints of Tourgée novels were either edited by historians or were simply reprinted in Gregg Press’s series called American Novels of Muckraking, Propaganda, and Social Protest. That series included reprints of Pactolus Prime (1890) and Murvale Eastman, novels deserving close attention from a literary perspective as well. Pactolus Prime is one of the most provocative passing novels of the late nineteenth century, while Murvale Eastman features a Methodist minister who works to reconcile socialism and Christianity.

The historians John Hope Franklin and George Frederickson brought out editions of A Fool’s Errand in 1961 and 1966, respectively, emphasizing the novel’s importance to rethinking the history of Reconstruction. But what was the source of the novel’s literary power? Several of our contributors wrestle with that novel from a variety of literary perspectives. The historian Otto Olsen published an edition of Bricks without Straw that, as with Franklin’s and Frederickson’s editions of A Fool’s Errand, used the novel to tell the history of Reconstruction.⁷ The novel does contribute to our understanding of Reconstruction, presenting, as Karcher emphasizes in her 2009 edition, the importance of Black perspectives and agency to the period. But it also tells a good story, works effectively with dialect, and, as several of our contributors point out, makes use of a number of literary techniques, including biblical typology in the manner of Stowe. Karcher’s edition of Bricks without Straw is the only extant edition of a Tourgée novel that approaches it as a work of literary art. We could use more such editions of Tourgée’s other major novels. We hope that this collection will generate further interest in Tourgée as a novelist, situating him in relation to other major American novelists of the period.

In his best-known statement about writing fiction during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction period, his 1888 The South as a Field for Fiction, Tourgée took a backhanded slap at William Dean Howells and Henry James, claiming that for these writers trivialities were the most important features of real life. He goes on to argue that the ‘realists’ profess to be truth-tellers, but are in fact the worst of falsifiers, since they tell only the weakest and meanest part of the grand truth which makes up the continued story of every life. The implication here is that, by contrast, Tourgée tells that grand truth. But the emphasis of the essay is on the future of American fiction, specifically as authored by African Americans, who, he believes, have the most important story to tell about the South. Concerned that Blacks are stereotypically stock characters in much of the fiction of the day, Tourgée laments the inadequacy of racial representation in US fiction: About the Negro as a man, with hopes, fears, and aspirations like other men, our literature is very nearly silent. For that reason, he encouraged Black authors, and he concludes the essay with a prediction: The life of the Negro as a slave, freedman, and racial outcast offers undoubtedly the richest mine of romantic material that has opened to the English-speaking novelist since the Wizard of the North [Sir Walter Scott] discovered and depicted the common life of Scotland.⁸ That prediction has been realized and exceeded by subsequent African American fiction writers. As two of our contributors suggest, Tourgée’s prediction anticipated and arguably helped inspire the fiction of Charles Chesnutt.

Figure 2. Flyer, speaking engagement of Albion Winegar Tourgée on the subject of The Race Problem, at Union Park Congregational Church on April 11, 1893. (Courtesy of the Chautauqua County Historical Society, McClurg Museum.)

Tourgée may have predicted great things for African American writing, and indeed American writing, of the future, but his own work, starting with his first novel, Toinette, had all along been wrestling with issues of racial representation and themes of racial equality. To take one example before turning to the essays in the collection: Tourgée demonstrates a remarkably sophisticated awareness of the cultural obstacles that literary tradition and convention could pose to African American authors in a striking scene from Bricks without Straw. The scene features Mollie Ainslee, a white woman from New England who has recently moved to North Carolina to instruct the freedpeople in a town called Red Wing, and Eliab Hill, a disabled Black man who serves as her assistant. Ainslee has been instructing Hill after hours, with the aim of helping him advance from his role as assistant teacher to replace her as head of the school. Despite Hill’s ready acquisition of basic literacy skills and his commitment to learning, however, he has unexpected difficulty moving to a higher level of comprehension. Ainslee attributes this slowness to the momentum which centuries of intelligence and freedom give to the mind of the learner and reflects on how unconscious is the acquisition of the great bulk of that knowledge which goes to make up the Caucasian manhood of the nineteenth century—a description that resonates with Isabel Wilkerson’s recent account of how a racial caste system has long been operative in the United States. Hill explains the impediments he encounters when he reads a work such as Tennyson’s The Princess (1847), focusing on the line Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean! He can read the literal words, he explains, but they do not convey meaning to him in the same way that they do to Ainslee: "I cannot make out what is meant by ‘idle’ tears, nor whether the author means to say that he does not know what ‘tears’ mean, or only ‘idle’ tears, or whether he does not understand such a display of grief because it is idle"⁹ Ainslee suggests that the line might mean all these things, but Hill remains frustrated by the ambiguity and challenges his teacher to recognize the unconscious knowledge that enables her immediate comprehension. (Tourgée describes this as knowledge of leges non scriptae [197], that is, unwritten cultural norms.) She knows the author’s life and ways as Hill does not; they share a race and class; his thoughts are your thoughts, his life has been your life (196).

Hill relates his inability to grasp the meaning of the poem to a recent crisis, when the community leaders at Red Wing fail to anticipate the response of a nearby white community to their procession at the election. The newly enfranchised voters from Red Wing thought it was nice to be free, and have our own music and march under that dear old flag to do the work of free men and citizens.¹⁰ Ainslee is far from embracing an idealized view of the southern past, but she has readily understood how the procession will affect local whites: as a reminder of what some experience as Death in Life, in Tennyson’s apt phrase, after losing the Civil War. The sharply divergent experiences of Black and white southerners produce conflicting hermeneutics, and Hill despairs of bridging the gap, at least among the adults. It is with this in mind that he refuses more of Ainslee’s instruction and, unbeknownst to her, proceeds with his own course of solitary study whose aim at first remains mysterious, though its effect is to elevate his authority in the Black community at Red Wing and exacerbate tensions with local whites. This scene offers a nuanced portrayal of slavery’s legacy of caste and the role of literary culture in both reproducing and challenging it.

But the scene also points to an issue that has troubled some readers of Tourgée and is taken up in some of the essays: the matter of white paternalism. Tourgée’s post–Civil War career shows a remarkable commitment to social justice and antiracism. But did he think of himself as a white savior? Consider the letter quoted at the beginning of our introduction, in which he remarks on his overwhelming pity for the inconceivable woes of the colored people in the United States. A critical reader could view Tourgée’s use of the word pity, along with his lumping together of the colored people of the United States into a single body, as condescending. Such a reader might even take the wording to imply that Blacks en masse needed to be rescued by white people like Ainslee—although Eliab Hill’s accomplishments after he strikes out on his own suggest a quite different conclusion. As the essays here demonstrate, Tourgée’s full oeuvre presents a striking range of Black characters and experiences. Even so, his most popular novel in his own time, A Fool’s Errand, could be read as a rescue narrative that played to the beliefs of many white readers that Blacks were essentially helpless. The novel’s popularity arguably says more about the limitations of Tourgée’s white readership than about his own. Still—and not unlike William Lloyd Garrison—Tourgée was a radical who sometimes could be condescending. As John Ernest suggests in his essay in the collection, some white radicals clearly had limits to how they thought about Black people. But as Ernest also suggests, those limits can be taken as one of the large subjects of A Fool’s Errand. We don’t make claims for Tourgée’s ability to transcend white privilege, but we would emphasize that there were few nineteenth-century white Americans more committed to improving the situation of Black people. Moreover, as a novelist he was committed to developing not a single Black perspective but multiple Black perspectives, sometimes even in conflict. The challenge was to do justice to those perspectives in the larger context of the story he wanted to tell about America. Over a writing career of approximately thirty years, Tourgée’s fiction took up that challenge.

We have divided the seventeen essays that constitute this collection into three parts—Race, Citizenship, Nation—that address key concerns of Tourgée’s writings, with the understanding that the sections are hardly self-contained. Some of the essays could be placed into different sections, and all are in conversation about what makes Tourgée such a compelling writer of fiction.

Tourgée has been celebrated by Carolyn Karcher for developing a remarkable alliance with African Americans in his battles for Black civil rights from his time as a judge in North Carolina to his pro bono legal work in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. But as the essays in Part 1 show, Tourgée was also engaged with the literary complexities of racial representation. Toni Morrison famously remarked that African Americans can be regarded as the ghost in the machine, having an almost unconscious impact on the choices, the language, the structure of white-authored US literature even as they are relegated to minor roles when they are present at all.¹¹ But Blacks are fully present in Tourgée’s most compelling fiction, actively involved in the effort to forge their way in a nation that had a long history of regarding them as marginal or as property. As Robert Levine argues in his reading of Toinette, Tourgée learned how to evoke that history through his engagement with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic fiction, especially The House of the Seven Gables (1851). In her essay on Bricks without Straw, Nancy Bentley comes at this history from a very different perspective in her exploration of that novel’s account of Black kinship. The history of slavery and racism in the United States meant that kinship for the freedpeople in particular had complicated valances at odds with the legal codes of the bureaucratic state. Black kinship is also crucial to DeLisa Hawkes’s analysis of Tourgée’s great passing novel, Pactolus Prime, which may also be the first American novel to make the case that Black people should receive reparations for the crime of slavery. In the gothic mode of Toinette, Pactolus Prime brings hidden family histories to the surface, with the implied suggestion that maybe all Americans are racially passing.

Tourgée’s racial fictions impressed a number of Black readers, perhaps most profoundly the fiction writer and essayist Charles Chesnutt, who, as Tess Chakkalakal shows, developed an instructive literary friendship with Tourgée. Jennifer Greeson also takes up the literary relationship between Tourgée and Chesnutt, provocatively suggesting that the figure of Tourgée himself informed one of Chesnutt’s most important white characters. Tourgée deserves greater attention from readers interested in race in American literary history for his depictions of Black characters and his influence on African American writing. But in a useful cautionary essay focused on Tourgée’s most famous novel, John Ernest raises questions about Tourgée’s subject position as a white man, arguing that we may be going too far in conceiving of Tourgée as somehow able to transcend white privilege in a white supremacist culture. Ernest’s reading of A Fool’s Errand therefore emphasizes the limits of the white radical imagination. However limited the imagination informing A Fool’s Errand, there is no question that Tourgée in both his fiction and legal work remained committed to the proposition that Blacks should be granted full rights to citizenship.

As the essays in Part 2 show, the nature and contours of citizenship were at the heart of the unsettled postwar nation and Tourgée’s fiction. Sandra Gustafson traces the core republican principles that run through his published work, from his earliest political statements to his Reconstruction fiction and beyond. Gustafson’s essay concludes with a discussion of Tourgée’s depictions of class conflict, religious pluralism, and citizenship in Murvale Eastman, Christian Socialist. Kenneth Warren’s contribution to the volume offers a fine-grained analysis of Tourgée’s approach to realism and romance. Theessay situates Tourgée’s literary vision vis-à-vis Alexis de Tocqueville’s discussion of democratic aesthetics and contrasts it with theories of realism offered by William Dean Howells and Henry James. Warren provocatively concludes that Tourgée was right to perceive a connection between southern culture and romance in terms of class domination. The biblical language of Bricks without Straw provides a lens that focalizes the richly detailed treatment of incomplete emancipation in Christine Holbo’s discussion of that novel. Holbo highlights the novel’s portrayal of a racialized caste society in the process of (re)emerging in the post–Civil War years and reveals how Tourgée used the language of the Hebrew Bible to point the nation in a different direction.

Religious diversity presented other challenges to concepts of US citizenship, with the plural marriage practices embraced by the Church of Latter-Day Saints offering a controversial instance. In her essay on Button’s Inn (1887), Molly Ball follows the thread of Tourgée’s complicated plot to highlight nonexclusive notions of marriage, property, and invention. Tourgée’s main target in the novel, Ball argues, is the possessive individualism that permeated so many aspects of American society. The final two essays in this section return to the nexus of race, literature, and the law with respect to contested notions of citizenship. Almas Khan’s essay connects Tourgée’s literary criticism to the rise of legal realism. Drawing on a broad range of work, Khan uncovers the shared roots of literary and legal realism in Tourgée’s oeuvre. The section’s closing essay, by Brook Thomas, a leading Tourgée scholar, reads With Gauge and Swallows, Attorneys (1889) as a legal romance. Thomas argues that Tourgée rightly saw the potential for law to be more than a contributor to systemic racism; it could be a means to the kind of social reform that would expand the rights of citizenship. The literary form of Gauge offers clues as to how the law might be reimagined in the service of progressive values. In Tourgée’s words, the novel seeks to imagine "what the law ought to be, rather than depict what it was." These very sentiments became central to Tourgée’s support of Homer Plessy in his quest for the full rights of citizenship.

In Part 3, the contributors consider Tourgée’s conception of the nation from the Civil War to the late nineteenth century. In the immediate post–Civil War years, rebuilding the nation in a more unified and equitable way was a central aim of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Sarah Chinn’s discussion of Bricks without Straw focuses on the bureau’s literal and figurative connections to amputation, specifically the white veteran amputees who were overrepresented among its employees. Noting that the bureau was headed by General Oliver O. Howard, who lost an arm in the Civil War, and connecting Howard to Hesden Le Moyne, the southern veteran in Bricks who did as well, Chinn draws out how amputation figured the permanent alteration of both the body and the nation. While missing limbs stood for what had been sacrificed, the developing railroads of the later nineteenth century promised not only the reintegration but the further expansion of the United States. In a comparative reading of Tourgée’s Figs and Thistles: A Romance of the Western Reserve (1879) and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1886), Annemarie Mott Ewing focuses on the mythologies of the West undergirding a certain postwar vision of the United States. Ewing shows that both novels reject these mythological views to instead emphasize imperialist expansion and corporate greed as driving forces tied to the railroad. Tourgée’s alternative vision of a more socially just US permeated his ambitious literary periodical Our Continent (1882–1884). Mary Hale’s essay characterizes the decidedly nationalist agenda of Our Continent as an inclusive and equitable vision of the nation-to-be. In order to achieve that vision, Tourgée challenged the cynical portraits of US politics offered by Henry Adams and John Hay, whose novels Democracy (1880) and The Bread-winners (1883) he critiqued in the pages of his magazine.

The last two essays in this section return to the theme of race as it relates to nation. In his provocative discussion of A Fool’s Errand, Bricks without Straw, and Pactolus Prime, Gregory Laski teases out how revenge, as mediated by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, emerged as a large theme in Tourgée’s writings as his hopes for Reconstruction crumbled. Laski concludes with a nod to the revenge theme in Thomas Dixon’s white supremacist fiction, and it is Dixon’s engagement with Tourgée that Alex Leslie examines in the closing essay of this volume. Leslie calls attention to the way publishers and reviewers paired the novels of Tourgée and Dixon as complementary views of the Civil War and its aftermath. The effect, Leslie emphasizes, was to create a false equivalence that undermined the very racial justice that had emerged as Tourgée’s goal during the war and remained central to his life’s work for more than thirty years. Sadly, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, Dixon’s vision of the Civil War and Reconstruction had captured the imaginations of white America and was taken by many as true. But interest in Tourgée remained, and there was an initial resurgence of interest during the civil rights period. As Mark Elliott notes in his afterword, recent work on Tourgée, including the essays in this volume, speak to the vitality of Tourgée’s fiction. At a time of deep polarization in US culture about race, citizenship, and nation, we need Tourgée’s writings more than ever.

Notes

1. The tribute was published as a pamphlet titled In Memoriam: Tributes of Respect by Colored Citizens of Chicago to the Memory of Judge Albion W. Tourgée. Adopted by the Illinois Division of the Niagara Movement and the Appomattox Club and presented on the occasion of the funeral obsequies at Mayville, NY, by Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, representing the above named organizations. W. E. B. Du Bois is listed on the back of the pamphlet as general secretary of the Niagara Movement. There is no publication information.

2. This paragraph draws on the unpaginated back pages of Fords, Howard, & Hulbert’s 1891 edition of Tourgée’s Murvale Eastman: Christian Socialist.

3. These reviews were reprinted in the unpaginated front and back pages of Fords, Howard, & Hulbert’s numerous editions of Tourgée’s novels. For the first two, see the front unpaginated page of the 1881 edition of Figs and Thistles: A Romance of the Western Reserve; for the third, see a back unpaginated page from the 1881 edition of A Royal Gentleman.

4. Albion W. Tourgée, Hot Plowshares (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1883), ii, iv.

5. On literary work as cultural work, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1770–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

6. Amanda Anderson, Bleak Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

7. See Albion R. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand, ed. John Hope Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961); Albion R. Tourgée, A Fool’s Errand, ed. George M. Fredrickson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966); and Albion R. Tourgée, Bricks without Straw, ed. Otto H. Olsen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973).

8. Albion W. Tourgée, The South as a Field for Fiction (1888), in Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourgée, ed. Mark Elliott and John David Smith (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 205, 209, 208, 209.

9. Albion W. Tourgée, Bricks without Straw, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 194. On caste and race, see Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020).

10. Tourgée, Bricks without Straw, ed. Karcher, 197.

11. Carolyn L. Karcher, A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), xi; Toni Morrison, Unspoken Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature (1989), in Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, ed. Henry B. Wonham (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 23.

1

Gothic Reconstruction

Hawthorne’s House in Tourgée’s Toinette and A Royal Gentleman

Robert S. Levine

Albion Tourgée began his career as a novelist not too long after the Atlantic Monthly initiated a campaign to canonize Nathaniel Hawthorne (who died in 1864) as the nation’s greatest writer. The Atlantic’s editors printed numerous essays about Hawthorne,