FLASH POINTS
Albion W. Tourgee in North Carolina Historiography
and Historical Memory*
By John David Smith
Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
On November 4, 2011, ten scholars, including authorities on American literature,
constitutional law, and Civil War and late-nineteenth-century American history, joined an
audience of more than 100 lawyers, historians, and lay persons at the Archives and
History/State Library Building and State Capitol Building for a day-long public program,
“A Radical Notion ofDemocracy: Law, Race, and Albion Tourgee, 1865—1905.”
The symposium, sponsored by the Center for the Study of the American South, a
research arm of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the North Carolina
Department of Cultural Resources, the Elon University School of Law, the University of
North Carolina School of Law, and the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law,
examined the life and contributions of Tourgee (1838—1905), the famous North Carolina
lawyer, law maker, judge, civil rights activist, polemicist, and novelist. Tourgee settled
near Greensboro in 1865 and had a remarkable career in the state before moving to Colo¬
rado in 1879, where he wrote his first major novel A Fool’s Errand by One of the Fools
(1879). In the second panel of the day, “Literature into Law: Interrogating Democracy in
the Post- Reconstruction Nation,” I framed Tourgee’ s work and thought within North
Carolina historiography and historical memory.
Tourgee was a lawyer who understood the relationship of history to the law, and he
ultimately became a lawyer who both made history and made law. Writing in the Yale Law
Journal in 1989, Randall Kennedy remarked that “Lawyers and judges (along with the citi¬
zenry at large) make important decisions that are informed by their sense of history. That
being so, it is imperative to apprise them of new perspectives that illuminate the past.
Unfortunately, even relatively sophisticated legal commentators act as if, having once stud¬
ied American history, they have no need to keep up with current historiographical devel¬
opments.”1 Despite the incredibly valuable work of Otto H. Olsen, Mark Elliott, and
numerous other historians and literary scholars on Tourgee, he remains less than a main¬
stream figure in the narrative of American history generally, and in North Carolina histori¬
ography in particular.2 In his recent book American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights
Era, historian David W. Blight asked pointedly: “Did even the most literate Americans in
either section know about the advanced racial imagination of a Northerner like Albion
Tourgee and his now classic book/1 Fool's Errand . . . ? Indeed, how many Americans
even today know of Tourgee’s complex personal critique of the Ku Klux Klan. . . ?”3
From among almost fifty reviews of A Fool’s Errand compiled by Tourgee’s publisher,
New York’s Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, only three came from newspapers published in
Dixie. According to the Okolona (Mississippi) Southern States, “It is well written, interest¬
ing, and demonstrates the utter hopelessness of revolutionizing the politics and society of
the South. It is a radical work; but old Confederate Democrats can chuckle over many of
its pages.” The editor of Raleigh’s newspaper, the Observer, considered A Fool's Errand “a
2 <)
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I, I M E 6 0, \ l! M It E It I, JAN II A It V 2012
