No Fool's Errand

Abstract

One northern newspaper, in its 1905 obituary for Albion W. Tourgee, sadly wrote, Happy are the people who have no history (p. 24). Indeed, the Reconstruction Era in which Tourgee played a prominent and heroic part as a politician, lawyer, judge, and author is one that it is difficult for Americans, including historians, to recall with much pleasure. As white supremacy was murderously and illegally re-imposed throughout the South, and to a large degree the Civil War's birth of freedom denied and revoked, Tourgee's life's work seemed wasted-certainly he feared that it had been, as he spent his last years in exile, holding a minor diplomatic position in Europe, afraid that he would anger his political patrons and lose his post if he continued to speak out on the issues that meant so much to him, and for which he has striven so vigorously. And yet how much poorer the nation's past, present, and future would be had the valiant, idealistic work of Reconstruction not been undertaken by activists like Albion Tourg e, though its fulfillment would be long-very long-in coming. This new study of Tourgee by Mark Elliott does not attempt to supplant Otto H. Olsen's classic 1965 biography Carpetbagger's Crusade as the standard account of the Ohioan's political career. Olsen's book remains the fullest, most comprehensive study of his involvement in Reconstruction politics, and one of the key works (along with roughly contemporaneous books by Richard Current and William C. Harris) in overturning the negative, caricatured view of carpetbaggers like Tourgee as corrupt opportunists-a key component of the now discredited racist Dunning school interpretation of Reconstruction as an unjust attempt by wild-eyed and impractical northern and southern Republicans to degrade the temporarily prostrated ex-Confederate southern whites. Elliott instead profitably moves beyond this vital but essentially settled historiographical debate and focuses more narrowly on Tourg&e's groundbreaking, influential advocacy of color-blind racial justice. The author argues that Tourgee's racial views were most fundamentally