A leading proponent of racial equality in the United States
during the second half of the nineteenth century, Albion W. Tourg?e
(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 Tourg?e'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, Tourg?e 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. Tourg?e 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,
Tourg?e 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 Tourg?e, have brought these writings, including the previously
unpublished oral arguments Tourg?e delivered before the U.S.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 Tourg?e's
life and an exhaustive bibliography of Tourg?e's writings and
related works, providing an essential collection for anyone
studying Reconstruction and the early civil rights movement.
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