Albion Tourgée and a national education program

Abstract

After the Civil War in which he served, Albion W. Tourgee moved from his boyhood home in Kingsville, Ohio, to Greensboro, North Carolina. He hoped that the mild climate would help restore his health which was severely impaired by two wounds and several months in Confederate prisons. Tourgee intended to go into the garden nursery business but soon found himself in the swirl of Reconstruction politics. In the fourteen years that he lived in the South,' Tourgee was a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1868, a member of the Code Commission, a judge of the Superior Court, and a pension agent. During this time he observed the implementation of the Reconstruction program at first hand and soon came to the conclusion that it was, for the most part, a failure. A major shortcoming of the program, he felt, was the neglect by the government of the freedman's and poor white's education. Tourgee believed that a program of National Education was necessary for the good of the whole country, and he spent much of the remainder of his life advocating such a plan. Perhaps the first indication of Tourgee's interest in a National Education program is found in A Fool's Errand, his most famous book and autobiographical account of his life in the South. Comfort Servosse, the hero of the novel, is nominated for membership to a state constitutional convention and is pledged to a platform promising to give the state an effective system of public schools.2