THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 THE COLLECTION OF 
 
 NORTH CAROLINIANA 
 
 ENDOWED BY 
 
 JOHN SPRUNT HILL 
 
 CLASS OF 1889 
 
 CB 
 
 T727d 
 
 C.3 
 
UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL Hll i 
 
 ■■■III 
 
 00032690918 
 
 This book may be kept out one month unless a recall 
 notice is sent to you. It must be brought to the North 
 Carolina Collection (in Wilson Library) for renewal. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 BY 
 
 ROY F. DIBBLE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 LEMCKE & BUECHNER 
 192 I 
 
Copyright, 192 i, by 
 
 LEMCKE & BUECHNER 
 
TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER 
 
 rs 
 
 ^ 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In this book I have attempted to weave into a single 
 narrative the various threads of interest in the Ufe of 
 Tourgee, soldier, carpet-bagger, politician, judge, con- 
 sul, lecturer, editor and publisher, political writer, and 
 novelist. The idea of writing his biography would 
 quite certainly never have occurred to me had I not 
 spent my early years in a cherished rural community, 
 hardly centralized enough to be dignified even by the 
 name of hamlet, only four miles from Thorheim. 
 One of my earliest recollections is of hearing my 
 father say what sounded to me then like a single word, 
 'Judgetorjay," which very much aroused my childish 
 curiosity. And while engaged in the work of collect- 
 ing material and of writing, I have often been cheered 
 by the thought that the published results of my re- 
 searches might afford some pleasure to many friends 
 and acquaintances of mine, who knew Tourgee not so 
 much as a prominent novelist as a genially democratic 
 neighbor. I can only hope that the picture of him 
 which I have drawn (in which task I have been 
 prompted only by the love of impartial, but I trust not 
 unsympathetic, truth) will not cause any of his friends 
 to hold in less esteem the only literary person of im- 
 portance who has added the lustre of legendary charm 
 to a spot already graciously favored by nature, but 
 will rather enable them to have a juster comprehension 
 of the reasons for their admiration. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Both the demand of prefatory conciseness and the 
 impossibiHty of expressing in an adequate manner the 
 gratitude I feel toward many persons whose kindly in- 
 terest has been shown me in multitudinous ways, some- 
 what disconcert me at this time. To Mrs. Elizabeth 
 S. Warner, now mistress of Thorheim, who placed all 
 of Tourgee's private correspondence, together with 
 masses of unpublished material, at my disposal, and 
 also favored me with a wealth of anecdote and gener- 
 ous hospitality, I owe the greatest debt of all. Profes- 
 sor Carl Van Doren read my manuscript chapter by 
 chapter as it was written and helped me with much 
 penetrating criticism. My thanks are also due to Pro- 
 fessors W. P. Trent, A. H. Thorndike and G. P. 
 Krapp, who gave me the benefit of their ripened schol- 
 arship. My colleague, Doctor R. F. Jones, read my 
 manuscript with painstaking care. Professor Archi- 
 bald Henderson, of the University of North Carolina, 
 and Professor C. Alphonso Smith, of the United States 
 Naval Academy, put me in touch with various sources 
 of information. Several of Tourgee's classmates of 
 Rochester University and a number of residents in 
 Greensboro, North Carolina, furnished me with much 
 illustrative material. The recent death of Mrs. Tour- 
 gee prevents me from showing her my appreciation for 
 the record of her husband's life which she kept for so 
 many years — a record upon which she would have 
 based her own biography of him, had not the memories 
 of their past experiences aroused in her emotions so 
 poignant that she was unable to put her plan into exe- 
 cution. 
 
 Roy F. Dibble. 
 
 Columbia University, May, 1920. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I Birth — Education — The War .... n 
 
 II The South 32 
 
 III ''A Fool's Errand" 59 
 
 IV "Our Continent" 84 
 
 V Thorheim 92 
 
 VI Bordeaux 124 
 
 VII Conclusion . } 132 
 
 Bibliography 150 
 
 Index i5S 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 BIRTH— EDUCATION— THE WAR 
 
 "As far as the mere facts of my birth, residence, and 
 occupation are concerned," says Tourgee in a letter 
 dated August, 1894, to a college president who had 
 written him asking for authentic biographical infor- 
 mation, "they are, I suppose, easily accessible to any- 
 one. Beyond that, I do not know that any account of 
 my life or thoughts has ever been written. I have 
 avoided with some persistence both biography and auto- 
 biography. None except of my own household has 
 ever come near enough to me for the former and I 
 have small inclination for the latter.'' 
 
 The above statement must be taken with the classic 
 grain of salt, however ; for though it is in the main cor- 
 rect, its author did begin an account of his life which, 
 as he noted on the margin of the manuscript, was in- 
 tended for use as the basis of a biography to be written 
 by one of his closest friends. He also left several other 
 autobiographical accounts of certain periods of his 
 life, and from them many of the facts in this biography 
 have been taken. 
 
 II 
 
12 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 The Tourgee family, of Huguenot origin, left 
 France in 1685, following the Revocation of the Edict 
 of Nantes. After stopping for a brief period on the Is- 
 land of Guernsey, its members decided to break the last 
 chain that held them to the Old World, and accord- 
 ingly settled in Kingston, Rhode Island, in the latter 
 part of the seventeenth century. The first Tourgee 
 whose name is left on record was Peter, who supported 
 himself and family in this part of the New World by 
 peg and awl. At some indefinite period in the early 
 eighteenth century the family again moved, this time 
 to Framingham, Alassachusetts, and there the future 
 author's grandfather, Valentine Tourgee, married Re- 
 becka Robbins, whose family had come from New 
 London, Connecticut, after experiencing the siege of 
 that town by the traitor Benedict Arnold. To this 
 couple was born Valentine Jr., father of Albion W. 
 Tourgee, in 18 14. During his early manhood Valen- 
 tine the second moved to Lee, Berkshire County, Mass- 
 achusetts, and there met Louisa Emma Winegar, who 
 was a descendant of Edward Doty, one of the famous 
 colony that came over on the Mayflower. The Wine- 
 gar family was of German origin, and the first one 
 whose name is known, Ulric Winegar, born in Switzer- 
 land in 1648, came to America in 17 10 with the colony 
 of Palatines which was under the fostering care of 
 Queen Anne. Ulric settled in Ulster County, New 
 York, and at some later date moved to Lee, where, as 
 has been noted, Valentine Tourgee Jr. had likewise 
 come. Jacob Winegar, maternal grandfather of Al- 
 bion W. Tourgee, had a family of seven children ; one, 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 13 
 
 Jack, was a member of the Massachusetts Legislature, 
 and another, Jacob Jr., was apparently a happy-go- 
 lucky chap, which may account for the fact that his 
 youthful nephew, Albion, came to him in the forties, 
 for the comforts of home which his carping step- 
 mother denied him. 
 
 It was at Lee, Massachusetts, then, that the author's 
 parents met. His father was here engaged in the 
 manufacture of paper. In 1836 he married Louisa 
 Emma Winegar, his brother Cyrus and one of Louisa's 
 four sisters also marrying at the same time. Appar- 
 ently the nomadic instincts which had characterized 
 both families were inherited by these descendants, for 
 both couples soon after the joint marriage removed to 
 Williamsfield, Ashtabula County, Ohio, where Valen- 
 tine and Louisa Tourgee settled on a farm. And here, 
 on May 2, 1838, was born their first child, Albion 
 Winegar Tourgee. Two other children were born to 
 them, but both died in infancy. The author's mother, 
 never strong, gradually wasted away and finally died 
 of tuberculosis in February, 1843. ^^1 that he was 
 ever able to recall of his mother was that she used to 
 whip him gently because he ''toed in," and that her 
 funeral took place on a bleak winter's day. 
 
 The bereaved husband and father bore this calamity 
 bravely and for several years remained alone with his 
 baby son. He finally decided to tempt fate, however, 
 by procuring a foster mother for his child, and accord- 
 ingly took a second spouse, Rowena Snow, some time 
 between 1844 and 1846, to which union there was born 
 a daughter about ten years Albion's junior. In 1847 
 
14 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 a final removal was made to a farm one and a half 
 miles north of Kingsville, Ohio, and here the father, 
 who had seen his son grow famous, died April 26, 
 1889. Meanwhile fate, having been tempted, was 
 proving capricious as usual, for the boy's legal mother 
 was showing herself true to the well-fixed tradition of 
 her species.^ The result was that the high-spirited lad, 
 who, by the time he was fourteen, was already begin- 
 ning to show that uncompromising independence which 
 later became one of the most pronounced characteris- 
 tics of the grown man, decided to sever connections 
 with his home and go for protection and solace to his 
 uncle, Jacob Winegar Jr., in Lee, Massachusetts. How 
 he obtained the funds for this youthful adventure is 
 not known, but obtain them he did and stayed in his 
 new home apparently for some two years. The facts 
 about this period of his life are very meagre indeed, 
 but probably he was pleased with the Rip Van Winkle 
 propensities of his uncle; for in one of his autobio- 
 graphical fragments Tourgee boasts that as a boy he 
 could never be relied on to perform the farm chores 
 which his father assigned him, but that he usually stole 
 the paternal rifle and hied him to the woods to return 
 just when he pleased. It is only fair to state, how- 
 ever, that the chief element of interest in the prodigal's 
 
 * This characterization of Tourgee's step-mother is based 
 wholly upon his own statement about her. A lady who knew 
 Rowena Snow Tourgee intimately has assured me, however, 
 that she was in reality a "mild, even-tempered woman, who al- 
 ways spoke very quietly." Tourgee probably magnified what- 
 ever faults his step-mother may have had, in accordance with 
 his usual practice of exaggerating the hardships of his career. 
 
^ 
 
 ALBION W. TOURGEE 15 
 
 return was an irate parent "armed with retributory 
 cudgel." The use of the rod was of course firmly be- 
 lieved in, because the lad's father was a very strict 
 Methodist, whose enormously long supplications in the 
 weekly prayer meetings could, according to tradition, 
 be heard far beyond the walls of the church itself. 
 The Methodistic element in the father's character also 
 showed itself in his love of argument, which was in 
 turn inherited by his son. Often the two would, in 
 the midst of a tempestuous debate, seat themselves at 
 the table, when, of course, it was necessary to pause 
 briefly for the saying of grace; and once this per- 
 functory task had been performed as speedily as pos- 
 sible, the verbal combat would be renewed with greater 
 violence than ever. 
 
 But, though he loved rod and gun with all the fervor 
 of youth, the boy loved books as well, and it was at the 
 library in Lee that his first real opportunity for exten- 
 sive reading came. His father had once intended to 
 prepare for a profession and had bought many books 
 with this end in view. But financial loss, and more 
 particularly a strong religious awakening, had turned 
 his mind from such worldly pursuits as the mastering 
 of professions, and also the making of verse, in which 
 he had occasionally indulged; hence it was that re- 
 ligious zeal prompted him to commit to the flames such 
 impious performances as Scott's novels and other 
 works of a like nature. The following volumes had 
 been preserved, however, for their indubitable moral 
 qualities, and had been read by Albion in lieu of more 
 exciting material : the Bible, Goodrich's "Universal 
 
i6 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 History," a "History of the United States," "Pil- 
 grim's Progress," Bacon's "Essays," "Paradise Lost," 
 "Night Thoughts," D'Aubigne's "History of the Ref- 
 ormation," other historical works, a book of fables, 
 the ubiquitous "Scottish Chiefs," and some volumes of 
 religious biography. The boy was compelled to mem- 
 orize parts of "Paradise Lost," "Night Thoughts," 
 and the Bible for his soul's good and incidentally as a 
 punishment for childish offences. He liked the Gospel 
 of St. John, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Revela- 
 tions especially well, and once said that he could have 
 restored all three of these had all copies been lost; but 
 it may justly be surmised that he was here emulating a 
 commonly known statement of Macaulay, rather than 
 telling the facts of the case. This, then, had consti- 
 tuted his intellectual pabulum till the good New Eng-' 
 land library opened his eyes to a much more extensive 
 literary field; and from this time till the call to arms 
 came, he literally reveled in English literature, while it 
 is significant that he was particularly interested in his- 
 tory and the background of fiction — the life and so- 
 ciety of the times portrayed. 
 
 At some indefinite period, probably in 1854, he re- 
 turned to his father's farm; for, being now nearly 
 full-grown, he had little cause to fear the weight of his 
 father's arm and still less his step-mother's tongue. 
 He was somewhat undersized for his age at this time, 
 but very tough and wiry. Here he remained, alter- 
 nately teaching in some elementary school and study- 
 ing at Kingsville Academy, whither he daily trudged 
 from the home farm until he entered the University of 
 
/ 
 
 ALBION W. TOURGEE 17 
 
 Rochester in 1859. This academy had as its principal 
 Chester W. Heywood, a young man fresh from col- 
 lege, to whom Tourgee became warmly attached and 
 to whom he always gave precedence later when speak- 
 ing of the formative influences of his early life. Hey- 
 wood freely opened his quite extensive library to the 
 boy, and thus further literary treasures were revealed 
 to him. Particularly, at this time, he read the Waver- 
 ley novels, taking one home every other day till he had 
 finished the set. Meanwhile, **A1," as he was familiarly 
 called, was rapidly winning first place as a scholar, de- 
 spite the fact that the standard of attainment at the 
 academy was high, since attendance was voluntary and 
 most of the students were paying their own way. He 
 was regarded by his fellow students as destined for a 
 brilliant career because of his general scholastic ability, 
 especially in languages. It was at this time that he 
 formed the determination to follow the legal profes- 
 sion. 
 
 During his academy days, the future novelist had 
 already begun to exercise his 'prentice pen in a very 
 'prentice manner indeed. A manuscript book of his, 
 dated March, 1857, and entitled ''Sense and Non- 
 sense," contains these first endeavors, and it is per- 
 haps no more than charitable to remark that the non- 
 sense is far more in evidence that any glimmerings of 
 sense. There are about forty ''poems," some based 
 upon classical subjects and written in a very weak 
 Byronic style; in fact, two are addressed to that 
 poet so often imitated by aspiring youths. Apparently 
 some of these verses sought immortality by being 
 
i8 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 printed in the academy paper. But by far the larger 
 part of these rhymed Hnes bear the title To Emma, 
 and since she will appear very frequently in the pages 
 that follow, it may be well to know something about 
 her now. 
 
 The young lady thus poetically eulogized was Emma 
 Lodoiska Kilbourne, the daughter of Harmon and 
 Mary Corwin Kilbourne, and she was likewise a stu- 
 dent at Kingsville Academy. Both the Kilbourne and 
 Corwin families were descended from Yorkshire gen- 
 try, and had come to New England before 1635. Some 
 of their descendants had intermarried with the Win- 
 throps of Massachusetts, and as a result Emma Kil- 
 bourne was a lineal descendant of both governors of 
 that name. The Kilboumes settled in Bristol, Ver- 
 mont; and after the Revolutionary War, since they 
 were suspected of being too fond of the Tories to be 
 comfortable in New England, they emigrated to Can- 
 ada, whence at some later time they removed to Con- 
 neaut, Ohio. At this place it was that Emma lived, 
 and whence she was sent to the academy. It was a 
 case of love at first sight, on Tourgee's part at least; 
 for when he first saw her, he confidentially remarked to 
 a friend, 'T'm going to marry that girl," and after an 
 engagement of five years he did so. The remark he 
 made to her on his death bed, ''Emma, you have been 
 the one perfect wife," was but little exaggerated, as 
 succeeding events will show. 
 
 After ending his academy days, Tourgee probably 
 taught school a little while, and then, from the autumn 
 of 1859 till January, 1861, he was a student at the Uni- 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 19 
 
 versity of Rochester. Just before entering this insti- 
 tution, he made another trip to Lee, Massachusetts, to 
 receive his share of his grandfather's property; the 
 amount of his share is unknown, but it certainly was 
 not large, for he paid his own way through college. 
 Had he chosen to do so, he might have had his college 
 expenses paid by another ; for during his boyhood stay 
 in Lee, a gentleman there had been so impressed by 
 Tourgee's youthful promise that he later offered to 
 send him to Williams College. But, independent as 
 usual, Tourgee refused this kind offer and went to 
 Rochester, where he received sophomore rating, 
 doubtless because of his good record at the academy. 
 
 Here he made no special effort to attain high scholas- 
 tic standing, but largely followed his own sweet will. 
 His course was very erratic; what he read, he read 
 with all his might, but in the subjects that interested 
 him least, he did just enough work to maintain his 
 standing in class. He read poetry enormously, but 
 mathematics was his special aversion. One day his 
 mathematics teacher reprimanded him for a poor reci- 
 tation, whereupon with tears in his eyes he blurted out : 
 "Professor ! I like you personally better than any man 
 on the faculty, but I don't like mathematics and I won't 
 study them if I have to leave college." He read all of 
 Shakspere and, if we can beheve his word, all the 
 pre-Shaksperean dramatists, to see how great their 
 influence on the master dramatist had been. He had 
 a habit of marking the books in the college library with 
 his own pen, but this peccadillo was not discovered un- 
 til he had become so famous that the books thus marked 
 
20 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 gained added value in the eyes of the college authorities 
 by reason of these disfigurements. He was fond of 
 debating in his college days, and has left in manu- 
 script some specimens of his speeches, which are 
 couched in the usual terms of forensic finality that one 
 ordinarily finds in the philippics of a budding orator. 
 A manuscript book containing notes on a college course 
 in logic has also about a dozen more poems, several of 
 them having war as their theme, which uniformly 
 maintain the high standard of inferiority that had 
 characterized those written in his academy days. This 
 same manuscript book contains also some fragments of 
 short stories. More significant than any of these in- 
 terests were his friendships with the students, and par- 
 ticularly with President M. B. Anderson, who was 
 Tourgee's life-long friend and counselor. 
 
 As soon as the first mutterings of the fast approach- 
 ing war were heard, Tourgee began to show that love 
 of leadership which was always one of his strong 
 traits by organizing a number of students and drilling 
 them. He amply proved his mastery one day, when 
 one of the members of his ^'company," a close friend 
 of his, did something which displeased him. In a very 
 short space of time, the friend was on the ground with 
 the self-appointed of^cer on top, pummelling him un- 
 mercifully. Apparently his funds were running low 
 at this time, for in January, 1861, he left the University 
 and became associate principal of a school at Wilson, 
 Niagara County, New York. He doubtless intended 
 to return to his collegiate work at some future time, 
 but it was not to be. The degree of A.B. was granted 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 21 
 
 to him by the University in June, 1862, however, in 
 accordance with the common practice of awarding de- 
 grees to students who had entered the service of their 
 country before their academic careers were quite com- 
 pleted. Years later, in 1880 to be exact, Rochester 
 University awarded him the honorary degree of LL.D., 
 and three years later the University of Copenhagen 
 made him a Doctor of Philosophy. Tourgee remained 
 at the school in Wilson until the nineteenth of April, 
 1861, on which date he enlisted in the 27th New York 
 Volunteers. 
 
 He had not long to wait before suffering for the 
 cause of the Union. In the first Battle of Bull Run, on 
 July 4, 1 86 1, he lost the sight of his left eye ^ and also 
 received a bad wound in his spine. The eye was later 
 removed and a glass one put in its place, which so 
 closely resembled the natural one that many people 
 who knew him fairly well never suspected that his left 
 eye was artificial. But the wound to the spine was a 
 different matter. During the whole of his life he never 
 fully recovered from it, for it caused a permanent 
 nervousness and often excruciating pain; consequently, 
 he never saw a really well day after that eventful 
 fourth of July. 
 
 ^ Tourgee stated again and again in his writings that his left 
 eye was lost in this battle; but some of his intimate friends, 
 whose word is unimpeachable, have assured me that in reality- 
 he had already lost the sight of this eye by an accident in his 
 boyhood. It seems plain that in this case, as in several others, 
 Tourgee was so enthralled by his ultra-romantic theory of life, 
 which colored all he did and wrote, that he applied it to one 
 of the rather drab facts of his actual career. 
 
22 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 For three days after this tragic event Tourgee was 
 in a state of coma, and when he returned to conscious- 
 ness it was to find himself in Washington with a nurse 
 at his side. The roar of battle was still in his ears, 
 and for several weeks he lived over, in his dilirium, 
 the ghastly events of that momentous day. The sur- 
 geon in attendance looked for nothing for him save a 
 slow lingering until death should mercifully come. 
 But instead he began gradually to mend, though it 
 was eleven months before he could walk without the 
 aid of crutches. By August, 1861, he had recovered 
 sufficient vitality to become somewhat entranced by a 
 Washington belle, a guest at the house where he was 
 invalided; but as soon as he saw Miss Kilbourne once 
 more, to whom he had been engaged for three years, 
 his old love returned stronger than ever. In this 
 month, having received his honorable discharge from 
 the army, he was sent to Ashtabula, Ohio, lying on the 
 floor of the train that carried him, for his back was too 
 weak to permit his sitting up. Having arrived at Ash- 
 tabula, he lay on his couch and read Blackstone every 
 day, until, by January, 1862, he was able to hobble on 
 crutches down to the law office of Sherman & Farmer, 
 Ashtabula, where he studied law till the following July. 
 
 But what of his Hterary work during this period? 
 The answer is that it saw the publication of his first 
 book, and the circumstances of this event are of suffi- 
 cient interest to warrant narration. Before this story 
 is told, however, it should be noted that, when Tourgee 
 started for war, he had in his knapsack two volumes, a 
 Greek Testament and Cicero's ''De Natura Deorum." 
 
? 
 
 ALBION W. TOURGEE 23 
 
 The Testament was included not because of any partic- 
 ular religious motive, but simply because he wished to 
 continue the study of Greek. But he took the other 
 book because he really liked to read it (he always ex- 
 celled in Latin), having already read it more than 
 once. During his army life he read both these books 
 several times, and the Testament was especially wel- 
 come to his closest friend in the army, a theological 
 student. Tourgee also read during his first army ex- 
 perience parts of the "Comedie Humaine" in the or- 
 iginal. 
 
 At the time when he began as a cripple to study law, 
 Tourgee had already written a few stories which had 
 appeared in some cheap periodicals long since gone into 
 the limbo of oblivion, and he had even received a little 
 pay for some of them; but so far he had no thought of 
 literature as a serious occupation. Now, however, with 
 the prospect of being a permanent invalid, possibly 
 ahvays confined to a couch, the thought of writing 
 came to him, and he was materially assisted in this 
 direction by the advice of President Anderson of 
 Rochester and of the Professor of Greek in that in- 
 stitution. Acting upon their advice, he made the 
 synopsis and indeed wrote several chapters of a novel ; 
 but he finally decided instead to publish a volume of 
 poems, most of which had already been written. One 
 more, however, he was prompted to write, and it is 
 worthy of remark that it was concerned with the con- 
 ditions attending the outbreak of the Civil War. At 
 this lengthy poem he labored until its completion in 
 January, 1862. Then, as soon as he was able, he 
 
^4 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 journeyed to a neighboring city to seek a publisher. 
 He found one who was wilHng to execute his wishes, 
 provided that he would assume the cost of the job. 
 Tourgee assented, thinking that he could pay for it 
 with the money from the pension that had just been 
 granted him, a pension which he renounced upon 
 patriotic motives when he re-entered the service. But 
 the book, published under an assumed name, cost all 
 the pension money and a little more. When he received 
 the first two copies sent him by the publisher, he was 
 so disappointed at the immaturity which, hidden in 
 the hypnotizing manuscript, the printed pages revealed, 
 that he thrust them with small delay into the kitchen 
 stove. This incineration was also determined upon 
 partly because of the advice of his father, to whom 
 he had shown the volumes in hope of winning some 
 paternal praise. Late in the summer of 1862, he went 
 to the publisher for a report and found that of the 
 one hundred copies printed twenty had been sold. He 
 had not at any time really expected that the sale of 
 the book would entirely pay for the expenses of pub- 
 lication; but by this time no illusion whatever, either 
 literary or financial, remained; and accordingly he 
 sought and obtained permission from the publisher to 
 cut the unsold copies into bits, which he did, not, how- 
 ever, without some pangs of regret. Nevertheless, he 
 had now tasted both the sweets and pains of author- 
 ship ; and, while it was easy to destroy this first product 
 of his enthusiasm for literature, the enthusiasm itself 
 remained, dormant for some years, to be sure, by rea- 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 25 
 
 son of war, bad health, and the necessity of earning a 
 Hving, but still it remained. 
 
 Meanwhile sterner events were again claiming 
 Tourgee's active interest. During the spring of 1862, 
 he took a preparation containing strychnia and there- 
 upon began to recover the use of his limbs. While 
 still an invalid, he attended meetings for the recruit- 
 ing of volunteers and even spoke for their cause, seated 
 in a chair. By July he was again well enough to serve 
 his country, and accordingly went to Columbus and 
 got a commission as first lieutenant in Company G of 
 the 105th Ohio Volunteers, many of whose members 
 were his old academy schoolmates. Over thirty years 
 later, in ''The Story of a Thousand," he performed a 
 labor of love by giving a minute account of this com- 
 pany. Unfortunately for his biographer, he, as the 
 preface states, ''endeavored to restrict personal incident 
 almost entirely to illustrative events common to the 
 experience of all" ; hence it was that he did not describe 
 his own experiences in prison because they were too 
 personal "to be compatible with the general tone of 
 the work." From July till October the company was 
 engaged in minor war activities in Kentucky. At the 
 Battle of Perryville, October 8, 1862, however, it lost 
 about one-third of its total strength, and Tourgee again 
 suffered an injury to his spine which kept him in a 
 hospital at Danville, Kentucky, through October and 
 November. He rejoined his company about the first 
 of December and for the next month spent his time in 
 helping to chase the raider Morgan. 
 
 It was during this time that an event of special 
 
26 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 interest occurred, best told in Tourgee's own words. 
 "I remember that as late as September 1862, I was 
 myself put under arrest in the army of the United 
 States, for refusing to surrender a colored man who 
 had saved my company."^ This brief utterance, con- 
 cerning a fact of which nothing else is known, is the 
 first evidence of that consuming passion which later 
 influenced nearly everything Tourgee did and wrote — 
 an untiring sympathy, admiration, even love, for the 
 negro in his servile state, and a zeal which was never 
 quenched for obtaining justice (at least Tourgee's con- 
 ception of justice) for the black man. 
 
 At some time in January, 1863, another event took 
 place of which little but the bare statement of fact is 
 known. On one of the Morgan expeditions referred 
 to, Tourgee was captured at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 
 and spent the following four months in prison. He has 
 left little record of this decidedly unpleasant episode 
 in his hfe, but it is certain that, in what order is un- 
 known, the several walls of the prisons at Atlanta, 
 Milan, Salisbury, and those of the notorious Libby, 
 encased him. He later referred to this experience as 
 follows: ''Despite the temptation, he [Tourgee] has 
 rarely alluded to the fact that he was a guest of 'Libby' 
 and sundry other hotels of that type — only more so — 
 at the South, in public speech or writing. ... Of 
 the treatment they received, the lack of supplies, the 
 crowded condition of the prisons, the lack of shelter, 
 the inexpressible foulness of some of them, and the 
 ^ The Chautauqtian, Nov. 1881, p. 93. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 27 
 
 indifference manifested toward their feelings, he has 
 said nothing lest his purpose should be misconceived. 
 Decidedly uncomfortable as these experiences were, 
 their irksome monotony must have been slightly 
 mitigated by at least three changes of air and 
 "scenery " In later years he once remarked to a triena, 
 apropos of this experience: "I ran away once or 
 twice and was shot at, caught and penned up again. 
 Oh, I had quite a variety." He put some part of his 
 life in prison to good account by the study of Spamsh 
 and the attendant reading of Cervantes s immortal tale 
 i„ the original, together with Car yle's 'French 
 Revolution," which was "one of the few books tha 
 found their way into the room in Libby Prison of 
 which the Bystander was at one time joint-tenant with 
 many others." ^ But in the first part of May 1863, 
 he was exchanged from prison, and so freed from 
 one of the most disagreeable misfortunes that can 
 happen to a soldier. . 
 
 That he wasted little time in returning home and 
 becoming partner in an event which he and another 
 person had longingly anticipated for five years is 
 sufficiently evinced by the following passage taken 
 from his war diary, which covers the period from May 
 till November, 1863, and which has fortunately been 
 preserved : "May 14, 1863. Married at Columbus, 
 Ohio, by the Rev. Julius E. Gardner at the Med. Coll 
 buildings. Returned to our lodgings in the W. S. Hotel 
 
 • "A Bystander's Notes," in The Chicago Inter Ocean, Feb, 13, 
 1890. 
 'Ibid., June 26, 1891. 
 
28 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 to take life quietly and happily. It ought to be happy, 
 for it is the consummation of five years of pleasant 
 waiting and sweet expectation." But unfortunately 
 the quiet and happy life was not destined to last long 
 at that particular time, for the diary on May 25 con- 
 tains this terse sentence : 'To-day I left for the war 
 again." 
 
 Practically the only source of information about 
 Tourgee's life during the remainder of this year is 
 this same war diary, together with some passages in 
 "The Story of a Thousand." There is little of worth 
 in this much battered diary except as it contains 
 biographical information, for its contents are merely 
 typical of most personal records of this kind. It is 
 filled with grumblings at army life and its privations 
 on the one hand, and fervidly patriotic sentiments on 
 the other, complaints of the scarcity of letters, and 
 particularly many devout expressions of love for his 
 wife and supplications to the Almighty that he may 
 be spared to return to her in safety. Much of it was 
 written in the blackness of night as its sprawling, at 
 times illegible, lines show, not a little during pauses 
 between battles, and some even while he was di''ectly 
 under fire. The following passage is characteristic: 
 ''July 5. We got a mail today but nothing for me. 
 Well no wonder for Emma has gone on a spree and 
 cannot stop to write to me. I do hope the darling is 
 happy." 
 
 "The Story of a Thousand" gives a much clearer 
 idea of the army activities in which Tourgee took part 
 during this time than does the diary. From this his- 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 29 
 
 tory it is apparent that the 105th Ohio Volunteers was 
 engaged in several battles. During the latter part of 
 June, this regiment was among those which saw action 
 in the campaign against the Confederate position at 
 Tullahoma, which was taken July i. It also assisted 
 in the Battle of Chickamauga and in the campaign 
 against Chattanooga. Moreover, it saw service in the 
 victorious battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary 
 Ridge. Its subsequent participation in the march 
 ''from Atlanta to the sea" was not, however, shared by 
 Tourgee, as will shortly appear. 
 
 It has been noted that Tourgee had already been 
 under arrest in 1862, and his second experience of the 
 kind came in June, 1863. The diary states that during 
 this month he was in prison two weeks because, while 
 on picket duty, he had pricked with his sword a soldier 
 who had tried to get through the lines, and was ac- 
 cordingly accused of wounding him. After being in- 
 carcerated two weeks, Tourgee was released from 
 prison, but the charge against him was not finally dis- 
 posed of until several weeks later. He was sentenced 
 to be formally reprimanded by his superior officer ; but 
 that the reprimand was only a form is evident from 
 the language in which, according to the diary, it was 
 couched : "Lieutenant Tourgee, I have nothing to say. 
 You will report for duty tomorrow morning." 
 
 To take commands from another was the one thing 
 that galled Tourgee perhaps more than anything else. 
 On June 2 he tendered his resignation as first lieutenant 
 because his "rights were not respected and his reputa- 
 tion threatened," but it was not accepted. It was doubt- 
 
30 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 less this independence of spirit, combined with his 
 interest in the negro which had already manifested 
 itself, that led him during the following summer to 
 meditate withdrawal from his regiment and the for- 
 mation of a negro company, to be officered of course 
 by himself. And it was probably because of this same 
 independence, together with the fact that his old 
 wound (which had already troubled him much of the 
 time) was aggravated when he leapt a ditch in October, 
 that he applied for leave of absence. This he ap- 
 parently obtained about the tenth of November, for 
 his diary closes on that date, while he was waiting for 
 his leave of absence and feeling very wretched on ac- 
 count of his wound. In December he again tendered 
 his resignation because of insolence (at least he called 
 it such) on the part of his superiors, which was once 
 more not accepted. Whether it was finally accepted 
 because of this friction or because of his state of 
 health is not definitely known ; at any rate, on about 
 January i, 1864, he withdrew from the army. The 
 fact probably is that what Tourgee deemed to be in- 
 dependence was regarded as pig-headedness by his 
 superior officers, and probability strongly favors their 
 opinion. 
 
 Upon thus severing his connection with the army, 
 Tourgee without doubt at once went home, though 
 the next five months are a blank as far as definite facts 
 are concerned. At all events, on May 2, 1864, the 
 anniversary of his birth in a month which he always 
 regarded as peculiarly lucky for him, he was admitted 
 to the bar at Painsville, Ohio, and at once entered the 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 31 
 
 law office of the firm with which he had previously 
 studied, Sherman & Farmer. On July 2, licenses to 
 practise law and to act as Claim Agent were granted 
 him at Ashtabula, Ohio. Here there is another gap 
 in biographic facts and a jump of eight months must 
 be made, during which time he was doubtless in- 
 creasing his knowledge of law, acquiring some financial 
 rewards, and enjoying marital feHcity. The jump just 
 referred to ends in March, 1865, when for some rea- 
 son he became a teacher in Erie Academy, Erie, Penn- 
 sylvania, where he remained till the end of the school 
 year. He also did some writing for The Erie Dispatch 
 during this time. It is also possible that, at some time 
 during the spring or early summer of this year, he 
 sought and obtained the rank of major of a colored 
 regiment, and that he was on his way to resume his 
 war activities when the end of the struggle made any 
 future military career for him impossible. Certainly 
 there is every reason to believe that such a command 
 would have been very acceptable to him, had his health 
 been good enough to make such an honor possible, al- 
 though this is very doubtful. 
 
 For the time was now nearly at hand when, prin- 
 cipally on account of his health, Tourgee was to take 
 the step which proved to be far more important in its 
 consequences than all the events of his life thus far 
 put together. In fact, had he not embarked on this 
 enterprise, it is very doubtful if any but his immediate 
 friends would ever have remembered his name, or 
 any account of his life been thought of sufficient value 
 and interest to be recorded. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE SOUTH 
 
 In July, 1865, Tourgee went South alone to seek a 
 new home for himself and his wife. His precarious 
 health was, as already stated, the chief motive for this 
 venture, for his spinal wound, the general hardship of 
 life in the army, together with a weakness of the lungs 
 which was probably inherited from his mother, had 
 all combined to make him anything but robust at this 
 time. For several weeks he was engaged as counsel in 
 a court martial then being held at Raleigh, North 
 Carolina, and for the next few weeks he made an ex- 
 tensive tour through that state and Georgia also to 
 seek a permanent residence near the Atlantic seacoast. 
 Greensboro, North Carolina, was the locality finally 
 selected, partly because he liked the place as well as 
 any he had seen, and also because he was there able 
 to rent the West Green Nurseries from C. P. Menden- 
 hall — for he had decided to engage in the nursery busi- 
 ness as well as in his regular profession. Having thus 
 brought to a successful conclusion his search for a 
 home better adapted to his state of health, he returned 
 to Ohio in the latter part of August. The next few 
 weeks were spent in settling his business affairs, and 
 
 32 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 33 
 
 the fourteenth of October found him and his wife in 
 Greensboro with a capital of $5000 acquired through 
 his legal activities. 
 
 And so, from being a respected citizen of the North, 
 in whose recent victoriously concluded cause he was an 
 honored veteran, Tourgee became not a citizen but a 
 ''carpet-bagger" in the denuded, poverty-stricken 
 South, whose wounds were still unstanched, whose 
 efficient white male population was almost wiped out, 
 whose territory was teeming with recently liberated, 
 hence inexpressibly despised, negroes, and whose proud 
 spirit, smarting with the sense of intolerable defeat, 
 regarded almost everything Northern with fearful 
 hatred. 
 
 It is not the purpose of this biography to discuss in 
 detail the Reconstruction Period, for that has already 
 been done for the South as a whole^ and for the part 
 in which Tourgee lived in particular.^ The interest 
 in this discussion lies in the special part played by him 
 in this movement, and the indelible results of this 
 experience which showed themselves in his character 
 and in his writings. 
 
 Picture the situation. To this land, a land cursed 
 by war, pestilence and famine, came this youthful, 
 
 * "History of the United States," by James Ford Rhodes, The 
 Macmillan Co., New York, 1906, Vols. 6 and 7. Also "The 
 American Nation: A History;" General Editor A. B. Hart; Vol. 
 23, "Reconstruction Political and Social, 1865-1877/' by W. A. 
 Dunning, Harper & Brothers, 1907. 
 
 "Columbia University Dissertation, "Reconstruction m North 
 Carolina," by J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Edwards & Broughton, 
 Raleigh, N. C, 1906. 
 
/ 
 
 34 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 impetuous, headstrong lawyer who beheved in himself 
 and the cause of the North absolutely without reserve, 
 and who did not, at least in his early years, know the 
 meaning of the words prudence and restraint. This 
 being true, there could be but one result : enemies on 
 every hand, both of reputation and life itself, oppro- 
 brium, and what amounted practically to social 
 ostracism, save for the friendship of the negroes, the 
 handful of carpet-baggers, and a comparatively few 
 Southerners, mostly Republicans, whose sympathies 
 were not wholly with their native land. This, then, is 
 in general what Tourgee experienced during the next 
 fourteen years; a detailed account of the specific oc- 
 currences in his life during this period follows. 
 
 As has been noted, Tourgee began his life here by 
 engaging in the nursery business. After a few months 
 of conducting the enterprise alone, during which time 
 he also practised law, he decided that an increase of 
 capital as well as other tangible assistance was ad- 
 visable. There is still extant a contract dated March 
 1 6, 1866, which reveals that at that time a firm was 
 organized by Tourgee, Seneca Kuhn of Greensboro,- 
 and R. L. Pettingill, formerly of Rochester, with a 
 joint capital of $4500 in three equal shares, to be 
 known as the Tourgee, Kuhn & Pettingill Firm, for 
 the purpose of conducting the nursery business. Prob- 
 ably this same triumvirate also practised law together 
 under the name of A. W. Tourgee & Co., although it 
 is not certain that Pettingill was a partner. But the 
 bonds apparently thus firmly forged were soon broken, 
 for Pettingill withdrew from the nursery firm in the 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 35 
 
 following summer, and Kuhn followed suit on De- 
 cember 6, 1866. Soon after this, Tourgee and Kuhn 
 also dissolved the ties of legal partnership. The exact 
 reasons for these dissolutions are not definitely known, 
 though Tourgee later referred to Kuhn as a 'Pascal/' 
 apparently because he appropriated certain funds to 
 himself; but this being a favorite derogatory epithet of 
 Tourgee's, it is perhaps best to state the mere facts and 
 not attempt to draw conclusions. At all events, there 
 is a sudden cessation at this time of any further in- 
 formation about the nursery business, whereas there is 
 abundance of evidence that ere long Tourgee was hard 
 pressed for money; and by June, 1867, the nursery 
 venture had found an early grave, while Tourgee was 
 left several thousand dollars in debt. 
 
 During the year 1866 he had already begun that 
 fearless and imprudent course of unceasing criticism 
 of all things Southern that marked his whole subse- 
 quent career. He was a delegate to the Loyalist Con- 
 vention held at Philadelphia in September, which 
 'Vas designed to bring about a demonstration by the 
 thick-and-thin opponents of secession and Confeder- 
 acy, who, through the operation of Johnson's policy, 
 had been overwhelmed in their respective states by the 
 popular ex-Confederates." 1 At this convention he 
 delivered a speech in which he bitterly assailed the 
 South for its treatment of the negro. This, together 
 with other utterances of a similar unqualified nature, 
 led to his receiving the first of a series of anonymous 
 * "Reconstruction Political and Social," by W. A. Dunning 
 
/ 
 
 36 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 letters, which from that time on were showered upon 
 him during his stay in the South. Several of these 
 made the customary threat of giving him a coat of tar 
 and feathers if his "lying tung," as one epistle put it, 
 was not stopped. Some of them were, however, 
 friendly letters warning him for the sake of personal 
 safety to be discreet or else leave the South. But 
 threats or words of friendly counsel equally failed to 
 move him, though in the following year he took the 
 wise precaution of requesting and obtaining permis- 
 sion to carry firearms for personal protection. 
 
 Meanwhile, undaunted by disrupted partnerships 
 and the imminent failure of his nursery, the irrepres- 
 sible Tourgee, whose faith in all sorts of financial will- 
 o-the-wisps seemed to grow stronger every time it was 
 knocked topsy-turvy, was already forming a new 
 enterprise even before the final failure of his first busi- 
 ness experience. He had probably been engaged in 
 the real estate business in 1866, possibly again with a 
 partner; at any rate, the statement that the first half 
 of the year 1867 saw him embarked on his first 
 journalistic venture fortunately needs no qualification. 
 On January 3, 1867, there appeared the first edition 
 of The Union Register, published by the Union Pub- 
 lishing Company at Greensboro. This was a weekly 
 newspaper containing four very large pages of seven 
 columns each, which sold for three dollars per year. 
 While Tourgee's name does not appear directly in 
 print as editor of this paper, its editor he unquestion- 
 ably was ; and the following utterance, taken from the 
 editorial of the first number and explaining the func- 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 37 
 
 tion of the paper, is with Httle doubt his own pro- 
 nouncement: "We are aware that the advocacy of 
 Union principles; or, if you prefer the word, radical 
 principles, is anything but a popular movement in any 
 part of the South. It is what we have enlisted for, 
 however. . . . Let us . . . give our strength to loose it 
 [the South] from the slough of ignorance and 
 prejudice." This same editorial also speaks of the 
 *'poor, misguided and mismanaged South.'' An edi- 
 torial on January 25 also gives the unnecessary in- 
 formation that ''the Register hopes never to be a 'mild' 
 advocate of anything" ; for if Tourgee ever reiterated 
 his entire lack of lukewarmness once, he did it a thou- 
 sand times. It would seem that the statement of the 
 first editorial to the eifect that the advocacy of Union 
 principles was anything but a popular Southern move- 
 ment had amply proved itself by the following June, 
 for an editorial on the fourteenth of that month states 
 that the "present number of the Register is the last 
 which will be published in its present locality. . . . Six 
 months ago, under every possible form of discourage- 
 ment, the Register sprang into life, the unfaltering 
 champion of true and absolute Republicanism. . . . The 
 hundreds of North Carolinians who are patrons of the 
 Register may be regarded as the forlorn hope of true 
 Republicanism in the state." Other editorials had 
 advocated the principles which Tourgee fought for in 
 the convention the following year. The paper was 
 transferred to Raleigh under different management, 
 to which place it is probable that the "forlorn hope" 
 sent many letters of inquiry as to the fate of the three 
 
38 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 dollars which had been invested by many Republicans 
 in a year's subscription. Thus ended in failure an- 
 other of Tourgee's attempts to succeed in an under- 
 taking which required the "head for business" he did 
 not have. That it was a failure, though partly be- 
 cause of extraneous reasons, is sufficiently attested in 
 his own words, in a letter dated April 2, 1868: 'T 
 started one newspaper here at Greensboro — the 
 Register — and it ran on until, by exterior mishaps, I 
 lost all I had brought here." This is probably a refer- 
 ence to the nursery fiasco ; at any rate, the newspaper 
 was not successful, and it is doubtful if it paid for the 
 cost of its production. These various enterprises of 
 his, however, failures though they had been, combined 
 to make him a fairly prominent figure in the public 
 eye. 
 
 Tourgee was already forming the habit of making 
 speeches whenever opportunity offered, in which he 
 was apparently utterly reckless of the effects of his 
 statements on the feelings of his audience. A South- 
 ern gentleman later commented thus on one of these 
 speeches delivered at Greensboro: "He let fly a speech 
 at Andrew Johnson which, I reckon, made him the 
 most hated man in all that community. He said he 
 was worse than Catiline ; that he was no improvement 
 on Jefferson Davis, etc. While we all listened in 
 speechless disgust, I couldn't help admiring the per- 
 sistence and pluck of the little devil." ^ 
 
 Hated or not, however, the "little devil" would have 
 been appointed Judge of the Superior Court, Seventh 
 ^New York Tribune, April 4, 1881. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 39 
 
 Judicial District of North Carolina, in the early part 
 of 1867, had it not been for the bitterness entertained 
 against him by the governor of the state, Jonathan 
 Worth, who had read Tourgee's speech which had 
 been delivered at the Loyalist Convention in Phila- 
 delphia in September, 1866, and who now attacked 
 him vehemently for its statements about Southern 
 atrocities against the negro. Governor Worth in his 
 correspondence gives vent to his opinions about 
 Tourgee in the following language: 'Tourgee, the 
 meanest Yankee who has ever settled among us" ;^ 
 "this vile wretch Tourgee" ;2 ''this contemptible 
 Tourgee" ^ and, perhaps most scathing of all, simply, 
 "this Tourgee." * In giving his reasons for objecting 
 to Tourgee as a judge, Worth says: 'T am sure I have 
 heard more than 100 men speak of Tourgee as a man 
 of 'most contemptible character' and I never heard one 
 speak well of him." ^ The irascible governor also 
 stated on May 26, 1868, that Tourgee had "never 
 practised law in this state nor had a license to prac- 
 tise" ; ^ but this statement was incorrect, for in a letter 
 to the Paymaster General at Washington, March 23, 
 1868, Tourgee says that he has held a license to prac- 
 tise since 1867, and objects against being taxed for a 
 new license. But the doughty governor's opposition 
 '' ' "The Correspondence of Jonathan Worth," collected and 
 edited by J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Raleigh, Edwards & 
 Broughton, 1909. Two vols. Vol. II, p. 1120. 
 Uhid., p. 17(i. 
 'Ibid., 777- 
 'Ibid. 
 
 "Ibid., 1 1 14. 
 "Ibid., 1213. 
 
40 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 to Tourgee as a judge had merely the effect of post- 
 poning that event only a little over a year; for on 
 March 21, 1868, Tourgee wrote a letter accepting the 
 nomination for the office of judge, and in the election 
 which followed he was put in the office by a majority 
 of over twenty-five thousand. 
 
 Before this personal triumph, however, an event took 
 place with which Tourgee's name is closely associated. 
 On January 14, 1868, a Constitutional Convention met 
 at Raleigh and one of the members was Tourgee. The 
 delegation included 13 Conservatives, 107 Republicans 
 (of whom 16 were carpet-baggers) and 13 negroes.^ 
 Hence it was that ''Individually and collectively the 
 'carpet-baggers' controlled the convention absolutely."^ 
 Tourgee himself advocated that the entire state debt 
 of the new North Carolina should be repudiated. But 
 this doctrine was too strong for the majority, being at- 
 tacked even by three colored delegates, and so was 
 defeated.^ He was, however, appointed one of three 
 commissioners for a term of three years at a salary 
 of $200 a month to codify the laws of the State.* In 
 this capacity he was the chief figure in putting into 
 organic law the Code of Civil Procedure, largely a 
 Northern idea, copied from the codes of New York 
 and Ohio. This code was of course strongly opposed 
 by some Southern lawyers, but finally proved its worth, 
 
 ^"Reconstruction in Nortli Carolina," Hamilton, p. 229. 
 ^Ibid., 237. 
 » Ibid., 238. 
 *Ibid., 239. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 41 
 
 since it was much less cumbersome than the old code 
 had been. 
 
 The following excerpts from a letter of Tourgee's 
 to his daughter, dated February i, 1890, will serve to 
 show his own reaction to this convention, to his election 
 as judge, and to his first literary work of importance : 
 'The fear of starvation and shame led me to fight for 
 a place as a member of the Constitutional Convention 
 of 1868. I found myself the strongest man in it. I 
 suffered almost mortal agony over the task of under- 
 taking the duties of the Judgeship in 1868. It was 
 easy to me and I won honor in it. ... I do not suppose 
 any one who knew me would have advised me to get 
 an election to the Convention, to accept the Judgeship, 
 or to write 'Toinette.' They are the three things on 
 which my successes are all based." 
 
 Whatever may be thought of the tone of this letter, 
 written to show his daughter the necessity of follow- 
 ing one's own star and of making decisions without 
 waiting for advice, it is certain that many Southern 
 gentlemen would not have advised him to do any of 
 the above things. One of them would doubtless have 
 been the person referred to in a letter of Tourgee's 
 dated April 2, 1868 : *'You would have been in danger 
 of spasms if you had seen me drop a platter over an 
 opponent's pate at a public dinner last week. He called 
 me a 'rascal.' Of course I cared not a flea-bite for his 
 words, but if I had not resented them the crowd would 
 have set me down as a coward. So I was fool enough 
 to do it." This first ''fool's errand" episode of which 
 
42 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 there is any mention doubtless refers to his campaign 
 as a candidate for the office of judge, and the incident 
 related is but one of many in a campaign of general 
 vilification on both sides. It seems that Governor 
 Worth was still on the war-path, for in a private letter 
 dated April 15, 1868, Tourgee says: *'I happen to 
 know that Governor Worth used every inducement to 
 get some of my enemies here to slander me. ... I in- 
 tend to make the old scoundrel smart for it some time 
 and perhaps some others." One type of slander directed 
 at him was the deliberate charge, printed by several 
 newspapers, that he had been in an Ohio prison four 
 and one half years for burglary. This malicious lie 
 Tourgee at once indignantly denied and offered a re- 
 ward of $1000 to anyone who could show tangible 
 evidence connecting him with such guilt. It is more 
 than doubtful if he could have paid such a sum at that 
 particular time, but he was of course aware that he 
 was safe in offering to do so. His usual method of 
 answering these assaults upon his character, whether 
 in his private letters or in articles intended for pub- 
 lication, was to state that such low, mean, contemptible 
 reptiles as those who were attacking him deserved only 
 silent contempt; and he would then forthwith proceed 
 to dig up every scurrilous adjective he could think of 
 to hurl at their heads, silently contemptuous for any- 
 where from five to thirty pages. 
 
 In spite of these numerous enemies of his, however, 
 Tourgee was elected judge and began his duties in 
 August, 1868, duties which occupied his time for the 
 next six years. As his jurisdiction extended over 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 43 
 
 eight counties, he was absent from home much of the 
 time. The $5000 per year which his office paid him, 
 together with the money received for helping codify 
 the laws of the state, enabled him in the following year 
 to pay off the still remaining debts of Tourgee & Co., 
 as well as to purchase a house and lot on Asheboro 
 Street for $3500, which was probably a welcome 
 change for him and his wife after their life on the 
 nursery farm about four miles west of Greensboro. 
 But that he still considered himself underpaid for his 
 services on the bench is sufficiently attested by a docu- 
 ment drawn up by him in July, 1868, entitled "Reasons 
 for the Increase of Judges' Salaries," a document 
 which would probably never have seen the light of day 
 had he not himself been a judge. 
 
 It was during the period in which he was judge 
 that Tourgee experienced the most exciting events of 
 his more than ordinarily exciting career. There can 
 be little question that his life was in almost constant 
 danger during this time. The chief factor in this was 
 of course the notorious Ku Klux Klan, the secret or- 
 ganization which history and tradition have made so 
 familiar as to need no discussion here. Tourgee, with 
 his uncompromising carpet-bagger traits, which were 
 shown in giving preference to negroes over whites 
 whenever suitable opportunity offered, was a perfectly 
 natural object for its attack. His private letters during 
 this period abound in references to the active hostility 
 which this terrorizing band manifested against him. 
 He received many notices which definitely fixed the 
 time when he was to be assassinated, as well as a paper, 
 
» 
 
 44 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 pinned by a knife to his dcwDr, on which was a picture 
 of a coffin and a written notice that he was doomed to 
 an agonizing death. On one occasion the place fixed 
 for his assassination was the room in which he was 
 holding court, the murder to be done after he had 
 finished speaking and had turned his back to retire 
 through a door in the rear. Luckily the plot was re- 
 vealed to him and he held court all the morning, to all 
 appearances as unconcernedly as ever ; but when he had 
 completed the morning's work, instead of retiring to 
 the rear, he walked straight through the crowded 
 room across the street to his hotel, where an immediate 
 change of clothes was necessary, since his suit was 
 damp with perspiration caused by nervous reaction 
 after the danger was past. Attempts were also made 
 to ambush him, but he fortunately escaped and kept 
 doggedly to his task of journeying on horseback to 
 hold court in different parts of his jurisdiction. 
 
 By 1870, however, the grim Ku Klux shadow al- 
 ways at his heels, together with consideration for the 
 terrific strain put upon his wife's nerves when he was 
 traveling about constantly menaced by these dangers, 
 at last induced him to think seriously of leaving the 
 state for a time. His Hfe became more precious and 
 necessary than ever in that year too, for on November 
 19, 1870, his only child, a daughter, first called Lodie, 
 after her mother's middle name, and later Aimee, was 
 bom; and so, despite great personal bravery, he de- 
 cided that prudence made it necessary for him tempor- 
 arily to leave the state. The Ku Klux was dogging 
 him hotter than ever now, because in the summer of 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 45 
 
 1870 a strictly private letter of his had been published 
 by Governor Holden, which had virulently attacked 
 the Ku Klux for its various outrages on the negroes, 
 and had cited many specific cases of its misdeeds. 
 Hence it was that one of his August letters had the 
 following: ''I think .... it may be mere common 
 prudence to get away from K. K. K. cords and daggers 
 for a year or two. I am not going to give up my grip, 
 but just let go to get a new hold." Another letter of 
 the same month contains this outburst : ''I wouldn't 
 mind yellow fever, cholera, fleas, earthquakes, vertigo, 
 smallpox, cannibalism, icebergs, sharks, or any other 
 name or shape of horror— provided always there are 
 no K. K. K." And this same letter, marked "confiden- 
 tial," has this closing passage: "Now— you go and 
 publish this a la Holden and if you are not damned for 
 it it shall not be my fault." What Tourgee particularly 
 wished was the Consulate in South America, more 
 particularly still in Chile, for he was fairly proficient 
 in Spanish, partly acquired, as will be remembered, 
 while he was a prisoner of war. He would have been 
 satisfied had the salary been sufficient only to pay his 
 expenses. But the position did not come; accordingly, 
 not having found any opening that suited him, he 
 remained where he was, still braving the dangers of 
 the Ku Klux, even though he was ''so sick oi the 
 
 whole d d country," as another letter puts it. 
 
 The following year saw him again chasing the ever 
 vanishing phantom of success in business. He con- 
 ceived the idea that some of the timber in the state 
 might profitably be converted into various sorts of tool- 
 
46 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 handles, and then followed the formation of the North 
 Carolina Handle Company. This new firm was 
 started with the enthusiasm that he always showed 
 when he was just entering upon some new venture, 
 an enthusiasm that lasted to the end of his life, despite 
 the fact that he always failed signally in everything 
 that demanded business ability. In February, 1871, 
 he was trying to mortgage his property to obtain funds 
 for the new company, a practice which he always fol- 
 lowed when in pursuit of any new financial chimera. 
 On February 22 he said in a letter : "I know but little 
 more than I did. ... as to where the funds are com- 
 ing from. ... I am just going to trust blindly in my 
 usual luck and go on until I come out or am stopped 
 entirely." Thus, much as Robinson Crusoe hollowed 
 out his boat without considering how he was going to 
 launch it, Tourgee started in great optimism to build 
 the handle factory when he had no funds with which 
 to complete it. Further details of this affair are not 
 very clear, though there are still a few letters extant 
 showing that some business was done. Apparently it 
 lasted till the autum of 1873, when the panic came. 
 It left him with liabilities of $30,000 and only a 
 quantity of unsalable stock with which to meet them; 
 for what little he had at this time consisted in mort- 
 gages on real estate. He set himself to work to pay 
 off these debts with his characteristic determination, 
 as a letter of his dated June 20, 1876, shows: "The 
 monetary misfortunes of which you are already in- 
 formed have given me two years of very hard work, 
 
/ 
 
 ALBION W. TOURGEE 47 
 
 though I can now see that they have been of great 
 advantage to me." 
 
 It is, however, Tourgee, the successful novelist, 
 rather than Tourgee, the unsuccessful business man, 
 who is of chief interest; for his literary labors during 
 these eventful years had again been resumed. At vari- 
 ous times from 1866 to 1870 he had written articles 
 of a political nature to some of the newspapers in his 
 vicinity, signed ''Wenckar," a variation of his mother's 
 maiden name. Several fragments of manuscripts of 
 his written during this period are extant, one being 
 the outlined chapters of what was apparently to be a 
 novel called *'My Horses," full of horses and sentiment. 
 He was a great lover of horses all his life and at 
 various times owned some fine "steppers." Other 
 Hterary relics of this period are : the concluding chap- 
 ters of a novel whose events took place in Scotland, a 
 story of ''adventure and love"; fragmentary remains 
 of a very long poem dealing with cruelty to the negro ; 
 and several speeches delivered on various memorial 
 days in the South, filled with the usual patriotic 
 platitudes. During 1871 and 1872, he wrote a dozen 
 or so articles to the newspapers under the pseudonym 
 of "God's Anynted Phue," a supposedly popular ren- 
 dering of "God's Anointed Few." These articles, in 
 the form of poems, letters and sermons, ironically at- 
 tack the pride, clannishness and class hatred which 
 Tourgee always attributed to the Southerners, "God's 
 Anynted Phue" being a particularly crass example of 
 Southern egotism. 
 
48 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 But it was not until 1874 that his first major work 
 appeared. That year saw the pubHcation of 
 **Toinette," which had, as a matter of fact, been written 
 in 1868-9. Following a practice which had already 
 been established, and which was doubtless begun as a 
 means of avoiding personal attacks, Tourgee published 
 this book under the non de plume ''Henry Churton." 
 In 188 1, when the book reappeared under his own 
 name with the new title, ''A Royal Gentleman," he 
 wrote a preface which makes plain his purpose in 
 penning the story. He believed that the anti-slavery 
 writers of the North had tended to magnify the chief 
 apparent evil of slavery — cruelty to the negro — at the 
 expense of what was the basis of the whole system, 
 the Southern aristocratic conception of society, in 
 which the prime element was pride of caste. With this 
 idea in mind, he attempted to delineate types of the 
 slave, the freeman, the ''poor white," and the "royal 
 gentleman," or the slave-holder. He wished also to 
 show that, while slavery in name had been abolished, 
 it was actually as much alive as ever, because the re- 
 sults of the Civil War had not changed, but rather 
 strengthened, the belief of the Southerners in their 
 superiority to the people of the North, and in their 
 right to dominate the negro, if not physically, at least 
 socially and politically. In other words, the Civil 
 War had merely lopped off a few branches from the 
 tree of slavery, but had left its roots and trunk un- 
 touched. From all this it followed, still according to 
 Tourgee, that slavery was a much greater evil to the 
 slave-holder than to the slave himself. These, then, 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 49 
 
 were the several ideas underlying' this story, which 
 opens in 1858 and runs briefly thus : 
 
 Geoffrey Hunter, the **royal gentleman," is a typical 
 young Southern lawyer, in whose father's house is 
 Toinette, a beautiful slave who has only a trace of 
 dark blood in her veins, and of whom he is very fond. 
 He aids her in obtaining an education, with the in- 
 tention of giving her her freedom, which he finally 
 does. Meanwhile the usual result of such close 
 intimacy follows, the Civil War comes, and Geoffrey 
 goes to fight, leaving Toinette and their child at his 
 home. He is severely wounded and Toinette comes to 
 nurse him back to life and health ; but when he proposes 
 a renewal of their old intimacy, she declines unless he 
 will marry her. This he of course angrily refuses to 
 do, still regarding her as his chattel; she accordingly 
 leaves him for good and they both live sorrowfully 
 ever after. 
 
 This tale contains most of the faults and virtues 
 which subsequently appeared in Tourgee's stories. 
 The plot is artificial, depending largely upon coin- 
 cidence; the characters, though called "types," are far 
 from typical, because their traits are so much exagger- 
 ated. The slave, Toinette, is impossibly idealized; it 
 is doubtful if one in a million of her class ever ap- 
 proached her in combined beauty, grace, intellect, and 
 morality — for she is of course held blameless of her 
 relations with Hunter. He is a possible figure, though 
 he represents Tourgee's conception of the typical 
 Southern gentleman rather than the actuality. The 
 "poor white," Betty Certain, is also idealized far be- 
 
50 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 yond her class. There are several reminders of Gothic 
 Romance in the form of a supposed ghost, a concealed 
 drawer, and in the attempt to create different kinds of 
 physical horror of the midnight variety. The story is 
 constantly interrupted by pronouncements against 
 slavery, and eulogies of Lincoln, who is unnecessarily, 
 not to say unhistorically, dragged in several times. 
 And yet the tale is by no means lacking in a certain 
 kind of merit. Impossible as the highly sentimentalized 
 Toinette is, this first of the large family of idealized 
 negroes portrayed by Tourgee is possibly the most im- 
 pressive creation of the whole lot. Betty Certain, 
 despite the unconvincing complexity of her character, 
 is a striking figure at times. And in melodramatic 
 narrative, which was always Tourgee's forte as a 
 novelist, there are several really powerful specimens : 
 Hunter's midnight search for the ghost, his rescue of 
 his drowning son, and especially the fight between 
 Betty Certain and Toinette's ghostly mother. All in 
 all, however, it can justly be said that Tourgee's re- 
 mark in the preface to the 1881 volume, ''it is a picture 
 of facts,'' while not completely wrong is certainly 
 largely so, for he here made the same error which he 
 continued to repeat all his life: he rarely saw facts, 
 but only their distorted images in the imperfect mirror 
 of his strongly biased personality. The book, printed 
 partly to help pay his debts, failed in that purpose. A 
 letter from his publishers. Fords, Howard, and Hul- 
 bert, New York, dated July i, 1875, states that only 
 2331 copies had been sold and that the loss on the 
 edition had been about $1100. These excerpts from 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 51 
 
 a letter to his wife, September 4, 1875, also' corroborate 
 the almost certain fact of the book's failure : "I fear 
 nothing can save us from complete wreck ... as to 
 estate and property ... If Toinette' had only been 
 a success" — but the rest of the sentence need not be 
 quoted. 
 
 Meanwhile his career as a judge was rapidly coming 
 to an end, though the appellation clung to him through 
 all his life.^ One reform which he caused to be put 
 into execution was the installation of heating systems 
 in all the jails in his district; for, being much annoyed 
 to discover that there had never been a fire in any 
 North Carolina jail, he required a grand jury to ascer- 
 tain the facts and, moved doubtless by memories of 
 his own prison experiences, caused the remedy to be 
 applied. The longer he was judge, the stronger be- 
 came the opposition of his enemies, and in 1873 they 
 unsuccessfully tried to secure his impeachment. On 
 February 19 of the previous year he had tendered his 
 resignation as a member of the board of trustees of 
 the University of North Carolina, because the press 
 had so severely attacked his appointment that he feared 
 that, if he continued in that capacity, he might injure 
 the reputation of the institution. In 1874 his friends 
 advanced his name as a candidate for the Congressional 
 nomination ; but though he indicated his willingness to 
 accept, in the usual "This-honor-has-been-forced-upon- 
 
 ^ While serving as judge, Tourgee recorded many sworn testi- 
 monials of negroes who had been the victims of Ku Klux out- 
 rages, and he later made use of many of these documents in 
 "The Invisible Empire." 
 
52 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 me-against-my-wishes" type of speech, the opposition 
 was too strong and, much to his chagrin, he failed to 
 obtain the nomination. In the following year, how- 
 ever, he was re-elected as a delegate to the second Con- 
 stitutional Convention at Raleigh, by the largest ma- 
 jority ever given to a candidate from his county. This 
 Convention strove to protect what had been accom- 
 plished by the Convention of 1868, and hence was 
 negative in character. During this second Convention, 
 a prominent Democrat made public threats to shoot 
 Tourgee ; but, fearless as usual, he borrowed a revolver 
 from a friend, walked up to the man in a public place 
 and ''remained staring fixedly at him for several 
 moments" ; but no attempt was made to put the threat 
 into execution. 
 
 In February, 1876, President Grant appointed 
 Tourgee to the position of Pension Agent at Raleigh, 
 and his wife was appointed clerk to administer oaths. 
 His departure from Greensboro to Raleigh was 
 graphically depicted by O. Henry, then a lad of four- 
 teen living in Greensboro, who drew a cartoon en- 
 titled '']udge Tourgee Leaving Greensboro," which 
 represents him sailing through the air on angelic wings, 
 his left hand holding a carpet-bag, his right a handker- 
 chief used to wipe away the tears which can be seen 
 dropping from his one good eye.^ So he left the place 
 which had been a residence rather than a home for 
 the last eleven years, but the hatred of his enemies 
 still followed him throughout all his stay at Raleigh. 
 
 ^ "O. Henry Biography," C. Alphonso Smith, Doubleday, Page 
 & Co., Garden City, N. Y., 1916, p. 60. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 53 
 
 As a matter of fact, his actual home was still at Greens- 
 boro, for he spent much time at his mother-in-law's 
 house there and bought no residence in Raleigh, but 
 Hved in a hotel; also, he retained his law office at 
 Greensboro. In a letter written April 15, 1877, he 
 says that the feeHng against him since his appoint- 
 ment as Pension Agent has been stronger than ever, 
 if possible, and that he now merely endures what he 
 cannot avoid. He curses his folly in ever going South, 
 and says he has stopped going to church because of 
 persecution and vilification at the hands of supposedly 
 Christian brethren ; he bitterly attacks the South and 
 all things Southern, and asks the friend to whom the 
 letter was directed to be very discreet because it is ''all 
 I can do to live among these people now," and he can- 
 not leave the South at present without serious financial 
 
 loss. 
 
 In his new position, his wife did nearly all the actual 
 work while he practised law, endeavoring by these com- 
 bined means to pay off his debts. During the Presi- 
 dential campaign of 1876, he made numerous speeches 
 for the Republican candidate. Two years later he 
 closed his law office to run for Congress in the Fifth 
 Congressional District, and succeeded in materially 
 reducing the majority of his Democratic opponent, but 
 failed to be elected. He also lost much money by this 
 venture, but was nevertheless happy in the thought 
 that he was fighting for reform. 
 
 The closing period of Tourgee's fourteen-year resi- 
 dence in the South was a time of constantly increasing 
 hterary activity on his part. While still a judge at 
 
54 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 Greensboro, he wrote two novelettes, both printed in 
 the same volume, "Jo^^ Eax" [pronounced Eex] and 
 ''Mamelon," two ''rifts in the shadow" of Southern 
 conditions, as the preface says, that almost constantly 
 overhung him. The rift is not especially pronounced 
 in either tale, however, for both deal largely with war 
 conditions. The hero of ''John Eax," Charles De 
 Jeunette, of Huguenot ancestry, a lawyer by profes- 
 sion, marries Alice Bain, an English girl of low social 
 rank, and thus brings upon himself the bitter hatred of 
 his family. He is imprisoned for debt, but escapes and 
 espouses the cause of the North in the Civil War, in 
 which he becomes a general ; and eventually, in order 
 to inherit a large fortune left to his wife by her great- 
 grandfather, John Eax, he assumes that name himself, 
 this being a condition stipulated in the will. The 
 autobiographical elements in this story are plainly 
 evident in the hero's birth, profession and war ac- 
 tivities, as is true of nearly all of Tourgee's novels. 
 After the brief resume given above, it need hardly 
 be said that the story is almost absolutely devoid of 
 any semblance of originality, since it has all the ear- 
 marks of the story of adventure plus sentiment which 
 was so popular in Tourgee's day. It has the superb 
 horses, the highly colored narrative, the impossible 
 evolutions of character, and the attacks upon the 
 South, so characteristic of him. The tale had its origin 
 in a story, related to Tourgee by a good story-teller, 
 which dealt with an old family that had once been 
 prominent in that vicinity. On the day after he heard 
 this story, he was unable, even amid the routine af- 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 55 
 
 fairs of a country court, to banish it with all its pos- 
 sibilities from his mind; and that night, from sunset 
 till sunrise, he wrote the one hundred and thirty-five 
 pages that make up the tale. Even if the physical 
 possibility of penning a story of one hundred and 
 thirty-five pages in a single night be granted, candor 
 still necessitates the comment that Tourgee's reputa- 
 tion would have suffered very little had he spent that 
 night sleeping the sleep of the unimaginative just. 
 
 ''Mamelon" had its inception in an inscription read 
 on a tombstone in a neglected church-yard, whither 
 Tourgee wandered one day in the spring of 1874 dur- 
 ing a lull in court affairs; and there it was that the 
 story thus suggested took shape in his mind, the first 
 chapters being written in the silence of the cemetery. 
 The tale is founded directly upon his already narrated 
 experiences with the ill-fated North Carolina Handle 
 Company. The hero, Paul Dewar, weds his childhood 
 sweetheart. Sue Moyer, and, as is to be expected, be- 
 comes a general in the Civil War. After the war, 
 impressed with the abundance of hickory in his locality, 
 the Carolinas, he starts a handle factory which lasts 
 until the panic of 1873. Discouraged by this disaster, 
 he attempts to take his own life; but the bullet, after 
 seriously wounding him, conveniently leaves its mark 
 upon a stone which he, a student of geology, has col- 
 lected, together with many other relics, from an Indian 
 mound dubbed ''Mamelon." The stone thus happily 
 scarred by the providential bit of lead is found to con- 
 tain corundum, and the New York Corundum Com- 
 pany eventually becomes as successful as one wishes 
 
56 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 that the North Carolina Handle Company might have 
 become. The French ancestry of the hero, who, though 
 not as usual a lawyer, is persuaded by his wife to 
 study law, together with his final abundant success, 
 and the features already mentioned, all combine to 
 make a largely autobiographic and almost completely 
 uninspired tale, which by no means implies that it does 
 not make entertaining reading. 
 
 A letter-head found in Tourgee's personal effects 
 witnesses that during the winter of 1875-6 he had 
 found a new means of remuneration, in which he was 
 ever after intermittently engaged. He gave lectures on 
 the following topics : 'The Coming Crusade" ; "Today 
 in Account with Yesterday"; ''Out of the Strong- 
 Sweetness" ; 'The Ben Adhemite Era" ; and "Southern 
 Humor." A copy of the "Ben Adhemite Era" only has 
 been found, which, based on Leigh Hunt's familiar 
 poem, paints the future in glowing colors ; but it may 
 safely be inferred from the titles that most of the other 
 lectures dealt with the Reconstruction Period as well. 
 This letter-head also states that the lectures were to 
 be given by "Albion W. Tourgee, Late Judge of the 
 Superior Court," and the "Author of 'Toinette'"; 
 hence it appears that by this time "Henry Churton" 
 had dropped his false garments and assumed genuine 
 judicial robes, although as late as 1875, before reveal- 
 ing himself to the public, "Henry Churton" still wrote 
 numerous articles to Southern newspapers, which at- 
 tempted to show that the policy of Reconstruction was 
 a failure. 
 
 The residence at Raleigh saw the production of 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 57, 
 
 Tourgee's final literary labors completed in the South. 
 Two were of a similar kind and were work of a 
 technically legal nature. 'The Code of Civil Procedure 
 of North Carolina with Notes and Decisions," and "A 
 Digest of Cited Cases in the North Carolina Reports," 
 were both copyrighted February 9, 1878. The preface 
 to the former volume states that the ''object of this 
 volume is to enable the professional reader more easily, 
 quickly and certainly to ascertain what is the law in 
 regard to practice in Civil Action and Special Plead- 
 ings." Tourgee received many letters of praise for 
 the production of this useful book, which cost him 
 much hard labor. It was of course written specifically 
 for North Carolina lawyers, as was the "Digest of 
 Cited Cases," of which there was an edition of six 
 hundred copies which sold for twelve dollars each. 
 
 During this same year. The North State, a paper 
 in Greensboro, published weekly from March 18 to 
 May 28, and then irregularly until August 12, the "C" 
 letters, which occasioned a really huge amount of 
 speculation in both North and South as to their author- 
 ship and pertinence. These letters, which occupied 
 about two large newspaper columns and always closed, 
 "We shall see. 'C'," were distinctly journalistic in 
 tone, being written in homely, popular style, despite 
 frequent poetical and classical quotations. They con- 
 sisted of attacks against the Ku Klux, defenses of the 
 negro, and much satire directed against Democratic 
 candidates for political offices, particularly the bench. 
 The intense partisanship, inexcusable personal scurril- 
 ity and mud-slinging which were everywhere present in 
 
58 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 them, together with their graphic style, caused several 
 papers to rank them even higher than the notorious 
 ^'Letters of Junius." One person especially attacked 
 in them, Judge Fowle of Raleigh, suspected that 
 Tourgee was the author; and, chancing to meet him 
 one day on the streets of Raleigh, directly accused him 
 of the authorship and followed his charge with a 
 shower of fisticuffs, to which Tourgee promptly 
 retaliated. He suffered more than his justly furious 
 antagonist in this brachial contest, as his discolored 
 countenance indicated for some time, although his 
 epistolary accounts of this affair stoutly maintain the 
 contrary. After this occurrence became known, it was 
 no longer possible for ''C" to hide his identity from 
 a long curious public. 
 
 Tourgee's period of residence in the South was now 
 nearly ended. Hatred against him had been steadily 
 waxing stronger ever since his arrival there; and by 
 1879 h^ was satisfied that the only sensible course for 
 him to pursue was to return to the section for which 
 he had fought and had always defended by tongue and 
 pen. During the summer of 1879 he spent his time 
 in closing his business affairs, and in the month of 
 August he and his family boarded a New York train, 
 incidentally taking several uncompleted manuscripts, 
 one of which, about to appear in printed form, was 
 destined soon to make his name ''known to almost 
 every household," as a convenient expression has it. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 "A FOOL'S ERRAND" 
 
 The Nezv York Tribune, September 3, 1879, de- 
 voted one and a half columns of its front page to an 
 interview granted by Tourgee to one of its reporters 
 on his return North. In this interview Tourgee defi- 
 nitely states that he had returned to a more congenial 
 atmosphere because of Southern antagonism to all 
 things Northern, and particularly because of its mani- 
 festations of hatred against himself. His whereabouts 
 for the next three months are not definitely known, 
 but it is certain that most of this time was spent in 
 New York attending to the publication of the two 
 books which will now be considered in detail. Al- 
 though "Figs and Thistles" appeared a month and a 
 half earlier than ''A Fool's Errand," the greater 
 historical importance of the latter work makes it ad- 
 visable to discuss it first. 
 
 On October 4, 1879, the following notice appeared 
 in the advertising pages of the New York Tribune: 
 "Published This Day. Figs and Thistles. . . . Ready 
 shortly, A Fool's Errand. Fords, Howard and Hul- 
 bert." On November 10, the Literary Notes depart- 
 ment in the Tribune contained this item : "The ad- 
 
 59 
 
6o ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 vance demand for 'A Fool's Errand' has been so great 
 that Fords, Howard and Hulbert have decided to de- 
 lay the publication of it until November 15, in order 
 to prepare a larger edition." And on that date the same 
 paper contained another advertisement stating that ''A 
 Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools," could be pur- 
 chased at all bookstores or at the publishers. The book 
 which the public was thus anticipating, and which it 
 has since generally regarded as the first literary effort 
 dealing with the Reconstruction Era; the book also 
 which for the next few months was probably the most 
 discussed American novel of the day; and the book 
 which was undoubtedly Tourgee's most successful 
 work, at any rate so far as earnings and popularity are 
 concerned, certainly deserves considerable attention. 
 
 He himself has told how it came to be written, in a 
 personal letter from Bordeaux, August 24, 1903. 
 ''Early on a Sunday morning in the month of July, 
 1877, in the city of Raleigh, . . . after a sleepless 
 night spent in restless review of events which had oc- 
 curred since the close of the war of the Rebellion, 
 especially in regard to the relations of Northern and 
 Southern ideas, I wakened my wife and said, 'I am go- 
 ing to write a book and call it *'A Fool's Errand".' I 
 immediately arose, went into an adjoining room and 
 that day wrote three chapters of that work." This story 
 may be continued by a passage taken from the Personal 
 column of the Tribune, April 22, 1881, in which 
 Tourgee is quoted thus : "I laid it [the manuscript of 
 these three chapters] away and did not take it up again 
 till June, 1879, when the printing began. One chapter 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 6i 
 
 I wrote twenty times, and tore it down out of the type 
 three times. Each time I threw my manuscript into 
 the fire and entirely rew^rote the chapter. I could never 
 patch up." Apropos of the above, it may be remarked 
 that Tourgee very frequently rewrote his different 
 articles several times, to the constant despair of his 
 wife, who was thus obliged to re-copy them a like num- 
 ber of times, and that he often wrote only in time to 
 keep the printers busy. 
 
 So much for the actual composition of the tale. 
 In the preface of ''Hot Plowshares," May, 1883, 
 Tourgee first discusses the serial idea that underlay the 
 wTiting of six of his novels: **Many years ago the 
 author conceived the idea that he might aid some of 
 his fellow-countrymen and country-women to a juster 
 comprehension of these things [Northern and South- 
 em divergences] by a series of works which should 
 give, in the form of fictitious narrative, the effects of 
 these distinct and contrasted civilizations upon various 
 types of characters and during specific periods of the 
 great transition. Beginning their preparation in 1867, 
 ... he has w^orked patiently and honestly and zeal- 
 ously to complete his analysis of the representative 
 groups of characters. . . . The period covered by the 
 now completed series of six volumes extends from 
 twenty years before the war until twelve years after it. 
 ... In chronological order they would stand as fol- 
 lows: 'Hot Plowshares', 'Figs and Thistles', 'A Royal 
 Gentleman', 'A Fool's Errand', 'Bricks Without 
 Straw', 'John Fax'." As has been true with more 
 than one author of a series of novels, it is highly prob- 
 
62 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 able that this conception was by no means as clear in 
 Tourgee's mind in 1867 as it was in 1883; for his 
 wife, in a letter to The Buffalo Express, October 14, 
 1908, lays much emphasis upon the fact that Tourgee 
 did not want to write any more books dealing with 
 Southern conditions after writing *'A Fool's Errand," 
 for he feared that he would merely repeat what he had 
 already written. His publishers, however, insisted, 
 and he finally yielded to their importunity. 
 
 The book has its title because its hero goes through 
 almost identically the same experiences that Tourgee 
 himself had undergone, and comes to the conclusion 
 which he had come to, that the attempt of the North 
 to superimpose its type of civilization upon the South 
 was a "fool's errand." The title was chosen also with 
 an eye to possible pecuniary profit, for we are told 
 that "the writer believed that the form of the title 
 would constitute one of those pleasant literary conun- 
 drums which have a distinct market value, and would 
 consequently enhance the sale of the book." ^ Its story 
 is a picture of the aftermath of the Civil War in the 
 South, and the effects upon two civilizations of that 
 mighty upheaval. The similarity of its hero to Tourgee 
 is even more pronounced than in any of his other 
 books. Comfort Servosse, of French ancestry, whose 
 family moves west near Detroit, is a college graduate 
 and a lawyer. In the cause of the North he becomes 
 a brigadier-general, but loses his health and hence de- 
 cides to go South with his wife (Metta Ward before 
 marriage) and small daughter, to practise law. There 
 * Our Continent, Vol. V, p. 604. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 63 
 
 he is elected delegate to the Constitutional Convention 
 of his state, and works for the same reforms which 
 Tourgee had advocated in the Convention of 1868. 
 His life is often endangered by the Ku Klux, and he 
 loses the sympathy of nearly all save the negroes and 
 carpet-baggers. Metta is clearly enough modeled on 
 Mrs. Tourgee, and the Reverend Enos Martin, Ser- 
 vosse's former college president, is with little doubt a 
 picture of M. B. Anderson, President of Rochester 
 University. There is also a suspicious resemblance 
 between the negro, Jerry Hunt, and Mrs. Stowe's 
 Uncle Tom. Tourgee often angrily denied that any 
 of the characters in his stories had flesh-and-blood 
 prototypes, but this denial is of as little value as his 
 constant reiteration that the chief merit of his stories 
 is their ''honest, uncompromising truthfulness of 
 portraiture," as the preface to ''A Fool's Errand" puts 
 it. This apparent ''truthfulness of portraiture" was 
 without doubt largely responsible for the great popular- 
 ity of the book; but, like many other generalizations 
 avidly accepted by the public, it is founded on the 
 sands. 
 
 Tourgee makes much use of the Richardsonian de- 
 vice of letters, and constantly interrupts the really 
 powerful narrative with disquisitions on history, curses 
 loud but not always deep against the Northern policy 
 of Reconstruction, attacks on the South, and exuberant 
 praise of the negro. These interruptions, indeed, al- 
 most spoil the story as a story, since their frequent 
 recurrences are so excessively irritating to the reader. 
 The best narrative is contained in the chapter "A Race 
 
/ 
 
 64 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 Against Time," in which Lily Servosse on her high- 
 mettled steed saves her father's life from the Kii Klux, 
 in the nick of time of course, for as usual the several 
 crises in the tale are happily manipulated by coin- 
 cidence. There is much grisly realism in the scenes 
 where the ravages of the Ku Klux are shown. The 
 dialogue is fairly life-like, but the story, like Tourgee's 
 other novels, is prevailingly deficient in humor, despite, 
 or rather because of, his conscious attempts to attain it; 
 it was in his letters, when he was not taking himself 
 seriously as he always does in his novels, that there 
 is often cause for real mirth. The story contains the 
 usual sentirnental elements in the relation between 
 Servosse's daughter, Lily, and Melville Gurney, son 
 of a Confederate general. These young people, after 
 surmounting the customary obstacles strewn upon the 
 course of their true love, are happily united by the 
 death of Servosse, an event which causes the heart 
 of the ex-Confederate general to relinquish its hatred 
 toward a ''carpet-bagger" daughter-in-law. Yet m 
 spite of the obvious faults which are inherent in this 
 novel, as in others of its kind, the story really grips, as 
 "Uncle Tom's Cabin" grips, because in each case the 
 author had a burning message to give the world. 
 
 And it is the message of ''A Fool's Errand" that is 
 of chief importance, to which the largely artificial 
 narrative was merely a means of attracting public at- 
 tention. 
 
 On March 2, 1867, the Reconstruction Act had gone 
 into operation, which was to be the Northern policy 
 toward the South for the next ten years. 'This famous 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 65 
 
 law consisted of two parts : five of its six sections pro- 
 vided for the establishment and administration of a 
 rigorous and comprehensive military government 
 throughout the ten states not yet restored to the Union ; 
 while the remaining section, the fifth, declared that 
 the restoration of the states should be effected only 
 after reorganization, on the basis of general negro en- 
 franchisement and limited rebel disfranchisement." ^ 
 That this policy was short-sighted and fatally destruc- 
 tive of the very objects it sought to attain, the next ten 
 years amply demonstrated. Tourgee himself has in- 
 dicated what its immediate effect was. ''So the line 
 of demarcation was drawn. Upon the one side were 
 found only those who constituted what was termed 
 respectable people, — the bulk of those of the white race 
 who had ruled the South in the ante helium days, who 
 had fostered slavery, and been fattened by it, who had 
 made it the dominant power in the nation, together 
 with the mass of those whose courage and capacity 
 had organized rebellion, and led the South in that 
 marvelous struggle for separation. On the other side 
 were the pariahs of the land, to designate the different 
 classes of which three words were used : 'Niggers,* 
 the new-enfranchised African voters; 'Scalawags,' 
 the native whites who were willing to accept the re- 
 construction measures; and 'Carpet-baggers,' all men 
 of Northern birth, resident in the South, who should 
 elect to speak or act in favor of such reconstruction" 
 (pp. 124-5). Tourgee had, in the Convention of 1868, 
 
 * "Reconstruction Political and Social," by W. A. Dunning, 
 p. 93. 
 
66 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 insisted upon the following reforms which the hero of 
 the story also advocates : ( i ) Equal civil and political 
 rights for all men; (2) Abolition of property quahfi- 
 cations for voters, officers and jurors; (3) Election by 
 the people of all officers; (4) Penal reform — the 
 abolition of the whipping-post, the stocks and the 
 branding-iron, and the reduction of capital crimes 
 from seventeen to one or at most two; (5) A uniform 
 system of taxation; (6) An effective system of public 
 schools (p. 141). In other words, Tourgee was in 
 1868, before reaping the results of his ^'fool's errand," 
 a firm believer in the Northern policy of Reconstruc- 
 tion. He had, as he says, ''no idea that he was com- 
 mitting an enormity ; but from that day he became an 
 outlaw in the land where he had hoped to have made 
 a home, and which he desired faithfully to serve" 
 (p. 141). 
 
 But bitter experience taught him the folly of thus 
 trying to force a proud, aristocratic people to accept a 
 system of government so utterly opposed to all their 
 traditions; and at the end of his Southern residence 
 he came to believe that only the enforcement of the 
 sixth item in the above list would produce the results 
 desired in the North. He first formulated this definite 
 educational policy, a policy to which he devoted the 
 larger part of his time for the next ten years or more, 
 at the end of ''A Fool's Errand," where his mouth- 
 piece, Servosse, states the fundamental error of the Re- 
 construction Act, and its remedy : ''We tried to super- 
 impose the civilization, the idea of the North, upon the 
 South at a moment's warning. ... So we tried to 
 
/ 
 
 ALBION W. TOURGEE 67 
 
 build up communities there which should be identical in 
 thought, sentiment, growth, and development, with 
 those of the North. It was A FOOL'S ERRAND" (p. 
 341). The remedy for this state of affairs, according 
 to Tourgee, cannot come from within but must come 
 from without. "The Nation nourished and protected 
 slavery. . . . Now let the Nation undo the evil it has per- 
 mitted and encouraged. Let it educate those whom it 
 made ignorant, and protect those whom it made weak. 
 It is not a matter of favor to the black, but of safety 
 to the Nation. Make the spelling-book the scepter of 
 national power. Let the Nation educate the colored 
 man and the poor-white man because the Nation held 
 them in bondage, and is responsible for their education ; 
 educate the voter because the Nation cannot afford that 
 he should be ignorant" (pp. 346-7). In this book 
 Tourgee thus merely indicates the general remedy; he 
 was shortly to argue for the specific educational meth- 
 ods which he regarded as necessary to effect the results 
 which the Reconstruction policy had failed to attain. 
 
 Scarcely had this book been given by the press to 
 an already expectant public when the first edition was 
 sold, and for the next year edition after edition fol- 
 lowed in almost bi-monthly succession. The Nezu York 
 Tribune in its Literary Notes, December 3, 1879, 
 makes the following comment: *Tew works of the 
 day have had a more rapid and immediate success than 
 *A Fool's Errand' now enjoys. No book on the shop 
 counters sells better and the fame of it has been carried 
 on the wings of newspapers into every State if not 
 county in the land. Its reception in the South has not 
 
68 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 been of the most cordial kind, though the merit of it 
 as a composition is not denied." This statement is al- 
 most literally true. Scores of Northern newspapers 
 spoke in the most extravagant praise of the book's 
 literary worth. Ulysses S. Grant at this time delivered 
 a speech in which he casually made a favorable refer- 
 ence to ''A Fool's Errand," and on the following day 
 the firm of Fords, Howard and Hulbert was deluged 
 with a shower of telegrams requesting copies of the 
 book. The unknown author was heralded as the 
 ''Victor Hugo of America," and many prophecies were 
 made that the ''great American novelist" had at last 
 arrived. Harper's Magazine contained perhaps the 
 most adequate and restrained contemporary criticism. 
 "It can scarcely be called a love story. ... It is 
 rather an earnest and at times passionate philippic in 
 narrative form against the reconstruction policy. . . . 
 The volume is one-sided, but intensely in earnest." ^ 
 Its Northern popularity was of course not reflected in 
 the South. A letter from the New Orleans Custom 
 House, December 22, 1879, informed the publishers 
 that the book was not on sale there because Southern 
 sentiment was against it, and hence sale by subscription 
 only was advisable. The Raleigh Observer grudgingly 
 admitted that the story "is a powerfully written work, 
 and destined, we fear, to do as much harm in the world 
 as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' to which it is, indeed, a com- 
 panion piece." Meanwhile speculation as to the author 
 was rife. The Literary Notes in the A^^e; York Trib- 
 une, January 24, 1880, hazards the following guess; 
 ^Harper's Magazine, February, 1880, p. 472. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 69 
 
 "The list of persons to whom has been attributed the 
 authorship of 'A Fool's Errand' grows apace. [Some of 
 those mentioned by the Tribune were : the governor of 
 South Carolina, General Ames of Mississippi, Edmund 
 Kirk, General Joseph Abbott, Tourgee, and particu- 
 larly Mrs. Stowe.] Evidently the author does not wish 
 to be known; but those who have guessed Judge 
 Tourgee can afford to stick to their guess." As late as 
 August 25, 1880, the same paper says : " 'A Fool's Er- 
 rand' is still selling by the thousand, and the publishers 
 have found it convenient to make duplicate plates and 
 print simultaneously in New York and Boston." ^ 
 
 Perhaps it will be well to see what unbiased critics 
 at a later day thought of this book, after the tumult 
 and shouting of contemporary criticism had died away 
 and the story was almost forgotten. The Bookman 
 speaks thus: ''Of course Judge Tourgee's book was 
 not to be compared with Mrs. Stowe's. Its subject 
 
 ^Accounts of sales regularly sent to Tourgee by Fords, Howard 
 and Hulbert indicate that most of the claims as to the sale of 
 "A Fool's Errand" were exaggerated. No record has been 
 found of the number of copies in the first edition, but by 
 January i, 1880, 5281 copies had been sold, including 300 in 
 England. By June 30, 1880, 43,^53 copies had been sold, and 
 by December 31, 1880, 41,236 more. In 1881 about 9000 copies 
 were disposed of, in 1882 about 2500, and from that time on 
 not more than 2000 copies per year. It would thus seem that the 
 total sale was not much more than 100,000 copies, but there 
 appear to have been several pirated editions both in this country 
 and in England; at any rate, Tourgee made this charge several 
 times, and was always bitter against both national and inter- 
 national copyright laws. It is thus possible that the total sales 
 of the book may have neared the 200,000 mark, for some 25,000 
 copies of "A Fool's Errand" were sold in the same volume with 
 "The Invisible Empire." 
 
70 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 made a more limited appeal; its author had no such 
 emotional power as hers ; and many chapters, especially 
 toward the end, read like political tracts. Yet none the 
 less, here is the most powerful and moving story of the 
 Reconstruction period that has yet been written."^ 
 The Arena has this comment, relative to a new edition 
 of "A Fool's Errand" : *'In our judgment 'A Fool's 
 Errand' is the most valuable historical contribution to 
 the Reconstruction period that romance literature has 
 yet given us. . . . Aside from its historical value, *A 
 Fool's Errand' is a beautiful romance and an im- 
 portant contribution to American fiction that merits a 
 permanent place in literature."^ Professor C. Alphonso 
 Smith, in his *'0. Henry Biography," says: ''After 
 reading many special treatises and university disserta- 
 tions on the kind of Reconstruction attempted in the 
 South I find in The Fool's Errand' the wisest state- 
 ment of the whole question yet made." ^ 
 
 The mystery of the authorship of the story was 
 definitely settled in the summer of 1880 when, on May 
 22, 'The Invisible Empire" appeared, bound in the 
 same volume as "A Fool's Errand," with Tourgee's 
 name on the title page as author of both works. "The 
 Invisible Empire" aims to do about what Airs. Stowe's 
 "A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin" had done; that is, 
 present the public with authenticated records of events, 
 which, though not precisely those narrated in the re- 
 spective tales, were yet almost exact analogies. The 
 
 '^Bookman, July, 1905, pp. 458-9. 
 '^ Arena, September, 1902, pp. 333-4. 
 ' "O. Henry Biography," p. 63. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 71 
 
 volume cites many cases of Ku Klux outrages, and 
 closes with an appeal emphasizing the necessity of 
 national education as the basis of real reconstruction. 
 It was printed only as a joint work with ''A Fool's 
 Errand," and was sold only by subscription at two 
 dollars per volume. Over twenty thousand copies were 
 sold in the first half year of its existence. 
 
 As has already been mentioned, 'Tigs and Thistles," 
 the second in the series of six Reconstruction novels, 
 appeared on October 4, 1879. Since it preceded the 
 publication of the vastly more popular ''A Fool's 
 Errand" by less than a month and a half, it attracted 
 much less attention. Furthermore, it dealt not at all 
 with Reconstruction problems, but its events took place 
 wholly in the North; more particularly, the scenes of 
 action are mostly in Ohio, and Tourgee himself said 
 that in this story he paid a debt of love to his childhood 
 home. The period of time covered is 1850-1872. 
 Markham Churr, the chief figure in the tale, embodies 
 the usual autobiographical qualities of a Tourgee 
 hero : he is a college graduate, a lawyer, and a soldier 
 in the Union cause. Of special similitude is the wound- 
 ing of Churr in the Battle of Bull Run, his consequent 
 confinement in a private house in Washington, his 
 slow recovery in his Ohio home in the spring of 1862, 
 and his return to the army. Eventually he attains the 
 rank of brigadier-general, luckily inherits a large for- 
 tune, and is sent to Congress ; these were honors which' 
 Tourgee never attained, but his heroes are always a 
 combination of genuine similarity to himself, plus sev- 
 eral higher attainments of which he apparently deemed 
 
72 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 himself amply worthy. Many critics thought that this 
 story was intended to be a life of James A. Garfield, 
 here concealed as Alarkham Churr; but this theory is 
 rendered unlikely, not so much because Tourgee denied 
 that it was true as because Churr is so obviously a 
 picture of himself. Sentiment, mystery, coincidence, 
 and absurdly impossible character somersaults appear 
 in the customary abundance throughout the tale. The 
 "Syllabus Personarum" in the preface makes far more 
 entertaining reading than the story itself, which as 
 usual is devoid of humor and contains, like most novels 
 of its type, a sentimental sop for the public at the end, 
 for virtue is rewarded and vice punished with the most 
 exasperating mechanical inevitability. 
 
 During this time Tourgee was a man of affairs as 
 well as a novelist. After the stay in New York in the 
 autumn of 1879, where he was writing, consulting with 
 his publishers, and doubtless vei'y happy in the thought 
 of the fame that would be his when ''One of the Fools'* 
 should reveal himself to an expectant public, he de- 
 parted to a new field. Although his bank account was 
 rapidly swelling to a size far greater than ever pre- 
 viously, he had been looking about for some occupation 
 more certain of steady financial reward than literature. 
 After refusing an offer to enter a prominent law firm 
 in New York, he decided to make a second migration 
 to a far country. This time it was the swiftly expand- 
 ing West that attracted him, and some time during 
 December the Tourgee family left for Denver. 
 
 Arriving there, he at once sought an opening in his 
 chosen profession, but none was available. An ofifer 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 73 
 
 was at once made him, however, by the publisher of 
 The Denver Times to assume the editorial manage- 
 ment of the evening edition. Since this appeared to 
 be fairly satisfactory, Tourgee accepted, meanwhile 
 keeping an eye open for an opportunity to practise law. 
 But he was not destined to remain in Denver long, 
 either as a newspaperman or as. a lawyer, for early in 
 1880 his publishers wrote a letter importuning him to 
 come East and supervise a new edition of ''A Fool's 
 Errand." This he did, and again went to Denver to 
 continue his journalistic work. But before many 
 weeks he received a most urgent request from his pub- 
 lishers to write another book in the same vein as ''A 
 Fool's Errand." He at first refused to do this, because, 
 as has already been noted, he thought it would be 
 merely a repetition of the former book and might there- 
 fore fail. But finally he sent his publishers eight or 
 ten chapters of ''Bricks without Straw," another story 
 that had been begun in the South. The publishers 
 found the chapters satisfactory and he began to finish 
 the story in Denver, but for some reason was unable 
 to write effectively, and so started East again, probably 
 in May, in search of inspiration. He was in Canada 
 for a short time, hoping to feel there a mood for writ- 
 ing, and incidentally seeking the British copyright for 
 the forthcoming story. By the middle of July he tele- 
 graphed his wife, requesting her to close up his busi- 
 ness affairs in Denver and come East. Thus ended the 
 brief Western experience, and for the next six months 
 their home was in New York where he rapidly finished 
 the new novel, of which the first edition of twenty-five 
 
/ 
 
 74 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 thousand copies appeared in the first week of October, 
 with ''By the Author of A Fool's Errand" in a con- 
 spicuous place on the outside cover. 
 
 The book took its title from Exodus 5, 18: ''Go 
 therefore now, and work; for there shall no straw be 
 given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks." In 
 this book, fifth in point of time in the series of Re- 
 construction novels, "some aspects of the present con- 
 dition of the colored race (1880) and their relations 
 to the whites in the great matters of Labor and Educa- 
 tion afford still another point of view, and present 
 still new types of character and romantic interest," as 
 the preface to "A Royal Gentleman" states. Despite 
 this claim for novelty, there is really little in the book 
 that had not already been presented in preceding tales; 
 for Yankee school teachers, idealized negroes, and 
 theories of national education had already character- 
 ized previous works. It does differ from 'Tigs and 
 Thistles" and "A Fool's Errand," however, in that it 
 has less of an autobiographical nature; for the hero, 
 Hesden Le Moyne, is a Southern man with accompany- 
 ing prejudices. His French ancestry is significant, 
 however, and he had voted in favor of the new State 
 Constitution of 1868; moreover, he is finally converted 
 entirely to the Northern point of view, both by his 
 wife, a New England school mistress who had become 
 a "carpet-bagger" teacher, and by his own observations 
 of the injustice done to the negro through the short- 
 sighted Reconstruction policy. Furthermore, he be- 
 comes Tourgee's mouthpiece in the closing chapters, 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 75 
 
 where for the first time education is not only advanced 
 as the sovereign remedy for the solution of Recon- 
 struction problems, but a specific method is offered to 
 attain this end : a fund of money for educational pur- 
 poses is to be distributed by the government in propor- 
 tion to the illiteracy of different communities ; in other 
 words, national supervision of state schools is ad- 
 vocated. 
 
 In other respects, however, the story is largely a 
 repetition of previous books, with its convenient dis- 
 regard of most of the laws of probability (as evinced 
 by several miraculous coincidences), its stirring scenes 
 of Ku Klux Klan depredations, its element of mystery 
 with an accompanying inept solution, its pathetically 
 conventional romanticism, its legal and economic dis- 
 cussions, and its strong denunciations of Southern 
 civilization and Northern inability to face facts. Both 
 its strength and weakness are suf^ciently pointed out 
 in the Dial, which said that the Northern women who 
 went South probably "did not as a usual thing enter 
 on their lonely and perilous task at the childish age of 
 seventeen; and did not invariably become at once the 
 daring riders of glossy steeds, each endowed with the 
 strength and speed of a locomotive, the tricks of a 
 circus-mule, and the intelligence, docility and affection- 
 ateness of a sheep-dog. The strength of the book lies 
 in its true-seeming portraiture of the lower order of 
 characters; its rapid and thrillingly graphic narration 
 of incidents both terrible and grotesque; and its tear- 
 compelling descriptions of the sufferings of a hapless 
 
;^6 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 and helpless race of beings." ^ Two weeks after the 
 book was placed on sale, the publishers found it neces- 
 sary to make a duplicate set of plates to keep up with 
 the demand. Their report to Tourgee on December 
 31, 1880, states that 41,459 copies had already been 
 sold, which shows that its sale had even exceeded that 
 of '*A Fool's Errand" for a period of similar length. 
 
 During this time, other matters than literature were 
 engaging Tourgee's attention. He could never resist 
 the temptation to engage in political strife, and op- 
 portunity was afforded him in the summer of 1880 to 
 take part in the presidential campaign which eventually 
 resulted in the election of Garfield. It so happened 
 that Tourgee had been acquainted with him as a boy, 
 for, when Tourgee was about ten years old, he had 
 visited some relatives in Chester, Ohio, and one of the 
 boarders in the family was the youthful Garfield. The 
 future president showed his interest in young Tourgee 
 by inviting him to the seminary in Chester, where the 
 two sang from the same song book during chapel 
 exercises ; and some fishing trips taken together at this 
 time resulted in a fairly intimate boyhood friendship. 
 They had met again in the Civil War, and there re- 
 newed their youthful acquaintance for a short time. 
 
 On the journey East, in the summer of 1880, 
 Tourgee had stopped off at the Chicago Convention 
 and once more met Garfield, who had read and en- 
 joyed "A Fool's Errand," and was aware that the book 
 would probably have, as it actually did, a considerable 
 amount of influence in the campaign of 1880, by plac- 
 ^ Dial, October, 1880, pp. 110-112. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 11 
 
 ing Reconstruction problems before the public in a 
 popular form.^ Hence it was not surprising that, 
 after being nominated for the presidency, Garfield 
 wrote Tourgee asking him to assist in the coming cam- 
 paign. He eagerly accepted the invitation, and that 
 he labored regularly at haranguing crowds in different 
 parts of the country is shown by various speeches 
 which still remain in manuscript form, and also by the 
 fact that he almost entirely lost his voice shortly before 
 the election. After Garfield had triumphed at the 
 polls, Tourgee sent this telegram: 'The family of 
 fools send greeting." To it Garfield replied in a letter : 
 "Dear Judge : I thank you for your kind greeting from 
 the 'Family of Fools,' and in return express the hope 
 that the day may come when our country will be a 
 paradise for all such fools." Furthermore, a few 
 weeks after his election, Garfield wrote Tourgee asking 
 his opinion as to what effect the election would have 
 on the ''solid South," to which Tourgee replied that 
 the result would be very good provided the Republican 
 Party would put into effect a system of national educa- 
 tion. In this letter Tourgee also says that even as 
 early as 1870 he had begun to try to get the Republican 
 Party interested in national education, and had per- 
 sisted in this attempt up to the present time. In the 
 following June, Garfield summoned Tourgee to Wash- 
 ington for a conference on the matter of educational 
 ^ "The Bystander is perhaps the only private citizen to whom 
 a Republican President ever wrote, 'But for the pubhcation of 
 your work I do not think my election would have been possible. 
 "A Bystander's Notes," The Chicago Inter Ocean, January 29, 
 1892. 
 
78 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 methods. After a two hours' conversation about this 
 matter, Garfield said : "You are right. There is no 
 other way. We must begin — at the he ginning. Write 
 out your views of what is possible to be done and let 
 me have them — or, better still, put them into a book 
 and I will study it. Of course I must find my own 
 way in this matter, but you can help me. No one else 
 has studied the subject in the same way or from the 
 same standpoint that you have occupied. . . . You 
 must help me in this matter." ^ Tourgee promised to 
 write the book and did so in ''An Appeal to Caesar"; 
 but several years before it appeared, Garfield was only 
 a memory. 
 
 Lectures, the dramatization of "A Fool's Errand," 
 and a controversy over that book, occupied the winter 
 of 1 880- 1. Tourgee spent most of this period in 
 Philadelphia at the home of his life-long friends, both 
 of whom he had known as a boy, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph 
 Warner. To the list of lectures given in his Southern 
 readings, at least two more titles were now added: 
 "Give Us a Rest" and "How to Boss the Bosses." He 
 usually started to read his lectures; but as he warmed 
 to his subject, the printed pages were often thrown 
 aside and the topic was finished extempore. 
 
 It was, however, the dramatization of "A Fool's 
 Errand," in collaboration with Steele Mackaye, that 
 took most of Tourgee' s time during this winter and 
 the coming summer as well. The slight success that 
 an unauthorized dramatization had made in the West, 
 had caused him to give notice that prosecution would 
 
 'An Appeal to Caesar," p. 17. 
 
 1 « 
 
/ 
 
 ALBION W. TOURGEE 79 
 
 follow any more like attempts, and had also very 
 probably given him the idea of making an authorized 
 version. The business contract, drawn up between 
 Tourgee and Mackaye on June 11, 1881, states that 
 the plot of the play was made in unison; Tourgee 
 wrote the first dramatic version, and Mackaye then 
 made such changes in construction as his experience 
 as a dramatist warranted. In matters of structure, 
 Mackaye's judgment was final; in matters of fact re- 
 garding the South and related subjects, Tourgee's 
 opinion was likewise unquestioned. Proceeds result- 
 ing from royalties were to be equally divided. The 
 proceeds were, however, unfortunately very slim, for 
 on its first appearance in Philadelphia in the end of 
 October, 1881, the play was hissed and lasted less 
 than two weeks. The story of the dramatic version 
 was practically the same as that of the book, except* 
 that Servosse was still alive at the end of the play. It 
 contained four acts of one scene each, except the third 
 act which had three scenes, and each act closed with a 
 ''curtain thriller." Scenes of Ku Klux outrages usurped 
 the greater part of the plot, with a corresponding lack 
 of humor and emotional relief. The play's failure 
 was thus about as complete as any orthodox South- 
 erner could have wished. 
 
 Near the first of January, 1881, there appeared *'A 
 Reply to A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools," ^ 
 written by Wm. L. Royal, a Southerner by birth, who 
 had fought for the Confederacy and then studied law 
 in Richmond before joining the New York Bar. The 
 *J. E. Hale & Son, 1881, New York. 
 
8o ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 general tone of this work is sufficiently indicated by the 
 following passage, taken from the preface: "I look 
 upon the book to which I have attempted to reply as a 
 willful, deliberate, and malicious libel upon a noble 
 and generous people. ... I look upon its author as 
 one of the most contemptible fellows of those who have 
 libeled that people, and not at all less contemptible 
 because highly endowed with intellect." After paying 
 his respects to the cleverness and popularity of the 
 book, Royal bitterly castigates Tourgee for his repre- 
 sentation of the negro dialect, his claim that nearly all 
 Southern people hated the North as much as they 
 hated the negro, and charges him with being partner in 
 an affair involving financial dishonesty. The author 
 of this piece of mordant vituperation excelled Tour- 
 gee himself in the ability to make unqualified state- 
 ments of whimsical beliefs. Tourgee replied to this 
 book in the New York Tribune, January 31, 1881, in 
 a four-column letter, in which he endeavored to refute 
 one of Royal's claims, to the effect that the chaotic state 
 of the South was due largely to the presence of nu- 
 merous carpet-baggers. Royal then had a new edition 
 of his book printed, containing a ''Reply" to Tourgee's 
 "Reply," in which a not very convincing attempt was 
 made to show that Tourgee had juggled figures in giv- 
 ing statistics, and in which also the ancient argument 
 was advanced that the teachings of revealed religion 
 show that the negro is inferior to the white. The 
 ''Reply" closes with this Parthian shot: "Upon the 
 whole, I desire to say that when Mr. Tourgee under- 
 takes to write history, he establishes his right to the 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 8i 
 
 place that his ardent admirers claim for him — to wit, 
 that of the greatest author of fiction of the day." The 
 Tribune for March 15, 1881, characterizes Royal's 
 book by saying that the author ''is satisfied with pro- 
 nouncing the statements of Judge Tourgee 'as false as 
 heir — a mode of reasoning which can hardly be called 
 conclusive." The book is then of little value, because 
 the writer's prejudices were much greater than those of 
 Tourgee; it is cited here merely because it is the chief 
 specimen ^ of a number of attacks made upon the 
 tenets which "A Fool's Errand" had so doughtily ad- 
 vanced. 
 
 Public approbation of Tourgee's literary work was 
 shown in March of this year by a friendly dinner 
 given him in New York by the Union League Club. 
 The speakers who toasted him included, among others, 
 John Jay and Joseph H. Choate. In response to their 
 toasts, Tourgee told of an interview which he had had 
 with President Grant, in which he [Tourgee] had sug- 
 gested education as the best remedy for Southern con- 
 ditions; but, having failed in his direct attempts to in- 
 fluence legislation, he had turned to the novel as the 
 best means of effecting his idea of reform. 
 
 In the spring of 1881, while on a lecture trip in 
 western New York, Tourgee saw in a Buffalo paper 
 an advertisement offering for sale a large house and 
 
 ^Another specimen is "Not a Fool's Errand," by Rev. J. H. 
 Ingraham, G. W. Carleton & Co., New York, 1880, a collection of 
 letters describing the peripatetic adventures of a Northern gov- 
 erness in the South. She becomes converted to the South- 
 erners' point of view; therefore her sojourn in that region is 
 "not a fool's errand," 
 
82 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 some thirty-five acres of land at Mayville, New York, 
 a village containing hardly one thousand people, the 
 county seat of Chautauqua County, and situated on the 
 northern end of Chautauqua Lake, only three miles 
 from the parent Chautauqua Institution. He at once 
 journeyed to the place, and liked it so well that before 
 long Mrs. Tourgee was taken there for her opinion of 
 it as a future permanent home. She was charmed with 
 the spot, and the place was soon purchased with a part 
 of the $60,000 which Tourgee had in the bank at that 
 time, the proceeds of the three novels published during 
 the last two years. The house, a fine, large mansion 
 built and formerly owned by one member of the 
 "Tweed Ring," needed some remodeling; but by June 
 I, 1881, the Mayville Sentinel could print this notice in 
 the local news item: "Judge A. W. Tourgee and 
 family are now located among the residents of May- 
 ville, they having arrived yesterday." Tourgee made 
 his wife a present of the place, and she at once aptly 
 dubbed it "Thorheim." 
 
 Several reasons had influenced the Tourgees in tak- 
 ing up their residence in this new locality. They both 
 loved country life, and Tourgee was inordinately fond 
 of fishing, for which the lake, less than half a mile 
 from his home, offered abundant opportunity. The 
 fact that the locality was strongly Republican also ap- 
 pealed to him, for the taste which he had already had 
 of public hfe had given him a hankering after more 
 of it ; a desire which was destined never to be very well 
 satisfied. For the next sixteen years this place was his 
 permanent home; and it is of course obvious that dur- 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 83 
 
 ing this time "Judge Torjay," as his neighbors called 
 him, was the leading citizen of the sleepy little hamlet, 
 and the recipient of many local honors. For most 
 of the time during the next three years, however, the 
 Tourgees were in Philadelphia engaged in a journalis- 
 tic venture of no little magnitude. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 "OUR CONTINENT" 
 
 The first number of Our Continent, which was pub- 
 lished at Chestnut and Eleventh Streets, Philadelphia, 
 appeared February 15, 1882. This newcomer in jour- 
 nalistic fields was started by what was virtually a 
 partnership between Tourgee and Robert S. Davis; 
 Tourgee was general editor and Davis furnished the 
 major part of the necessary funds. This magazine 
 was, according to Tourgee, "the first serious attempt 
 ever made to put into a weekly the attractions and ex- 
 cellences of our great monthlies." -^ It proclaimed its 
 general purpose thus : "This journal is not, however, 
 intended to be the vehicle of any peculiar ideas. It 
 may very probably call a spade a spade, and may even 
 shy a brick at an especially obtrusive head now and 
 then, but as a rule its politics will be non-partisan as 
 its religion will be non-sectarian." ^ That it was pre- 
 vailingly Republican in its politics, however, need 
 hardly be mentioned. It was indeed as large as the 
 average monthly periodical, and contained the usual 
 popular features characteristic of such productions: 
 
 ^ Vol. II, p. 477. 
 'Vol. I, p. 72. 
 
 84 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 85 
 
 short stories, serial stories, "Notes and Queries," "Lit- 
 erary Notes," "The Household," "Science," "Jot- 
 tings," "Notes on Dress," "In Lighter Vein," "Home 
 Horticulture," articles of general interest, and so forth. 
 Thus it attempted to "lay before our readers from 
 week to week the best thought of our best writers, il- 
 lustrated by the best work of our best artists, and 
 clothed in the most befitting garb that the highest me- 
 chanical skill can devise." ^ The art department was 
 managed by Donald G. Mitchell; and other writers of 
 prominence, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, made 
 contributions. The magazine sold for ten cents a copy 
 and four dollars a year. 
 
 A large part of its material was of course contributed 
 by Tourgee. Again and again in its pages he assever- 
 ated that he willingly took all responsibility for what- 
 ever appeared in it, and as usual preened himself on the 
 fact that he was outspoken, fearless and independent. 
 Much of his literary work consisted in the grinding of 
 old axes: discussions of the South, innumerable de- 
 fenses of the negro, and the advocacy of Republican 
 principles, as well as attacks upon the Republican party 
 for its failure to effect legislation leading to national 
 education. In 1884 he strongly advocated the nomina- 
 tion of Robert Lincoln as Republican candidate for 
 president, but finally acquiesced with a show of good 
 grace in the nomination of Blaine. In addition, he 
 wrote many articles of a purely popular nature, such 
 as, the value of home life, proper training for rich 
 men's sons, the necessity for all to take part in politics, 
 
 'Vol. I, p. 8. 
 
86 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 warnings against the excessive use of tobacco and alco- 
 hol, attacks on the Mormons, criticisms of various au- 
 thors, the part of the church in social service — and so 
 on, in an endless variety that still had unity in the fact 
 that these effusions were all largely cant, after the 
 manner of most popular magazines. 
 
 One work of real importance by Tourgee first ap- 
 peared in the pages of Our Continent. This was ''Hot 
 Plowshares," last in the series of six Reconstruction 
 novels, though first in chronological order, for the 
 story closes when the Civil War had just begun. This 
 novel was started in July, 1882, and ran, with occa- 
 sional lapses, until May, 1883, in the spring of which 
 year it also appeared in book form, published, as all 
 the others had been, by Fords, Howard and Hulbert. 
 It was composed amid hard conditions. "This story 
 from the first has been written under the most difficult 
 and peculiar circumstances. It had just been com- 
 menced when it became necessary for the writer to as- 
 sume the entire control and management of the Con- 
 tinent, both editorially and as a publisher." ^ Nervous- 
 ness caused by summer heat acting upon his old wound 
 and a temporary spell of eye-trouble had also hindered 
 the composition of the tale. As the preface to the pub- 
 lished volume states, it was ''designed to give a review 
 of the Anti-Slavery struggle by tracing its growth and 
 the influences of the sentiment upon contrasted char- 
 acters." Thus it discusses, with the usual combination 
 of fictitious and historical elements, the growth of the 
 Abolition movement in the North, and the Fugitive 
 ^Vol. II, p. 571. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 87 
 
 Slave Law, with its attendant, the * 'Underground 
 Railroad." The main events take place in a small vil- 
 lage in central New York. 
 
 The story gets its title from the fact that the heroine, 
 Hilda Hargrove, is supposed to have a taint of African 
 blood in her veins, and is therefore obliged to undergo 
 the ordeal of public contempt; but, as might be ex- 
 pected, she is eventually proved to be of pure Caucas- 
 ian blood, through the efficacy of concealed documents 
 luckily found, by a crazed woman, in a secret drawer. 
 Because of this lucky find, the ''hot plowshares'* 
 Hilda "had been called upon to tread" prove harmless 
 and she triumphantly marries the hero. He is Martin 
 Kortright, son of the farmer, Harrison Kortright ; the 
 parent eventually becomes wealthy through the con- 
 struction and successful operation of factories — doubt- 
 less another Hterary echo of Tourgee's experiment 
 with the handle factory. Harrison Kortright is the 
 best picture of Valentine Tourgee ever drawn by his 
 son, and the conversation in the opening chapter be- 
 tween the Kortright father and son had actually taken 
 place between Valentine Tourgee and his strong- 
 willed boy. In other respects the hero resembles Tour- 
 gee only in that he is a lawyer and officer in the Union 
 cause. The mystery of Hilda's birth furnishes the 
 chief interest in the narrative, which is also enlivened 
 by stirring pictures of a runaway sleigh, the destruc- 
 tion of the mills by fire, and the attempted abduction 
 of Hilda. The artificialities of plot which have been 
 noted in preceding tales appear here in wonted abun- 
 dance. Repetition of the elements common to most of 
 
88 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 the five earlier novels — contrasts between the civiliza- 
 tion of the North and the South, categorical lists of 
 the motives which bring about certain episodes of the 
 action, as well as eulogies of Lincoln and John Brown 
 — abound in the story, which is perhaps the weakest in 
 the series of Reconstruction novels, with the exception 
 of "John Eax." The fact that it was written primarily 
 for serial publication intensified the tendency, already 
 strong in Tourgee, of closing many chapters with the 
 thrill that the ''to-be-continued-in-our-next" story usu- 
 ally strives to arouse for financial reasons. 
 
 Mrs. Tourgee's diary. May 17, 1882, reads as fol- 
 lows : ''At Albion's request, I write that his prediction 
 is that one year from today he will have $100,000 in 
 the bank, outside of his property and Thorheim, and 
 if this prediction is fulfilled, he will go to Europe and 
 stay a year." But the prophecy was not fulfilled, for 
 in spite of repeated assertions that Our Continent was 
 a success, it soon became evident that trouble was in 
 the air. Davis had become frightened at the possi- 
 bility of failure, and transferred all his interests in 
 the publication to Tourgee for $10,000 long before 
 even one volume was completed. 
 
 Mrs. Tourgee worked in the office every day far 
 more regularly than Tourgee himself, but even her 
 great industry could by no means counterbalance the 
 lack of business instincts in her strongly opinionated 
 husband. By January 15, 1883, she was constrained 
 to record in her diary this blunt fact : ''Blue day in the 
 office for the Judge," and this expression was often re- 
 peated in the months that followed. In July of this 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 89 
 
 year Tourgee wrote to James Gordon Bennett, request- 
 ing him to help back up Our Continent with his capital, 
 but no aid came from that source. 
 
 In the following October a removal was made to 
 22i Park Row, New York, though the Philadelphia of- 
 fice was retained. The change was deemed expedient 
 because of the greater business opportunities of New 
 York, and also because the chief persons who had of- 
 fered financial assistance in Philadelphia had been a 
 liquor dealer, an infidel, and two Democrats ; it would 
 have been gall and wormwood for Tourgee to accept 
 aid from any of this quartet. Aid from the liquor 
 dealer was quite certainly refused, for Tourgee would 
 not take liquor advertisements in Our Continent at any 
 price. The new situation did not, however, help mat- 
 ters much. Things still went from bad to worse, and 
 by July, 1884, Tourgee's sworn statement reveals that 
 the average monthly receipts from subscriptions were 
 only $1425. At the beginning of this year, he used the 
 device, so often employed by struggling periodicals, of 
 offering prizes for the best short stories as a means of 
 arousing the flagging public interest, as well as prizes 
 for those who secured the greatest number of subscrip- 
 tions for the magazine ; and these prizes in many cases 
 were his own novels. But all efforts to keep the publi- 
 cation going were vain, and on August 20, 1884, it 
 made its final appearance. This last number, how- 
 ever, contained no mention of the fact that it was the 
 magazine's swan song. 
 
 The details of its demise are not very clear, for 
 Mrs. Tourgee stopped keeping her diary through this 
 
f 
 
 90 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 troublesome period, or else destroyed it, and few au- 
 thentic records have been found. But there are several 
 references in the diary for 1885 which show that the 
 latter part of 1884 was largely taken up in nerve-rack- 
 ing legal matters connected with the financial affairs of 
 the publication. It had had a capital of $150,000 com- 
 posed of shares of fifty dollars each, and no less a 
 person than Ulysses S. Grant had $1000 worth of these 
 shares. This is shown by his letter of July 30, 1884, 
 in which he asked Tourgee to return the principal and 
 accumulated interest, since, because of recent misfor- 
 tunes, one thousand dollars now meant much to him. 
 Tourgee replied, stating the facts about the financial 
 condition of the magazine; and on October 16, Grant 
 answered, saying that he was unaware of these facts, 
 begged pardon for asking the return of the money, and 
 requested Tourgee not to give himself another thought 
 about the matter. Tourgee has briefly summed up his 
 experiences with Our Continent in this excerpt from 
 one of his letters : "A very rich man induced me in 
 1 88 1 to engage with him in publishing the Continent 
 magazine. When his extravagance and pretense had 
 swamped what ought to have been a success, he dug 
 out and I very foolishly undertook to resuscitate the 
 corpse. Had I been brave enough to cut expenses 
 down to bed-rock, I should have succeeded. But I 
 was not. ... It was a bad break — took everything and 
 a lot more." This was literally true, for the $60,000 re- 
 ceived from his books was gone, Thorheim and even 
 the future sale of the books themselves had been 
 mortgaged, and debts still remained. Tourgee went to 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE gi 
 
 stay with a cousin of his in Grimsby, Canada, for some 
 time in the autumn of 1884, trying to collect his ener- 
 gies to face the consequences of this most disastrous 
 of all the blows that had thus far struck him. Mean- 
 while his wife remained in New York, settling the 
 business affairs of the publication, and at the close of 
 the year they both returned to Thorheim. This ex- 
 perience unquestionably made Tourgee a sadder, as 
 well as poorer, man; but it unfortunately did not make 
 him an appreciably wiser one. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THORHEIM 
 
 The next twelve years of Tourgee's life (1885- 
 1897) were spent wholly at Thorheim, save for scores 
 of trips made all over the United States, but particu- 
 larly in the eastern part, to fill lecture engagements. 
 On the whole it was a very disheartening time, marked 
 by steadily waning literary powers, with an accom- 
 panying diminution of sales for the products of his 
 pen, and hence a regular lessening of income. During 
 the last half of this period, Tourgee was little more 
 than a hack writer, using whatever skill he had on any 
 sort of writing that offered hopes of publication; and 
 only too often did his manuscripts go on more than 
 one journey only to return accompanied by the usual 
 rejection notice, while many of them never appeared 
 in print at all. Many articles which, after several trips 
 to and fro, finally obtained publication, might better 
 never have been printed so far as his reputation is 
 concerned. 
 
 The best record of his activities during this time is 
 contained in his wife's diary. The perusal of this fairly 
 systematic record of his life from 1881 till his death 
 makes it plainly evident that she was the nobler soul. 
 
 92 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 93 
 
 Hardly once did she fail through these years of trial 
 and continual disappointment to be his constant in- 
 spiration ; while, in a more practical sense, it was largely 
 due to her untiring energy, despite frequent attacks of 
 illness which often overcame her, that Tourgee's liter- 
 ary and business ventures attained what small success 
 they did. Without her assistance in the office as aman- 
 uensis, proof-reader and general business manager, 
 their financial condition would have been much worse, 
 and the retention of Thorheim, the maintenance of 
 which cost no little sum on account of its large size, 
 would have been impossible. Besides this constant fear 
 of financial ruin, she had to bear with the many ir- 
 ritable traits of her husband. His headstrong nature, 
 his cocksure confidence in his own opinions, his exces- 
 sive love of fishing with the accompanying waste of 
 many valuable days, his constant desire to enter the po- 
 litical arena — all these well-defined traits of his taxed 
 her wifely powers of diplomacy to the uttermost. ''Blue 
 and discouraged" recurs again and again in the diary. 
 The following passages, selected from many of a like 
 nature, illustrate the constant strain she was forced to 
 undergo : 
 
 July 16, 1885. "Albion went fishing, but as usual 
 caught nothing; but, as it does him just as much good, 
 no one cares." 
 
 October 2, 1885. "Was glad Albion did not get the 
 nomination." [This refers to his attempt, which had 
 seemed possible of success, to be nominated for State 
 Senator.] 
 
 September 30, 1886. "A serious, fruitless talk with 
 
94 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 Albion. It is useless to hope to influence him. His 
 own way is always the right way." 
 
 October 8, 1886. ''Albion went this morning fish- 
 ing all day and dwindled away all the golden day, 
 when honor, which means everything, is at stake." 
 
 May 14, 1887. ''Anniversary of our marriage. 
 Still in bed and spent a very unhappy day. How the 
 sweet dreams vanish as the years go by !" 
 
 June 2, 1887. "A rainy, gloomy day with many sad 
 accompaniments. Albion in despair over his work. 
 Life does not seem worth the struggle anyhow." 
 
 In spite of the despondency evident in such passages, 
 it is nevertheless true that on the whole the Tourgees' 
 family life, apart from financial worries, was a happy 
 one. "So glad Albion is back," appears frequently in 
 the diary, upon occasions when Tourgee returned from 
 lecture engagements. The testimony of their close 
 friends, as well as that of the diary, indicates that 
 there was more domestic felicity at Thorheim than in 
 the majority of households. Almost always during 
 these years several friends or relatives shared the hos- 
 pitality of Thorheim, and birthdays, marriage anni- 
 versaries, and other like times were made memorable 
 by festive activities. When the cares of the oflice were 
 off his mind, Tourgee was always excellent company, 
 whether at the fireside or in the fishing-boat. 
 
 Tourgee's next volume, after the publication of the 
 Reconstruction novels, was "An Appeal to Caesar," a 
 series of campaign documents written to influence the 
 Republican party, symbolized as "Caesar," to put into 
 effective legislation his pet project — national educa- 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 95 
 
 tion. As noted previously, it was written in fulfillment 
 of a promise made to President Garfield, and certain 
 parts of it had already appeared in Our Continent. 
 It was published in the autumn of 1884, having been 
 dictated from a bed of pain that year. This series of 
 essays, written in much the same manner as a lawyer's 
 argument, deals with Tourgee's ''fool's errand," to 
 the South and his consequent disenchantment. He at- 
 tempts to show, by a long array of arguments and nu- 
 merous tables of statistics, that the negro population in 
 the South will steadily increase, while the whites will 
 decrease ; he discusses other plans that have been pro- 
 posed as a remedy for the present intolerable state of 
 affairs in the South and shows their inadequacy; and 
 he then advocates his own specific nostrum that will, 
 according to him, prove an infallible remedy for the 
 present ill, a remedy already broadly outlined in *'A 
 Fool's Errand" and in a more detailed manner in 
 ''Bricks without Straw," but never before treated at 
 such expository and argumentative length. This remedy 
 is national education, the funds devoted to this purpose 
 to be subject not at all to State control, but "to be dis- 
 tributed, on the basis of illiteracy, to the various town- 
 ships and school-districts in which free primary schools 
 shall have been in active operation for a specified 
 period during the time covered by the appropriation, 
 and having a specified average attendance'' (p. 319). 
 He then proceeds verbally to pummel objections that 
 may be raised to his plan. As an inducement to the 
 acceptance of his scheme, he holds out the threat of a 
 possible future uprising of the blacks against the South 
 
96 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 unless his method of dealing with the Reconstruction 
 problem is employed. 
 
 Tourgee did not argue for his theory in a manner 
 calculated to conciliate the South. 'The writer knows 
 full well that very few of the white men of the South 
 believe that this time [when the negro receives his 
 rights] can ever come. They think the black man's 
 capacity for endurance has been divinely adapted to 
 the infinity of their arrogance" (p. 404). The book 
 closes with a final chapter urging those who read it to 
 bombard their representatives in Congress with letters 
 demanding that action be taken to put this educational 
 policy into practice. Tourgee had already circulated 
 a petition to this effect, which had been signed by some 
 thousands of voters (p. 319). 
 
 Northern press comments on the book were as usual 
 over-laudatory, for few of them mentioned the plainly 
 evident conviction of infallible prophetic powers, and 
 the usual animus against all things Southern except 
 the negro. The New York Nation spoke of it thus: 
 "We wish to do a piece of justice and frankly confess 
 that we had a strong prejudice against Judge Tourgee 
 as an embittered sufferer from dispelled illusions. . . . 
 We read on with a determined intellectual resistance to 
 the foreshadowed proposal of national interference in 
 State affairs. But when we came to his plan of na- 
 tional education, we could not deny its reasonable and 
 statesmanlike character." 
 
 This book had been written in every faith that the 
 Republican party would triumph at the polls in Novem- 
 ber, 1884. But the election of Cleveland put a very 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 97 
 
 different aspect on national affairs. As a result of this 
 catastrophe, for such it was in his opinion, Tourgee 
 began, in The Chicago Inter-Ocean, a series of weekly 
 articles which ran from December 10, 1884, till two 
 weeks past the time of Cleveland's inaugural in the 
 following March. They were addressed to ''A Man of 
 Destiny," signed "Siva," and marked the beginning of 
 a relationship with the Inter-Ocean that was almost 
 unbroken for the next thirteen years. These weekly 
 articles caused so much comment that in March, 1885, 
 William Penn Nixon, editor of the Inter-Ocean, had 
 them published in book form. The essays are political 
 satires addressed personally to Cleveland, much like 
 the previous ''C" letters in tone, though this later work 
 surpasses the earlier in partisan fury, rancorous in- 
 vective, and nasty personalities. The following pas- 
 sages are the best commentary on the tone of the es- 
 says : ''Knowing, as you do, how little worthy of note 
 your life has been, and how utterly barren your mind 
 and character are of all those elements usually ac- 
 counted needful to a fit exemplification of our Ameri- 
 can life, it must be with some sense of dizziness that 
 you find yourself about to be hoisted upon the pinnacle 
 of national power as the representative headlight of 
 American Statesmanship" (p. 11). *Tf you are a 
 true type of American life, it is high time that we had 
 a new ideal" (p 108). 'T pity you as I do the snarl- 
 ing scavenger of the desert sands, because he is not 
 fitted for better things. I pity you standing before 
 the world as the exemplar of the American people, as 
 I would pity a Lilliputian leper put forward as a rep- 
 
f 
 
 98 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 resentative and type of the unlettered giants of Brob- 
 dingnag. I pity you as an inert instrument of an unholy 
 combination of evil purposes — the victim of a party's 
 greed for power and of a faction's blood-stained 
 strength. I pity you" (p. 109) — ^but here a stop had 
 best be made and *'pity," if not indeed a harsher feel- 
 ing, be bestowed upon a man w^ho w^ould stoop to such 
 indignities, upon a new^spaper, partisan though it was, 
 that would print them, and upon a portion of the public 
 that would read and believe them. There is of course 
 some palliation for Tourgee in that he was merely fol- 
 lowing in the steps of an innumerable host of political 
 muck-rakers. It is perhaps better neither to justify nor 
 condemn these ineptitudes too strongly, as w^ell as not 
 to take them too seriously; for the absolutely uncon- 
 scious naivete of the whole series of papers, in their 
 assumption of unfailing wisdom, prophecy, and the 
 right to act as dictatory counselor, results in giving 
 the reader a refreshingly large amount of amusement. 
 The question of the authorship of the papers, as in 
 previous anonymous publications of Tourgee, was 
 again widely discussed and many suggestions were 
 made, including, among others, the names of Roscoe 
 Conkling, James G. Blaine, and, impossible though it 
 may seem, Ulysses S. Grant. By the first of August 
 the sale of the book had netted Tourgee over four 
 hundred dollars; but after that there was little de- 
 mand for it, possibly because Cleveland's record of 
 sturdy, uncompromising efficiency had at least partial- 
 ly shown how completely fatuous the chief ideas in 
 the book had proved to be. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 99 
 
 Still determined to nag Cleveland as much as he 
 could, immediately after the "Man of Destiny" series 
 had been completed, Tourgee began to bombard the 
 Democratic administration in a new set of papers. 
 These received the title "The Veteran and His Pipe," 
 and ran in the Inter-Ocean from April to September, 
 1885. They consist of dialogues between several Civil 
 War veterans, who continually praise the patriotism 
 of the country as they knew it in their youth, and as 
 unceasingly lament the crass indifference to country 
 and to the heroes of the war which they see at the 
 present time. Modern apathy to sentiment of all kinds 
 versus old-time reverence of it, eulogies of Lincoln 
 and Grant, vitriolic onslaughts against the Reconstruc- 
 tion policy, as well as against Cleveland's appointments 
 and upon him personally because he had not fought for 
 the Northern cause, much discussion of Southern mat- 
 ters already broached in Tourgee's novels, and de- 
 fenses of himself from the charge that he was unduly 
 prejudiced against the South — these are the main topics 
 in this new series of papers, whose most noteworthy 
 feature is an entire absence of any new ideas. They 
 were, however, sufficiently well received by the public 
 to justify Nixon in having them pubHshed, probably 
 in 1886, and seventeen years later a new edition ap- 
 peared. 
 
 On September 26, 1885, the Inter-Ocean began to 
 publish another series of articles by Tourgee, entitled 
 "Letters to a Mugwump," signed "Trueman Joyce," 
 which appeared every Saturday until the middle of 
 November. As the title implies, these letters were 
 
loo ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 addressed to the ''man without a party," and advocated 
 that he should ahgn himself with some definite political 
 organization, preferably, of course, the Republican 
 party. They contain hosts of truisms about the neces- 
 sity of political catharsis, and allied topics. For these 
 articles, which averaged between two and three 
 columns in length, Tourgee received fifty dollars each, 
 and this constituted a large part of the $5500 that 
 was his total income for the year 1885. This income 
 also included some money gained from the sale of a 
 little property which he still had in North Carolina. 
 He had also some real estate in Kingsville, Ohio, 
 whose rental afforded him during his whole life prob- 
 ably about enough money to pay for the expenses in- 
 curred by his fishing trips. But the bills for this year 
 were numerous, and they, including the upkeep of 
 Thorheim and the interest on Our Continent debts, 
 left no surplus whatever. 
 
 Having found that his tirades against Cleveland 
 apparently had pleased a certain cantankerous element 
 in the Republican party, Tourgee began a third col- 
 lection of articles that bristled with scurrilous utter- 
 ances against the president in the Inter-Ocean on 
 March 4, 1886, and they ran bi-monthly until eighteen 
 numbers had appeared. This time the title chosen was 
 "A Child of Luck," and the signature was again 
 ''Siva." The only remarkable thing in this third dia- 
 tribe against Democrats generally and Cleveland very 
 particularly, is the astonishing amount of ingenuity 
 displayed in saying nothing new or of any special 
 value in an innumerable variety of ways. There is 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE loi 
 
 again evident the same debonair, patronizing, cheaply 
 famiHar, uncle-to-nephew tone that had characterized 
 the first two series. Since tliese three sets of papers 
 were entirely too innocuous to cause Cleveland to pay 
 the least attention to them (except that he may have 
 remarked that the "writer is probably some government 
 Diogenes, who is afraid I will deprive him of his tub 
 or will stand in his sunshine" ^), there is no need to 
 make any further comment on them. Comment might 
 better be made on the fact that in 1886 Tourgee's lec- 
 tures were going very badly, for popular interest in 
 them was decreasing, as Mrs. Tourgee's diary plainly 
 shows. Whereas he had usually received $100 per lec- 
 ture, there is a record of one which he was now glad 
 to deliver for thirty-five dollars ; and at this time the 
 family bills were allowed to run until they were several 
 months overdue. 
 
 The year 1887 was marked by the publication of 
 two more novels, in which for the first time Southern 
 questions do not hold the place of chief interest, though 
 echoes of them appear in the first one published, which 
 was "Black Ice." Mrs. Tourgee's diary for January 
 8, 1885, states that "Albion today wrote the first in- 
 stallment of 'Black Ice'," and on May 16, 1887, "Sent 
 ms. of 'Black Ice' to Fords, Howard and Hulbert," 
 by which company it was shortly published. Tourgee 
 needed the aid of his physician while writing this tale, 
 as the dedication and preface show, as well as this 
 passage from the diary, April 8, 1885 : "Looked over 
 what Albion had written of 'Black Ice' and find many 
 
 ^"A Man of Destiny," p. 139- 
 
I02 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 alterations necessary, which it pains me to call his 
 attention to but it must be done." The book was thus 
 written in a time of great physical pain, caused largely 
 by Tourgee's old wound and attacks of neuralgia to 
 which he was wtry susceptible, and one wishes that his 
 ill health might account for the fact that most of the 
 weaknesses which appeared in his earlier works are 
 found here even more prominently; but unfortunately 
 Tourgee himself said that the story was written with 
 the deliberate intention of justifying the theory that 
 he held in regard to all fiction — that the only true 
 romance is that which is built up on those rare oc- 
 currences which are the result of a series of coin- 
 cidences, and that pure realism is always to be avoided, 
 save in historical matters. 
 
 Hence the plot of this tale is even more bizarre than 
 any of those which preceded it. The chief figure is 
 Percival Reynolds, a middle-aged mining and civil en- 
 gineer, who, with his wife and daughter, lives in a 
 pleasant country village apparently somewhere in New 
 York. There can be little question that the village is 
 really a picture of Mayville; the lake, whose "black 
 ice" gives the story its title, Chautauqua; the house, 
 described with so much care, Thorheim ; the Reynolds 
 family, the Tourgees; the benevolent old physician, 
 the family doctor to whom the book is dedicated. Dr. 
 William Chace; and the span of horses, those that 
 Tourgee was taking so much pride in at that time. 
 Furthermore, the reader is told that two of the 
 characters in the novel were married at Columbus, 
 Ohio, on May 14, by the Reverend Julius E. Gardner, 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 103 
 
 which is precisely autobiographical. The first few 
 chapters present a really pleasant picture of domestic 
 tranquillity in the small village, and one only desires 
 that Tourgee might have written the whole book thus ; 
 but, true to his theory, he soon converts what might 
 have been a rather charming picture of village life into 
 a hodge-podge of mystery, suspense, fortuitous com- 
 binations of events, horror, and crime. The titles of 
 several chapters will sufficiently point out the general 
 structure of the tale: 'The Breaking of the Seal"; 
 "Some Raveled Threads" ; 'The End of the Chase" ; 
 ''A Midnight Horror" ; and 'Tn the Pale Moonlight." 
 The following passage, taken from the chapter called 
 ''A Midnight Horror," shows how well Tourgee had 
 mastered the art of conventional melodrama : 
 
 "My heart was in my throat as I peered forward at 
 the roadway with unnecessary care. A rustle in the 
 hemlocks by the roadside startled me as if it had been 
 a thing of terror. I pulled the reins and stopped the 
 surprised horses at the very steepest part of the 
 declivity. As I did so a shriek, clear and shrill, rang 
 out of the unseen space beyond, and echoed and re- 
 echoed across the river. 
 
 " 'My God !' I exclaimed, 'that is a cry for help !' 
 
 'The cry was repeated, shriller, clearer, and un- 
 mistakably in a woman's voice." 
 
 This passage illustrates why Tourgee's novels were 
 fairly successful with the public; and very likely an- 
 other reason for this success was the justification, dwelt 
 upon particularly in this story, of coincidence as op- 
 posed to the regularity of nature. " 'Such things are 
 
I04 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 ''happening" every day. Some call them the result of 
 chance. ... I may be a fool, but such things, which 
 seem against Nature, are to me conclusive evidence of 
 One that uses and controls Nature. Call it what you 
 will, I love to call it God'" (p. 405). The modern 
 reader, however, is much more likely to designate this 
 theory of his by some such unmetaphysical term as a 
 lack of constructive ability, or even sheer mental lazi- 
 ness. 
 
 The second book, which had appeared from the 
 press of Roberts Brothers, Boston, about the first of 
 September, was begun November 22, 1886, and was 
 called ''Button's Inn." In writing this tale Tourgee 
 was particularly interested in Mormonism, which he 
 had previously attacked in Our Continent; but he 
 was here more concerned in tracing its origin and the 
 philosophy of its evolution from the religious life of 
 the time. So it happens that "Button's Inn" contains 
 about as many disquisitions on religion as Tourgee's 
 earlier stories had contained chapters on history and 
 social theories. This story, even more definitely than 
 the preceding one, has its scenes in the vicinity of 
 Thorheim. "Button's Inn," so named for its owner, 
 had once been a real inn, standing some five or six 
 miles northwest of Mayville on Portage Road — a name 
 given because it was first used by the French and 
 Indians as the route by which their goods were carried 
 between lakes Chautauqua and Erie, the particular 
 points of connection being Mayville, Westfield, and 
 Barcelona, once a fiourishing harbor, now merely a 
 
/ 
 
 ALBION W. TOURGEE 105 
 
 moribund hamlet marked chiefly by some dilapidated 
 fishermen's huts and a ramshackle hotel. As in ''Black 
 Ice," the pastoral part of the story is rather pleasant; 
 but one learns in the very first chapter that the inn 
 is haunted, and from that point on the story becomes 
 a blend of love scenes, suspense, crime, and discussions 
 of Mormonism. The events take place mostly on 
 Christmas Eve and Day, 1842, but part of the tale is 
 concerned with blood-curdling incidents that happened 
 eighteen years earlier. The inn-keeper's son. Jack But- 
 ton, is a wild young fellow in his youth, who finally 
 commits a murder in self-defense and for love, and 
 hence is forced to flee. He becomes a convert to 
 Mormonism, and finally returns to his old home, where 
 he is unknown until he reveals himself. He is the real 
 ''hero" of the tale, though the more conventional one 
 (that is, the one who marries the inevitable pretty 
 girl) is Ozro Evans, son of the woman for love of 
 whom Jack Button committed murder. Along with 
 the pretty girl, there is bestowed upon Ozro the 
 scarcely less inevitable fortune, inherited through his 
 father's will, which he increases by means of a com- 
 bination of inventive genius and business ability. The 
 story is almost wholly a refutation of the prefatory 
 statement that accompanies it : "My purpose has been 
 faithfully to depict the life which marked the period," 
 and instead represents merely another of the countless 
 hosts of marriages that have taken place in fiction be- 
 tween sentimentaUty (in this case both of love and 
 religion) and Gothic Romance. In this tale, as is 
 
io6 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 usual in Tourgee's novels, the ghost turns out to be 
 one of substantial flesh and blood, which has carried 
 on its nocturnal activities by means of a trap door. 
 
 The inventive genius of Ozro Evans may possibly 
 be an embodiment of an unsuppressed desire on the 
 part of Tourgee to win recognition at the patent office. 
 During a large part of his life, he spent many hours 
 working on mechanical devices of much variety. 
 Hundreds of dollars were spent in these efforts, dol- 
 lars which would have done far better service had 
 they been applied to some of his long-standing debts. 
 When he was in the South, he had tried his brain and 
 hands on some of the machinery of his handle factory, 
 and from that time on he never entirely left off such 
 endeavors. Some of his projects were, the making of 
 an all-steel harness for horses, iron posts, and new 
 brands of wrenches. He obtained one patent at least, 
 in January, 1889, for an hydraulic motor, but it did 
 not prove to be of any financial value. Even while 
 Consul at Bordeaux, he still kept on with various 
 schemes of this sort. 
 
 During the following year (1888) two more books 
 were published, in the first of which Tourgee returned 
 to the South for inspiration. This was *'Eighty-Nine," 
 or "The Grand Master's Story," which appeared in 
 April. The author's name is given as Edgar Henry, 
 and Tourgee tries to make anonymity doubly strong 
 by having Henry state that he is merely editing his 
 friend's life from an "original manuscript." This 
 friend is Royal Owen, a Georgian, who resembles the 
 usual Tourgee hero in his Huguenot descent, his 
 

 
 ALBION W. TOURGEE 107 
 
 farmer parent, his study of law, and his love of speedy 
 horses. While the book in general is only a repetition 
 of oft-repeated theories about the South and contains 
 the usual historical and hortatory chapters, Tourgee 
 adds two new ideas, for one of which he was plainly 
 enough indebted to the Ku Klux Klan organization. 
 This is the "Order of the Southern Cross," which 
 Owen originates in obedience to the dying injunctions 
 of his father that he should help the South in every 
 possible way. This order advocates "peaceful revolu- 
 tion" rather than the actively hostile methods of the 
 Ku Kluxers. Its members are pledged not to take up 
 arms, but by legal means to prevent negroes from 
 attaining inordinate political power. It is a secret 
 society and its members wear white clothes as a dis- 
 guise — both Ku Klux ideas. The hero is thus Tourgee' s 
 conception of the ideal Southern man. Not much is 
 said of national education, but its remedial powers 
 are implied, and Cleveland is again sharply attacked 
 for his failure to put such a policy into law. Tourgee's 
 private correspondence shows that the book was also 
 intended to be a surreptitious attack on the Standard 
 Oil Company, because of its monopolistic practices, 
 and this explains the anonymity of the story. One of 
 the characters in the tale has lost all his possessions 
 and his reputation because he opposed the activities of 
 the "Rock Oil Company," which is only another name 
 for the company actually existing. The purpose of the 
 book, then, was two-fold : it aimed to show that, while 
 at present "the South was in the saddle and monopoly 
 in the stirrup," as a poster advertising its appearance 
 
io8 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 stated, the South could be ejected from this saddle by 
 means of the "Order of the Southern Cross," and that 
 monopoly could be forced out of the stirrup by the use 
 of impartial legal justice. The title was intended to 
 indicate what benefit the year 1889 would bestow upon 
 the United States, if, before that time, these two 
 methods of reform were employed. 
 
 The other book, which probably appeared in July, 
 was ''Letters to a King," most of which had already 
 been published piecemeal in various religious papers. 
 The volume is very similar to ''Letters to a Mug- 
 wump," except that the mugwump is here treated more 
 respectfully by being honored with a regal title. The 
 letters have the twofold aim of pointing out to the 
 "king" (who of course symbolizes the American youth 
 who has recently come to voting age) that he has a 
 great responsibility, and that he must accordingly be 
 intelligent in order to meet its demands. This means, 
 as one might surmise, that these letters gave Tourgee 
 another chance to indulge in that form of writing in 
 which he was so expert — the production of a chain of 
 age-worn truisms, which rolled unceasingly from his 
 affably condescending and unconsciously tiresome pen. 
 
 Thus far Tourgee had written only sporadic series 
 of articles for the Inter-Ocean; but, beginning in May, 
 1888, he wrote regular weekly contributions for that 
 paper under the caption "A Bystander's Notes," and 
 continued to do so with practically no omissions until 
 August, 1893. These articles, signed by his own name, 
 constituted an enlarged "Migna," the department in 
 Our Continent in which he had discussed all sorts of 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 109 
 
 political and social questions in a popular manner. 
 "Waving the bloody shirt," education, labor and 
 capital, foreign affairs, book reviews, the World's 
 Fair, attacks on the Democrats, alternate defenses of 
 the Republican party and mild assaults on certain of 
 its policies which were opposed to his ideas — such 
 subjects as these were discussed by him in "A Bystand- 
 er's Notes" many, many times. In 1889 he used a new 
 heading, ''A Tidewatcher's Thoughts," for part of that 
 year, in which he ''studied the tide of today's life." 
 More and more these articles became propagandistic 
 in tone. In October, 1891, he made a public appeal 
 in the "Notes" for the formation of a "Citizens' Equal 
 Rights Association," which was of course intended for 
 the special benefit of the negro. He formed this or- 
 ganization because, as one of his letters of this period 
 states, he had come to feel that it was impossible to 
 influence the North by merely writing and speaking 
 for the negro, and had therefore decided to employ 
 more business-like means. Tourgee received hundreds 
 of letters, mostly from negroes, praising him for this 
 idea, and so started the association on its way; but, 
 like his other various schemes, it soon ended in failure. 
 The publishers of the Inter-Ocean found it necessary 
 several times to refuse articles of his which attacked 
 certain Republican principles with undue vigor, because 
 the paper depended for its success upon political 
 patronage. Tourgee also wrote articles for this pub- 
 lication on noteworthy occasions, as, for example, on 
 the deaths of Henry Ward Beecher and John A. Logan, 
 the latter of whom he extolled to the extent of ten 
 
no ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 thousand words. Had all these Inter-Ocean articles 
 appeared in book form they would have made some 
 eight or ten fat volumes; but this material would have 
 been even more ephemeral than much in his actually 
 published books. 
 
 ''With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys," which came 
 from the press in 1889, had already been published by 
 Lippincotts.^ This book, as the preface states, was 
 written to show how much romance there is in the sup- 
 posedly matter-of-fact legal profession; it is thus a 
 sort of sequel to ''Black Ice," in which, it will be re- 
 called, the theory was advanced that all life consists 
 of romance governed by caprice. It is composed of 
 thirteen short tales, each complete in itself, but all 
 having the same hero, Gerald de Fontaine, a farmer's 
 son, who had begun the study of law as a clerk, but 
 who eventually attains eminence in the profession itself. 
 The "romance" which is the basis of each story is 
 composed of the customary blend of highly improbable 
 concurrences, technical legal matter, thrilling crises, 
 sentimentality, and prescience on the part of certain 
 individuals, the whole resulting in patent artificiality. 
 There are several negroes in the tales, but no specific 
 discussion of Reconstruction problems. 
 
 For 1890 several events in Tourgee's life are worthy 
 of note. He was summoned to Washington in March 
 to address the House Committee on Education, which 
 he did on the thirteenth of that month. In his address 
 he opposed the Blair Educational Bill which was then 
 before Congress, and advocated one of his own con- 
 ^ Lippincotl's Monthly Magazine, Philadelphia, vols. 40-44, inc. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE iii 
 
 coction, which formulated the same ideas that had al- 
 ready appeared in ''An Appeal to Caesar." On the 
 twentieth of March he had the satisfaction of seeing, 
 from a place in the gallery, the defeat of the Blair 
 bill, while on the following day he appeared before the 
 Committee on Elections and spoke in favor of a bill 
 then pending, which was intended to protect the voter 
 without regard to race or color. In April he was 
 granted a pension of six dollars a month, including 
 the years from 1863 (in which he had renounced his 
 pension from patriotic motives) until 1890, and thirty 
 dollars a month for the rest of his Hfe. On June 6, 
 according to his wife's diary, he ''covered himself with 
 honor" by delivering a fiery address on the wrongs 
 done the negro before the First Mohonk Negro Con- 
 ference in Ulster County, New York. During this 
 summer, in his Inter-Ocean articles, he advised that 
 the Afro-American League, an organization fairly ac- 
 tive at that time, should be a secret affair in order that 
 it might escape persecution in the South ; and for this 
 advice he was roundly attacked by scores of news- 
 papers. 
 
 "First bound copies of 'Pactolus' received," says 
 Mrs. Tourgee's diary for March 27, 1890. This is a 
 reference to "Pactolus Prime," a book on which 
 Tourgee had been busy for over a year. "I do not 
 know what it will do, but it is a very strong book, or 
 else I am a very silly man," he says, in a letter about 
 it. In this story he made use of the popular interest in 
 the Blair bill by writing a tale in which this bill was 
 attacked, and his old "Appeal to Caesar" remedy 
 
112 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 again recommended. The title of the book is the hero's 
 name, and he is a mulatto who, in order to save his 
 children (in whom no trace of negro blood appears) 
 from the stigma of their birth, hides from them the 
 fact that he is their father, and takes a position as 
 boot-black at a Washington hotel. Tourgee, as usual 
 idealizing the negro almost to the point of apotheosis, 
 endows Pactolus with the argumentative ability and 
 technical knowledge of a lawyer, and with an uncanny 
 prescience of men and affairs. The gentle reader is 
 asked to believe that even men high in the nation's 
 councils "were not ashamed to consider his warnings" 
 (p. 25). Melodrama and mystery often meet to- 
 gether in this novel, while gushing sentiment and 
 religious piety frequently and fervently kiss ieach 
 other. Pactolus, from being an unbeliever in the 
 'Svhite Christ" who ''exists for whites only," finally 
 accepts Christianity with an ardor fiery enough to suit 
 even the idolizers of E. P. Roe — with whom, incident- 
 ally, Tourgee was always on friendly terms. It is 
 quite possible that Tourgee may have got from Roe 
 hints of the device, so frequently used by that per- 
 petrator of several viciously virtuous pieces of fiction, 
 of hurling many souls into the hopper of atheism, 
 whence they finally emerge, after a severe jostling 
 and grinding process, as uniformly orthodox Victorian 
 Christians. The publishers' preface to the book refers 
 to Pactolus as ''the Edipus of American fiction"; but 
 this particular "Edipus," instead of tearing out his 
 eyes as a self -punishment, suffers the ignoble fate of 
 being mortally injured by a runaway horse. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 113 
 
 Mrs. Tourgee's diary for September 17, 1889, re- 
 cords this item : "After a year and a half of thought, 
 Albion began today his story. The agony — I can use 
 no other word — of decision was intense. He wished 
 to do so well — to put so forcibly the truths which have 
 weighed upon him so long." This refers to a story 
 first called ''Nazirema, or The Church of the Golden 
 Lilies." Under that title it had appeared in The Ad- 
 vancc, a humanitarian weekly journal.^ In November 
 or December, 1890, Fords, Howard and Hulbert 
 printed it under the new title ''Murvale Eastman, 
 Christian Socialist." The Kingsleyean title indicates 
 the general nature of the book, which is a plea for 
 the application of the principles of Christianity to 
 modern industrial problems. This doctrine is embodied 
 in the person of Murvale Eastman, a ''muscular Chris- 
 tian," pastor of the Church of the Golden Lilies, who 
 is of course a paragon of "body, mind, and spirit" 
 perfection. He literally practices what he preaches by 
 acting as driver of a horse-car, by which means he pays 
 his own expenses and gets in touch with life as well. 
 Finally he forms a "League of Christian Socialists," 
 which formulates feasible methods of putting into 
 practice the theory of the golden rule. There is a re- 
 minder of Tourgee's early literary experiments in the 
 form of a minister named "God's Anynted Phue," who 
 is the same type of person that he had been when 
 Tourgee used his name in North Carolina. Secrecy, 
 sentiment and crime add their customary zest to the tale 
 and, in spite of their absurdity, serve to make readable 
 ^The Advance, Chicago, vol. XXXII. 
 
114 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 what would otherwise be a dry, theological tract. 
 Eastman succeeds in converting enough people to his 
 socialistic conception of Christianity to satisfy even 
 the most egregious demands of those who insist upon 
 religious conversions as a necessary concomitant of 
 every good novel, somewhat as the healthier-minded 
 Elizabethans liked those plays best which ended in a 
 general slaughter of the leading characters. The villain 
 of the story, Wilton Kishu, richest member in East- 
 man's congregation, after indulging in the usual 
 amount of emotional acrobatics, is thoroughly cleansed 
 of his former nefariousness and becomes a humble 
 worshipper of the victorious Eastman. Even the sub- 
 stantial quantity of flesh-and-blood mystery, crime and 
 sentiment which composes the narrative part of the 
 book is not sufficient to conceal the very evident skele- 
 ton of propaganda which constitutes its framework. 
 One of the members of the firm that published the 
 story objected strongly, in a letter to Mrs. Tourgee, 
 to the "elaborate disquisitions, which in my opinion 
 clog the current of the thought as much as the possible 
 current of the sales." This criticism proved to be 
 prophetic, for the book was by no means a financial 
 success. 
 
 In the spring of 1891, Tourgee, who had been ap- 
 pointed Honorary Professor of Legal Ethics in the 
 Buffalo Law School at the time of its foundation in 
 1887, and had already delivered lectures there during 
 the last four years, gave a course of lectures at that 
 institution on legal ethics. Since Buffalo was only 
 some sixty miles from Thorheim, he found it easy to 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 115 
 
 make the journey to and fro without staying in the 
 city over night. He held this position until he went 
 to France, and the income thus derived was especially 
 welcome during these years, for the sale of his books 
 was now steadily approaching the vanishing point. 
 
 The Inter-Ocean, in July, 1891, began a series of 
 articles by Tourgee, entitled ''Jo^i^ Workman's No- 
 tions," which were popular presentations of topics con- 
 cerned with contemporary political economy. John 
 Workman professes to be a great friend of the laboring 
 classes. He discusses the historical background of his 
 subject, and then applies the lessons drawn from this 
 study to modern conditions. There can be little doubt 
 that Tourgee was mainly indebted to Ruskin for most 
 of his ideas on political economy, for he reaches much 
 the same conclusions as Ruskin had reached twenty 
 years earlier, and advocates many of the same fantastic 
 remedies which the great Victorian had already sug- 
 gested. All these articles, forty-four in number, were 
 written particularly with the intention of giving the 
 poor nobler ideas of labor. Tourgee expected to publish 
 this series in book form, and even copyrighted a forth- 
 coming volume; but it never was printed, probably 
 because he decided that the unsatisfactory sale of his 
 previous works of a similar nature did not warrant 
 any hope that a new volume would meet with any 
 better financial success. 
 
 Tourgee went to California on the first day of April, 
 1892, and stayed there until the eighth of May, in order 
 to recuperate from a combination of ills — the ever 
 troublesome spinal wound, nervousness, and general 
 
ii6 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 physical and mental depression. Hardly had he re- 
 turned, much refreshed, from this brief respite from 
 almost unceasing labor, when he called down scathing 
 denunciation upon himself because of a prophecy that 
 he had made in an Inter-Occan article to the effect 
 that, unless different governmental methods were used, 
 there would be an uprising of the negroes within the 
 next ten years that would equal if not exceed the 
 French Revolution in terror and bloodshed. Both the 
 Northern and Southern press joined in vigorous con- 
 demnation of this new Tourgee jeremiad, but he in- 
 sisted that the prophecy would come true and used the 
 columns of the Inter-Ocean for defending himself in 
 his usual intrepid fashion. As late as 1903, in a letter 
 to Nixon, he still maintained that such an uprising, 
 accompanied with terrible slaughter, was almost in- 
 evitable. 
 
 In ''A Son of Old Harry," published in 1892, 
 Tourgee employed some methods of modern realistic 
 fiction which he affected so frequently to despise. The 
 story was written to show that no one can escape from 
 an evil destiny if fate has so ordained it. Yet, while 
 the doctrine of fatalism is the foundation of the tale, 
 it contains little compelling power; for Tourgee, in 
 the use of coincidence, not only goes beyond Thomas 
 Hardy, but also comes very near giving the story a 
 conventionally happy conclusion, which would be 
 irritating if it were not so patently impossible. In 
 other respects the novel is characteristic of the Tourgee 
 genre: horses and horse-racing are even more in evi- 
 dence than in any of his other tales; the hero, Hubert 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 117 
 
 Goodwin, becomes a brigadier-general in the Civil 
 War; there is much discussion of religious matters; 
 melodrama plays its wonted inevitable part ; and senti- 
 mentality oozes from almost every page, appearing in 
 an ''eternal triangle" in this story — a type of emotional 
 debauchery, it should thankfully be noted, in which 
 Tourgee seldom rioted. The racial problem is broached 
 several times, but not to excess. The whole book pre- 
 sents a pathetic picture of a mind that was in nearly 
 all respects Victorian, floundering in the effort to make 
 literary capital of some elementary theories taken from 
 the gospel of realism; a mind that, after giving up this 
 vain attempt, returns with manifest relief to the com- 
 fortably familiar regions of grotesquely impossible 
 romance. 
 
 The Chicago World's Fair called forth Tourgee's 
 next volume, written with deliberate intent to make 
 mone}^ out of that international event. ''Out of the 
 Sunset Sea," which appeared early in 1893, recounts 
 in the first person the adventures of an Englishman, 
 Arthur Lake, who, after divers exciting experiences 
 in both love and war, embarks with Columbus on his 
 voyage of discovery, and later succumbs to the lust 
 for gold that seized so many adventurers at that time. 
 This, Tourgee's only experiment in historical romance 
 outside of his own country, is in some respects his 
 most successful book. He himself thought that it con- 
 tained his best writing, and there are good grounds for 
 agreeing with this opinion. First of all, it is not a 
 novel of purpose, and hence is primarily a story, one 
 that abounds in active and swift narration, with no 
 
ii8 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 pauses for pointing the morals that blemish rather than 
 adorn most of his tales. Furthermore, his other faults 
 are less in evidence here : there is less melodrama than 
 is customary, sentiment is kept well under control, and 
 piety is fortunately almost completely absent. The 
 characters are of course perfectly conventional, the 
 hero being the ordinary swash-buckler so common in 
 stories of adventure; but after all, in a novel of this 
 kind characterization is of secondary importance. An 
 almost complete absence of that constant straining for 
 effect which is so noticeable in his other stories, results 
 in the presence of something that is almost, if not quite, 
 charm. In general there is nothing of originality in 
 the story, but Tourgee in it did fairly well what many 
 have done poorly and only a few excellently. The con- 
 versation of the sailors, however, is of a sort that 
 certainly never was on land, though possibly it may 
 have been on sea. One reason why the story is told 
 better than usual is that the plot was here made almost 
 ready to hand; for it was in the structure of his plots 
 that Tourgee was generally weakest, weaker even than 
 in character drawing. Another reason is that the sub- 
 ject furnished all the romance necessary without the 
 necessity of painfully seeking it. The volume was 
 popularized by drawings made by his daughter, Aimee, 
 who also illustrated several of his other works. 
 
 One of the books so decorated was *'An Outing with 
 the Queen of Hearts," which appeared in 1894, and 
 is a pleasant pastoral sketch. The *'Queen" is Mrs. 
 Tourgee, whose unfailing counsel and assistance 
 merited a greater reward than this small volume gave. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 119 
 
 But, small as the book is, it shows how deep and 
 abiding was the affection of husband and wife, despite 
 the temporary vexations that depressing financial 
 troubles occasionally caused. This story, as well as 
 "Out of the Sunset Sea," has some real charm; a 
 charm that is, however, often distinctly impaired by 
 bitterly one-sided attacks on modern ideas of love. 
 But the glimpses of quiet, undisturbed nature, of 
 fishing and exploring, slight as they are, nevertheless 
 will probably remain with the reader long after both 
 the plots and characters of some of Tourgee's more 
 pretentious literary efforts have vanished from the 
 mind. 
 
 From this time until the spring of 1895, there is 
 little known about Tourgee that is of interest. *'A By- 
 stander's Notes" had been discontinued by the Inter- 
 Ocean in August, 1893, and this suspension caused 
 worry that was not alleviated until Tourgee was al- 
 lowed, some four months later, to resume the series. 
 In January, 1894, a second series of articles on "A 
 Man of Destiny," once more by ''Siva," was begun and 
 continued weekly till the following April- This new 
 production was such in name only, for nothing novel 
 was added in this last flamboyant fulmination against 
 Cleveland. At the end of this year, Tourgee's ac- 
 tivities with the Inter-Ocean were ended until he went 
 to France, from which place he occasionally sent his 
 ideas. His long and fairly regular connection with 
 this paper was certainly his most successful financial 
 enterprise, for it was the only one that had given 
 him a fairly steady income. Visions of political office 
 
I20 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 again haunted him in 1894, and several papers in his 
 vicinity advocated his election to Congress; but he 
 was opposed by most of the organs even of his own 
 party, though one had the temerity to suggest his name 
 as vice-presidential candidate for 1896. But the slight 
 sentiment in favor of his nomination to Congress soon 
 died an even swifter natural death than is ordinary in 
 politics, and with its decease all of Tourgee's hopes for 
 popular approval of his political theories flickered out 
 forever. 
 
 Still unwilling to learn, or more probably incapable, 
 harsh though the word is, of learning from the stern 
 teachings of experience, in the spring of 1895 Tourgee 
 started another journalistic venture in that optimistic 
 frame of mind which he always displayed when be- 
 ginning to chase the ignis fatuiis of business success. 
 On March 20, there appeared from rooms at 457 
 Washington Street, Buffalo, The Basis; A Journal of 
 Citizenship, edited by Tourgee. Its front page pro- 
 claimed its modest mission to the world in flaring type. 
 That mission was to be 'The Basis of Public Peace, 
 Personal Security, Equal Right, Justice to All, Good 
 Laws, Good Government, National Prosperity, Im- 
 proved Conditions, AND OF A BETTER WORLD 
 TOMORROW." The first editorial states that The 
 Basis is a ''thirty-two page weekly which hopes to 
 grow to forty-eight pages and then to sixty-four if 
 the favor of the public will permit." The general idea 
 of the publication, as announced, was to promote "ap- 
 plied Christianity," the theory which had already 
 been advanced in "Murvale Eastman"; but it is very 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 121 
 
 plain that a scarcely secondary purpose was to furnish 
 a medium for ''A Bystander's Notes" and various other 
 articles of Tourgee's, together with several by his 
 daughter, who signed herself "Henry Churton Jr.," 
 which had been rejected by certain magazines. 
 **Migna/' which had been sleeping in a corner of the 
 grave where Oitr Continent had rested for eleven years, 
 was now exhumed and at least partially revivified. The 
 history of that unfortunate magazine now began to be 
 repeated, and the next year was painfully employed in 
 disheartening efforts to make The Basis succeed, at- 
 tempts that were hindered by almost constant ill- 
 health. As early as July, Tourgee's private corre- 
 spondence shows that the magazine was likely to stop 
 at any time because of insufficient funds. Efforts to 
 merge it with several other publications had failed, 
 since the editors were too wary. Tourgee stated that 
 he himself, his wife, daughter, and one office girl did 
 the whole of the work for the magazine, which had 
 only eight hundred subscribers. By December it had 
 become necessary to limit the publication to once a 
 month, and in April, 1896, the last number came 
 forth. 
 
 The rest of this year was spent in the attempt to ob- 
 tain publication for articles which almost always were 
 rejected, but two small volumes finally found their 
 way into print. The first of these, 'The War of the 
 Standards," is a study in ''coin and credit versus coin 
 without credit"; in other words, it is a series of cam- 
 paign documents. They are largely historical, but 
 those at the end discuss certain concrete methods of 
 
122 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 dealing with the currency problem that was the chief 
 issue in the campaign of 1896. Possibly of more in- 
 terest, because it is fiction, is "The Mortgage on the 
 Hip-Roof House." It is a novelette of the Horatio 
 Alger type, in which there are a villain, a poor but 
 lovable grandfather, a more lovable granddaughter, 
 an adopted grandson (adopted of course that he may 
 wed the granddaughter), and a kindly as well as rich 
 benefactor. The plot centers about the necessity of 
 raising a mortgage on the family home, which is 
 situated near Lake Erie. Needless to say, it is raised, 
 villainy is properly punished, and poverty-stricken, 
 spotless virtue is amply recompensed for its unswerv- 
 ing adherence to the straight and narrow path. 
 
 Tourgee went to New York in the autumn of 1896, 
 and remained there for several months seeking pub- 
 lishers for various articles, as well as an opportunity 
 to campaign for McKinley. His letters to his wife 
 during this period often threatened suicide unless he 
 found some means of sustenance. At last this was ob- 
 tained through campaign speeches made for the Re- 
 publicans, and thus the tension caused by a really 
 desperate financial situation was relieved. After such 
 experiences as these, it is no cause for wonder that, 
 on December 31, Mrs. Tourgee exclaimed, in the 
 privacy of her diary : 'The close of the most distress- 
 ful year of my life! Pray God the next may be 
 different!" 
 
 Fortunately it was, for in 1897 Tourgee was ap- 
 pointed Consul at Bordeaux. In January he began 
 to send letters to the President as well as to various 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 123 
 
 men in Congress in regard to a consulship at Man- 
 chester. He received some encouragement in this 
 attempt, because of which Mrs. Tourgee went to 
 Washington in April and had many personal confer- 
 ences with those in authority. As a result of these 
 conferences, Bordeaux was finally chosen, since it 
 was the most available position. On May 6, President 
 McKinley informed Mrs. Tourgee that the appoint- 
 ment to Bordeaux was settled, and one week later the 
 commission as Consul to that place was granted her 
 husband. The next six weeks were occupied in 
 settling up business affairs, and on July 3 Tourgee took 
 what was to be his final look at his native country, 
 and, accompanied by his wife, sailed for France. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 BORDEAUX 
 
 After a stop at Gibraltar, Tourgee landed on the 
 southern coast of France, arrived at Bordeaux on July 
 22, and took formal charge of his office on August 2. 
 The duties incumbent upon him were not arduous, and, 
 had his health been good, there would have been much 
 happiness in store for him and his family, for the 
 daughter came to Bordeaux shortly after her parents. 
 But the next eight years was a time of steadily de- 
 clining vigor for Tourgee, broken by periods of ap- 
 parently returning strength; not only his old wounds, 
 but a complication resulting from them which took 
 the form of diabetes, became gradually more malignant. 
 And yet it was not on the whole an unhappy period, 
 at least in comparison to the preceding six or eight 
 years, for his income was now definite and regular. 
 
 In 1898 his old publishers. Fords, Howard and 
 Hulbert, brought out a volume of three stories, of 
 which the "first furnished the title, 'The Man Who 
 Outlived Himself." In the caption story, Tourgee 
 again shows that interest in things supernatural which 
 had already been manifested in some of his writings. 
 The leading figure in the story purports to have been 
 
 124 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 125 
 
 one of the inmates at Libby prison when Tourgee was 
 there, and he entrusts the ''strange story" of his Hfe 
 to his old fellow-prisoner. The tale, which contains 
 occasional gruesome touches and uncanny situations 
 that suggest Poe, recounts how one Arthur Quitman 
 died while in the midst of financial troubles, came back 
 to life, and finally recovered his memory, together 
 with his wife and daughter — much of which is sug- 
 gestive of autobiography. The second story, 'Toor 
 Joel Pike," is reminiscent of Tourgee's lawyer days. 
 Joel Pike is a Pactolus Prime-like figure who suffers 
 under the suspicion of being a villain, whereas he is 
 eventually shown to be almost an angel — albeit a very 
 ugly one — in disguise. Autobiography, mystery, 
 problems of Reconstruction, love, and a dark, schem- 
 ing villain who is finally reformed, equally spoil the 
 closing story in the volume, "The Grave of Tante 
 Angelique." 
 
 In September of this year, Tourgee's connection 
 with the Inter-Ocean, to w^hich he had made regular 
 contributions since coming to France, particularly 
 patriotic articles dealing with the Spanish-American 
 War, was finally severed. Three months later the 
 family took up residence for the winter at the Villa 
 Trocadero, a pretty spot on the seacoast about fifty 
 miles from Bordeaux, whither Tourgee went because 
 in it were medical baths which had been prescribed for 
 him. The family remained there until April, 1899, 
 when, upon their return to Bordeaux, a disagreeable 
 incident occurred. On the twelfth of that month, a 
 bailiff, with a writ of saisie-gagerie issued by local 
 
126 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 authorities, entered Tourgee's house and, after 
 handhng him and his daughter roughly, took an in- 
 ventory of the furniture and made insulting remarks 
 about the American flag. This action raised the ques- 
 tion of the inviolability of consular material, sustained 
 by treaty, and accordingly Tourgee immediately sent 
 all the facts to the mayor of Bordeaux and to Wash- 
 ington. After a good deal of diplomatic corre- 
 spondence, the matter was satisfactorily adjusted. 
 
 During the coming summer and until well on in 
 1900, Tourgee's health was apparently the best it had 
 been for several years, as a result of which he resumed 
 writing, mostly about political matters, for several 
 magazines. For the next two years his health was 
 still such that he was able to do a little literary work 
 at various times. One item is of much interest in 
 view of the fact that it shows how absolutely at this 
 time Tourgee had given up all the educational theories 
 which had been the foundation of the Reconstruction 
 novels and of much of his other writings. In a letter 
 to President Roosevelt, on October 21, 1901, Tourgee 
 first congratulates him for the moral courage shown 
 in his invitation to Booker T. Washington to dine with 
 him, and then says, apropos of the question of national 
 education as a remedy for the negro problem : 
 
 "It was a genuine fool's notion. I sincerely believed 
 at that time (1880) that education and Christianity 
 were infallible solvents of all the evils which have 
 resulted from the white man's claim of individual su- 
 periority. . . . Today I am ashamed to have been that 
 sort of a fool. I realize now that . . . education does 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 127 
 
 not eradicate prejudice, but intensifies it — Christianity 
 does not condemn or prevent injustice done to the weak 
 by the strong, but encourages and excuses it." 
 
 This letter is clear proof that the rosy visions about 
 humanity's betterment which Tourgee had so long en- 
 tertained had now entirely faded. The peevish, Timon- 
 of -Athens tone (attributable in part perhaps to 
 Tourgee's state of health) here manifested is obviously 
 enough that which is usually assumed by most would- 
 be alleviators of human ills, when their theories, based 
 upon the insecure foundations of prejudice, sentiment, 
 and the self-satisfaction derived from blind adherence 
 to their own plan to the exclusion of all others, have 
 been finally proved false by the beneficent corrosion 
 of time. 
 
 In this same year was published what was probably 
 the last literary effort of much length undertaken by 
 Tourgee, and it is an only too painful evidence that 
 his fountain of inspiration had not only ceased to spurt 
 but almost even to bubble. In the National Tribune, 
 Washington, D. C, there appeared weekly during 
 March and April, 1901, successive chapters of a novel- 
 ette, *The Summerdale Brabble." The action begins 
 in Summerdale, Massachusetts, but soon switches to 
 Tourgee's old home at Mayville, and local scenery 
 thence plays a large part in the story. Hero and 
 heroine are both even more extraordinary for wealth, 
 good looks, and general personal attainments than had 
 been customary in Tourgee's works. The only thing 
 which prevents the tale from being an almost perfect 
 example of consistently impeccable dulness in plot, 
 
128 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 character types, and action, is that it contains no real 
 reprobate who has the blood-curdhng attributes of all 
 orthodox bad people. 
 
 The current of life ran smoothly for Tourgee in 
 1902, but the next year brought renewed troubles for 
 both body and mind. On June 25, 1903, he received 
 a message from Washington inquiring w^hether he 
 would like a position as Consul-General at Halifax. 
 He at once replied, stating that he much preferred to 
 remain at his present post; but several weeks later an 
 official announcement came that he had been appointed 
 Consul-General at the newly suggested post. Though 
 deeply hurt at what he regarded as a personal rebuff, 
 he replied in a quiet letter, maintaining that he could 
 not go to Halifax because the rigorous climate there 
 would probably be disastrous both to him and his 
 weak daughter. In response, he was told that if he 
 preferred he could go to Prague or the West Indies, 
 but that his successor at Bordeaux had already been 
 appointed. This last communication alarmed Mrs. 
 Tourgee so much that she dared not show it to her 
 husband, but instead wrote a pleading letter to Presi- 
 dent Roosevelt. Having waited in vain for a reply, 
 she sailed on July 25 for the United States, determined 
 to have a personal interview wath the President. No 
 sooner had she landed in New York than she received 
 a cablegram stating that Tourgee was to be permitted 
 to remain at Bordeaux ''because of Madam's letter to 
 the President." ^ But this affair had a most disquiet- 
 ing effect upon her husband, for, in his wife's own 
 ^ The Buffalo Express^ December 12, 1909. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 129 
 
 words, he ''never recovered from the shock of this ex- 
 perience, and though he Hved nearly two years after, 
 he was never again his bright, hopeful self." ^ The 
 active cause for this episode was that certain dealers 
 in hides in Bordeaux thought that Tourgee was too 
 strict in his regulations concerning exportations, and 
 accordingly made complaints to the authorities. It 
 should be noted that Tourgee was never in his life 
 in Halifax, though several abbreviated biographies of 
 him state that he was Consul-General there during the 
 last years of his life. 
 
 Meanwhile his health was steadily declining, though 
 at times he appeared almost well ; and from this period 
 on his wife did practically all the business connected 
 with his office. A letter of his, dated November 23, 
 1904, gives his own estimate of his condition: "My 
 health was very bad for several months [1904], but in 
 August last the doctors made an excavation in my hip 
 and took out a piece of lead which must have been 
 wandering around in my anatomy since Perryville. I 
 have been much better since. I now weigh 175 and 
 feel almost well, except for my hands which are pain- 
 fully hypersensitive — making writing a burden which 
 has so long been a deHght." This letter shows that 
 unwarranted hope of recovery which so often charac- 
 terizes persons whose course is almost run. Uric acid 
 poison was now filling Tourgee's system, and he also 
 frequently experienced choking spells caused by water 
 on the lungs which had to be drawn off several times. 
 On December 30, 1904, Mrs. Tourgee said in her diary, 
 
1.30 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 "Began reports which may be for the last time." She 
 of course knew that the end could not be far off. Dur- 
 ing the spring of 1905, Tourgee was dilirious much 
 of the time, and often thought that he was dying, 
 though he still sat up as late as April 25. 
 
 Mrs. Tourgee's diary, which had so faithfully 
 narrated the events of her husband's life for more 
 than twenty-five years, on May 21, 1905, recorded the 
 closing scene thus : 'The sun shines brightly, but it is 
 a dark day for us. Albion breathed his last at 12:15 
 this morning. My heart is wrung. I can say no 
 more." Two days later funeral services were held in 
 the English church at Bordeaux, and the body was im- 
 mediately taken to a crematory at Paris. Mrs. Tourgee 
 and her daughter spent the next few months in 
 settling up the business affairs of the Consulate office, 
 and in November returned to Thorheim, bringing with 
 them the ashes of the husband and father, which were 
 shortly interred in the local cemetery after appropriate 
 ceremonies had been conducted by the Grand Army 
 of the Republic. A simple granite shaft was soon 
 erected over the ashes, which bears the inscription : 
 
 **I pray thee then 
 Write me as one that loves his fellow-men." 
 
 In personal appearance, Tourgee was of medium 
 height, and, while a young man, was very slim, as a 
 photograph taken when he was in the army witnesses.^ 
 As he grew older, he increased considerably in weight 
 and breadth, and during the last ten or fifteen years 
 'The Story of a Thousand," p. 209. 
 
 1 «' 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 131 
 
 of his life was quite obese — a result not only of age 
 but of disease as well. His hair was very dark brown 
 and he wore a heavy moustache ; his face was perhaps 
 strong rather than handsome, though he was possibly 
 better looking than the average man. He unequivocably 
 liked at least one custom of the Southerners — their 
 style of dress, which he always followed after his re- 
 turn North, particularly as regards the wide-brimmed 
 hat for which the "Southern colonel" on our stage has 
 always been conspicuous. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 A CONTINUALLY lapsing interest in his novels with 
 their already antiquated or largely discredited theories, 
 and an unbroken absence of eight years from his native 
 land before his death took place, account for the fact 
 that there was little critical comment about Tourgee 
 or his literary work after his decease. The penalty 
 of faint praise or decorous silence thus inflicted upon 
 him was that which is usually paid by men of his type : 
 opportunists, who make literary capital out of some 
 tremendous social convulsion whose surgings are soon 
 calmed by legislative measures, or simply by the 
 progress of time with its accompanying increase of 
 more charitable, because less interested, opinions; 
 politicians, whose acrid partisanship, which stains not 
 merely their political views but also their opinions on 
 nearly all those public and private questions which 
 admit of manifold interpretations and solutions, almost 
 completely ostracises them from fellowship with those 
 who believe that one of the chief glories of literature 
 is the possibility it affords for a comity of infinitely 
 varied ideas; writers, whose literary style depends for 
 
 132 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 133 
 
 its effectiveness largely upon the persistent use of 
 devices long since hoary with age. And by this time 
 it should be evident that Tourgee's works come, with 
 almost unbroken regularity, under this three-fold 
 classification : they give vent to narrow, cramped ideas; 
 they are the products of particular, and therefore 
 temporary, social conditions; they lack stylistic dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 One subject but little touched upon thus far con- 
 cerns Tourgee's opinions about some of the chief 
 writers of his day. His views of his contemporaries 
 are to be found mostly in Our Continent, but he 
 occasionally interpolated them in his novels. It was 
 of course a maxim of his literary as well as political 
 faith to admire only those writers whose minds ran in 
 much the same channels as his own. This means, in 
 general, that the Victorians were the objects of his 
 adulation. Particularly did he reverence them for the 
 chief article in their creed : the interpretation of every- 
 thing terrestrial by what they conceived to be celestial 
 standards. That idea which permeates so many of 
 their writings, "And the Lord spake unto Moses, say- 
 ing" — whatever any particular Victorian Moses 
 thought the Lord commanded him to write for the bet- 
 terment of humanity, to Tourgee's mind constituted 
 their greatest charm. Thus in an article on Reade and 
 Trollope he says: "He [Reade] recognized the under- 
 lying truth of all artistic production, that its highest 
 purpose is to teach a noble lesson." ^ In another article, 
 
 ^ Our Continent, Vol. V, pp. 634-5. 
 
134 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 entitled *The King is Dead!" he praises Longfellow 
 in these words: ''He was easily the first of American 
 poets." He "won his crown by Americanizing the 
 world's life. ... As compared with England's poet 
 laureate he was perhaps less rich in fervid imagery, 
 but he was of deeper and tenderer tone, of broader and 
 riper manhood, closer akin to the great common heart 
 and less tainted with any narrow and bigoted exclusive- 
 ness." ^ The same article contains much more perfervid 
 praise of Longfellow's Americanism. Tourgee, indeed, 
 thought that American literature was destined to sur- 
 pass that of the Old World, as is evinced by an article 
 called "Americanism in Literature," in which there 
 are these passages : "The American element in litera- 
 ture is simply the American element in our thought. . . . 
 The coming American novelists may choose to portray 
 the universal humanity only in Old World phases, but 
 they will view such foreign life from a standpoint 
 peculiarly their own, and will give new interpretations 
 to characters and events which the Old World has but. 
 dimly understood and only half appreciated." ^ E. P. 
 Roe was the beneficiary of a special amount of lauda- 
 tion. "Few men have extended a healthier influence 
 upon the life of today than Mr. Roe. In these times, 
 when the novel of purpose is made a matter of artistic 
 ridicule by our over-refined dilettanti, and the novel 
 without a purpose is corrupting the heart and brain of 
 the rising generation . . . the very large sales which 
 
 ^ Our Continent, Vol. I, p. 178. 
 'Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 219. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 135 
 
 his works have had disclose to us the pleasing fact 
 that our American reading public is not yet entirely 
 given over to the worship of the realism which insists 
 that fiction shall be given up to the painting life as it 
 is, dirt and all." ^ Tourgee further elaborates his 
 belief in the purpose novel in these words: "A novel 
 without a purpose is the counterpart of a man without 
 a purpose. One written for mere amusement may be 
 either good or bad, but at the very best, is only the low- 
 est form of art." Self-defense was probably the motive 
 which prompted the above words. Dickens, George 
 Eliot, Ruskin, and other lesser figures often received ^ 
 word of commendation from Tourgee; in the case of 
 George Eliot, he failed to grasp the significance of her 
 minute searchings for environmental causes as the 
 motivations of good and evil actions. 
 
 Against everything that savored of realism in mod- 
 ern fiction, and against all writers who did not tread 
 the path of indisputable morality, Tourgee was relent- 
 lessly hostile. His novels abound with references to 
 these matters. ''Black Ice" (pp. 18-19) : 'They [mod- 
 ern realists] tell us that fiction is of necessity limited by 
 its sterile commonplaces to laborious self-dissection 
 and elaborated display of the results of morbid mental 
 anatomy ... I had come to think that if the life 
 which is portrayed in our so-called 'realistic fiction' is 
 a fair average product of our institutions, the time 
 cannot be far distant when the killing of an American 
 will be no more counted homicide than the drowning 
 
 * Our Continent, Vol. Ill, p. 669. 
 
/ 
 
 136 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 of supernumerary puppies." ^ "Button's Inn" closes 
 with this querulous sentence : "We . . . assert that pet- 
 tiness alone is truth and declare that real life is con- 
 cerned only with multitudinous trivialities, discover- 
 able only by elaborate processes of morbid self -dissec- 
 tion." "Murvale Eastman" (p. 113): "So, too, the 
 pessimistic philosophy which calls itself 'reaHsm' in 
 art and literature, always is, and always will be, at 
 fault when it comes to solve the riddle of humanity. 
 It says human nature, human character, is a result of 
 the operations of natural laws. So it is; but those laws 
 are not all physical, nor purely mental. The soul must 
 be taken into account if we would comprehend hu- 
 manity or truly portray character." Again in the same 
 book (p. 165) : "You see, the 'realist' is always ready 
 to believe anything mean; but anything decent and 
 manly he declares at once to be unnatural." Also 
 (p. 214) : "It is only romantic notions of love and 
 virtue that we fear today; and these we seek to fore- 
 stall by prescribing for the young soul the carefully 
 elaborated daily record of the world's infamies, and 
 substituting 'realistic' impurity as a motive for 'healthy 
 fiction,' instead of the silly sentimentaHsm of old- 
 fashioned love." "An Outing with the Queen of 
 Hearts," (pp. 49-50) : "I suppose we should yet speak 
 of it [sex attraction] as love, and go on believing in 
 it to the very last, had not 'realism' and the curious 
 contempt for all things American, which has come to 
 lift us up to the sublime level of social formalism by 
 which the society of other lands is shaped into such 
 * Our Continent, Vol. Ill, p. 732. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 137 
 
 matchless excellence, taught us that belief in love, and 
 more especially in married love, is not merely the very 
 'worst possible form,' but a vain and weak credulity 
 in which only 'the immature American' is any longer 
 willing to admit himself so foolish as to indulge." 
 Again (p. 64) : 'The man who paints warts and weak- 
 ness, sin and shame, may tell the truth; but it is an 
 insignificant truth, unworthy of the artist's skill, unless 
 it bring some lesson of cause or cure." 
 
 Tourgee's works do not lack specific references to 
 some of the chief exponents of these modern ideas, or 
 of many other ideas that would not bear the lynx- 
 eyed scrutiny of such believers in strictly orthodox 
 virtue as himself. In an article which attacks Emer- 
 son for his irreverence, there occurs this sentence : "A 
 disciple of Carlyle, he regarded man as chiefly created 
 that he and his master might scold and scourge him, 
 though unlike Carlyle he believed in and expected his 
 improvement."^ Tourgee abominated Carlyle; he 
 praises Auerbach because he was a lover of humanity, 
 and hence just the opposite of the "blustering scold,"^ 
 Carlyle. In "Murvale Eastman" (p. 415) we are told 
 that Carlyle is "the cowardliest of braggarts with his 
 dog's heart and envenomed tongue" ; while in the same 
 book (p. 454) we learn that the chief impression which 
 Tourgee obtained from reading the "French Revolu- 
 tion" was of "the froth of Carlyle's rabid ravings." 
 Also, Tourgee praises Froude's biography of Carlyle 
 
 ^ Our Continent, Vol. I, p. 242. 
 'Ibid., Vol. I, p. 120. 
 
138 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 because, as he says, it is just that a ''man who assumed 
 to denounce and scourge others"' ^ ought not to have 
 his own shortcomings treated with lenity. Feehngs 
 of professional jealousy undoubtedly had something to 
 do with Tourgee's frequent snubbing of Howells and 
 James, though he was occasionally constrained to give 
 both some grudging praise. Howells is a "merciless 
 satirist of Boston life, who paints its pettiness and self- 
 sufficiency so deftly that his victims take his ridicule 
 for praise — that universal pessimist'' (''Letters to a 
 King," p. 71). And while he admits that "no modern 
 novelist has more grace and vigor or finer sense of 
 literary form" ^ than Howells, Tourgee also speaks of 
 him as "pouring forth page after page of inconceivable 
 agony over trifles too insignificant for ordinary mortals 
 to note. ... A picture is not truthful merely because 
 it has dirt in it. The province of true art is to portray 
 the meaner phases of nature only as a foil for the 
 nobler and grander passions." ^ The last sentence is of 
 great significance, for it succinctly states Tourgee's 
 abiding conception of the function of literature. The 
 chief fault in the works of Howells and James is, ac- 
 cording to Tourgee, that the soul has been left out.^ He 
 positively abhorred Hardy. Of his "Two in a Tower" 
 he says: "Never was more hideousness conveyed in 
 a simple story — . . . The realism of Zola is suffi- 
 ciently atrocious, but it is not reductive. . . . — for 
 
 ' Our Continent, Vol. Ill, p. 698-9. 
 'Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 733- 
 'Ibid., Vol. IV, p. 252. 
 *Ibid., Vol. I, p. 796. 
 
w 
 
 ALBION W. TOURGEE 139 
 
 cool sensualism, expressed in decorous ingenuousness, 
 combined with ignorance of what woman really is, in 
 soul, feeling and purpose, commend us to 'Two in a 
 Tower'." ^ As an amusing contrast to these onslaughts 
 on three of the greatest novelists of the time, Tourgee's 
 effusive admiration for a now almost forgotten lady 
 novelist may be cited : ''Miss Rhoda Broughton has 
 won for herself a peculiar place among modern nove- 
 lists. She has had her admirers by the hundred 
 thousand, and her critics in equal numbers, but of 
 imitators she thus far has had none that are worth 
 considering. Her originality of style, indeed, renders 
 imitation well nigh impossible." ^ 
 
 It was against Russian fiction, however, that 
 Tourgee aimed his heaviest verbal artillery. Of 
 Turgenev he does indeed admit that his "pen-pictures 
 of lower Russian life were the first step toward the 
 redemption and elevation of the Russian people" ; ^ 
 but he is unable to find language scorching enough to 
 express his contumely for 'Tolstoi, particularly because 
 of his theories about love. These stabbing words may 
 be found in ''An Outing with the Queen of Hearts" 
 (P- 43) • '*We are even told that love is no secure 
 foundation for happiness in married life, which should, 
 instead, be based on 'mutual esteem and forbearance.* 
 Indeed, one of the chief priests of this newfangled 
 doctrine of life-relations has gone so far as to declare 
 that marriage itself is 'the most sinful form of love,* 
 
 * Our Continent, Vol. Ill, p. 732-3. 
 *Jbid., Vol. Ill, p. 91. 
 
 • Ibid., Yol IV, p. 411. 
 
140 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 which itself, so he assures us, is of the devil and al- 
 together vile. I thank God that he is not an Amer- 
 ican." And in ''Murvale Eastman" (p. 214) we are 
 advised that ''a generation to whose lips the pessimistic 
 foulness of Tolstoi and his imitators has been com- 
 mended as an inspiring cordial, not only by the high 
 priests of literature, but by ministers of God, is per- 
 haps beyond fear of peril from the highly-spiced narra- 
 tives of social peccadilloes which abound in the daily 
 press." One can scarcely refrain from wondering 
 whether the strongest superlatives in our tongue would 
 have enabled Tourgee to express even a tithe of his 
 disgust could he have read, let us say, ''Ann Veronica" ! 
 Toward science Tourgee was more charitable than 
 toward realistic literature. He looked upon it at best, 
 however, as of secondary importance in comparison 
 with the value of the emotions, and was frankly sus- 
 picious of some of its hypotheses. In "The Apostle of 
 Evolution," ^ he praises Darwin for his love of nature 
 and sweet-tempered endurance of adverse criticism, 
 but is non-committal in respect to the theory of evolu- 
 tion, which he regarded of value chiefly because he 
 thought it helped to substantiate his theory of moral 
 progress. In ''Murvale Eastman" (p. 266) he says: 
 ''Evolution is the law of attribute, whether it is of 
 species or not. . . . The dead hand of an ancestor 
 reaches often across even a century and grips us by 
 the heartstrings. God has consecrated this law to 
 human progress." And again (p. 274) : "Science has 
 taught even the most incredulous of saints, within the 
 ^ Our Continent^ Vol. I, p. 226. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 141 
 
 life-time of many now living, to admit what was be- 
 fore esteemed blasphemous, not merely as a fact, but 
 as a beautiful and harmonious revelation; so that we 
 read to-day the record of God's work in veritable tables 
 of stones which his hand has traced and his wisdom 
 preserved for our instruction and delight." But it was 
 exceptions from the law of regularity that most ar- 
 rested and fascinated his ever-credulous mind. A 
 passage from "A Son of Old Harry" (p. 92) will 
 substantiate this: *The student of heredity in the 
 human family is ever and anon confounded with seem- 
 ing miracles In spite of the principle that like 
 
 produces like, we meet every day with instances of 
 unlikeness so startling as to confound the observer, 
 and, for a time at least, destroy all faith in scientific 
 theories of life." Tourgee's belief in the inviolabiHty 
 of the exceptional, of the miraculous (in a word, of 
 the romantic), was much stronger than his belief in 
 the inviolability of the laws of heredity and environ- 
 ment. Ironically enough, it so happens that his own 
 life is a rather unusually good illustration of the work- 
 ings of those same laws. 
 
 Much in Tourgee's novels and in nearly all his other 
 work is of interest not so much to the student of 
 literature as of politics. His devotion to his particular 
 party, as well as his unconcealed disdain for the op- 
 posing political faction — a disdain that only too often 
 expressed itself in numerous screeds which lacked 
 dignity, fairness, impersonality and breadth of view, 
 and showed, in their stead, far too much pettiness, 
 superficiality, pettifoggery, and feebly sardonic humor 
 
/ 
 
 142 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 — are quite characteristic of the poHtical sound and 
 fury of his day. The paper for which he wrote, The 
 Chicago Inter-Ocean, was one of the chief sinners of 
 the time against pubHc good taste, and not a few of 
 Tourgee's splenetic articles contributed to the sum total 
 of its sins — sins which were probably the main cause 
 for causing its loss of patronage, and eventual 
 absorption by another paper. What it lacked in 
 political fairmindedness and foresight, it endeavored 
 to atone for by strident animosities and jaundiced 
 flapdoodle; qualities which Tourgee, both because of 
 his temperament and training, commonly found very 
 pleasing to his own conception of partisanship. 
 
 **My poor husband! How his life was embittered, 
 ruined, by his trying to do what he had no capacity 
 to do!" Thus Mrs. Tourgee laments, as usual with 
 acuteness of perception, the chief reason for her hus- 
 band's failure to win greater success than was granted 
 him. Multiplicity of interests was perhaps the main 
 cause why he never attained lasting peace of mind. 
 Had he been content to devote himself only to writing, 
 his life would have been freed from that continual 
 strain of slaving for the necessities of existence which 
 he was subjected to during his last twenty years — 
 but no, this would not do; instead, he must, despite the 
 pleading admonitions of friends and relatives, invest 
 the neat fortune he had won from several of his most 
 successful books in a hazardous journalistic experi- 
 ment, which resulted in a smash that ruined his 
 financial prospects forever. He must capitalize his 
 literary talent; and the result was mutually self -de- 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 143 
 
 structive, for both money and mental peace were gone. 
 From this time on, he was forced to engage in an un- 
 broken struggle to find a market for his various 
 literary efforts, in order to keep his family in moder- 
 ately good circumstances; and hardly was this goal 
 reached by means of his appointment as Consul than 
 failing health ensued to cloud the last eight years of 
 his life. '1 would have been a much better writer 
 and far greater novelist had I been content to do less 
 pretentious work," Tourgee says in one of his last 
 letters; and had he said ''less diffuse work," the self- 
 criticism would have been still more pertinent. 
 
 ''Somehow I have never thought much about fame 
 and really do not know that I would care to forego to- 
 day's dinner for tomorrow's praise. . . . Yet I be- 
 lieve I have the true artistic instinct. The idea of 
 carving out a grand presence, a noble character — of 
 impressing and at the same time bettering humanity — 
 is so strong with me that I find myself absolutely 
 absorbed by it." Thus runs a passage from one of 
 Tourgee's letters to his daughter, for whom he always 
 coveted greater rewards than were ever granted him; 
 rewards that, probably impossible of attainment by 
 her because of insufficient artistic and literary ability, 
 were made forever unattainable by an early death. 
 His remark about fame should be largely discounted, 
 for he was afflicted with as much of the "last in- 
 firmity" as are most literary men; whenever "critic 
 peep or cynic bark" touched his works either because 
 of their extreme ideas or artistic faults, and pointed 
 out how they had few permanent literary qualities, he 
 
144 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 was always ready to leap valiantly to their defense. 
 While at work on any of his novels, he was almost 
 completely absorbed in his task — except when the lure 
 of the rod overcame him. 'There is no happiness for 
 me except in doing — achieving. If I cannot accom- 
 plish, I prefer not to be," he says in another letter, 
 in which he also significantly states that he cares 
 little for music, but likes plays because they pre- 
 sent the multitudinous activities of life; a fact, among 
 others, which witnesses that his was a nature de- 
 ficient, on the whole, in the appreciation of delicately 
 refining humanistic values. He had too much love for 
 applied ethics to be much interested in strictly eclectic 
 mental and emotional pursuits. Not art for art's sake, 
 but art for morality's sake, was what spurred his mind 
 to activity; and such a conception of the function of 
 literature peremptorily excluded finesse from his writ- 
 ings. Serenity, poise, austerity, disinterestedness, cath- 
 olicity, — of such enduring literary values he was almost 
 destitute ; instead, he exemplified that love for applying 
 a quality of virtue by no means always unstrained to 
 specific and concrete problems of the day, which, 
 despite its frequent abuse of art for didactic uses, is 
 one of the perennial glories of English literature. 
 
 This last consideration may well lead to a final 
 estimate of Tourgee's place in that literature. Gen- 
 erally speaking, his works suffer, as most Victorian 
 literature suffers, because of their dual aim — artistic 
 excellence plus doctrinal inculcation. More particu- 
 larly, he stands out as the author of one purpose novel 
 that, principally because of its timeliness, took the 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 145 
 
 country by storm. The burden of that novel he later 
 expressed in this passage taken from a poem of his, 
 which, like the other comparatively few rhymes that 
 he fashioned, has all the vigor of his prose: 
 
 "Yet up from the Southland comes a moan 
 Like Yesterday's ceaseless monotone. 
 Hark! 'Tis the half-freed Slave's lament. 
 For the bliss we promised and woe we sent! 
 The moan of the fettered, untaught soul 
 Charged with a freeman's power and dole I" ^ 
 
 His literary work which preceded '*A Fool's 
 Errand" never attained popular success, though 
 *Toinette" is with little doubt the first piece of fiction 
 dealing directly with the problem of Reconstruction; 
 for the non-partisan tales of Constance Fenimore 
 Woolson which, first published in magazines in the 
 seventies and eventually appearing in book form as 
 ''Rodman the Keeper" in 1880, showed the utter de- 
 pression, the yet unquenched bitterness, and the pride, 
 still splendid in desolation, of the South, postdated the 
 appearance of 'Toinette" at least a year. But 
 'Toinette," pioneer in a literary land though it is, and 
 worthy in many respects of comparison with Tourgee's 
 better known writings, never caught the popular fancy 
 — perhaps because it was a pioneer. After the extraor- 
 dinary success of ''A Fool's Errand," Tourgee be- 
 gan to experience the misfortune that second or third- 
 rate genius must always suffer; he had burnt up al- 
 ^ Our Continent, Vol. I, p. 329. 
 
146 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 most all the enthusiasm he had in this first great, 
 consuming effort, and spent most of his remaining 
 life in a vain attempt to revive the ashes. Or, to 
 change the figure, he summarily exhausted his one 
 narrow vein of literary ore in "A Fool's Errand" (or, 
 more generally, in the six Reconstruction novels), and 
 occupied the rest of his days largely in working and 
 re-working the barren material that was still left in 
 this vein. Continually failing in this attempt, he was 
 at the same time forced to eke out his decreasing in- 
 come with efforts to strike a paying vein in some new 
 literary mine, which efforts usually proved to be worth- 
 less. The first mine was amply large, for it contained 
 the endless ramifications of Southern Romance, 
 whence, during the eighties, much valuable ore was 
 exhumed by several writers of greater ability than 
 Tourgee; but unfortunately, in this many-branched 
 field, he saw only the single vein of partisan interpreta- 
 tion of the Southern mind and character. The read- 
 ing public, however, soon tired of his "political docu- 
 ments" ; ^ not because they were documents only, for 
 they were more than that, but because they were per- 
 vasively political, and represented an attitude that both 
 unimpassioned, judicial criticism and popular interest 
 could not long tolerate. 
 
 Judgment of a writer like Tourgee, as of much 
 greater writers (Dickens, for instance) whose faults 
 are unusually patent, is always likely to err on the side 
 of harshness. There is, to be sure, little possibility 
 
 ^ "A History of American Literature Since 1870," by Fred 
 Lewis Pattee, Century Co., New York, 1915, p. 318. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 147 
 
 that the uniform edition of his works which he so 
 much wanted to see pubHshed will ever appear. Public 
 concern in the particularly relevant problems of his 
 day has since been largely shifted to more immediate 
 matters; his point of view was too individual, hence 
 too restricted, to cause any notable imitations of the 
 works, though he was unquestionably instrumental in 
 stimulating much Northern interest in the South. He 
 neither followed nor started any very distinct literary 
 tradition; rather, he spent his strength in an attempt 
 to alleviate a social ill which could not be cured by any 
 such ineffectual palliative as the bigotry which results 
 from clannish instincts, lack of well-balanced judg- 
 ment, myopic political vision, and a sense of personal 
 wrongs. Never did the spectator's attitude toward life 
 attract him; he was not interested in the enchantment 
 which the flux of things has afforded to some rare and 
 precious writers ; he was interested in the things them- 
 selves, and in only a restricted portion of them at that. 
 To be in the world, yet not of it, was not for him. He 
 hated with perfect hatred anything that savored of 
 dandyism or of a dilettante attitude toward life, and 
 attacked it with unrelenting acerbity. There was no 
 neutrality for Tourgee ; a belief, a political policy, an 
 institution, must be either cold or hot, else it received 
 from his pen a doom similar to that which was meted 
 out to the church at Laodicea ; and he often doomed it 
 anyhow because, even though unneutral, it was too 
 cold or too hot. And yet out of such qualities as these 
 comes his chief virtue: he exemplified in his writings 
 the magnificent, whether credible or not, folk-lore 
 
148 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 tradition that, in this universe of good and evil, of light 
 and darkness, of justice and injustice, of love and hate, 
 of God and the Devil, the positive quality of good is 
 not only destined to win an eventual victory over the 
 negative quality of evil in a future world, but that it 
 often wins it here and now. Hence heroism almost in- 
 variably sweeps on to triumphant victory in Tourgee's 
 novels, while villainy is punished with no less regular 
 uniformity, as is demanded by the snores out of which 
 come the ideas of popular literature. It was his mis- 
 fortune that his particular interpretation of these 
 eternally opposed principles did not happen to be 
 adequate for the settlement of the questions of Re- 
 construction, especially in regard to the black race. 
 Settlement of this special matter is still problematic, 
 while the general question has now become world- 
 wide; and the words concerning Comfort Servosse, 
 with which Tourgee concluded the next but last 
 chapter of his greatest novel, may now, with but slight 
 textual change, be aptly applied to himself : 'Time 
 smiles grimly as he traces anew the unsolved problem 
 which mocked the Fool's heart." 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF TOURGEE'S PUBLISHED 
 WRITINGS, AND PERIODICALS EDITED 
 BY HIM 
 
 1867 The Union Register, weekly newspaper. Greens- 
 
 boro, January 3-June 14. 
 
 1868 'The Code of Civil Procedure, to Special Plead- 
 
 ings." Prepared by Victor C. Barringer, 
 Will B. Rodman, Albion W. Tourgee, Com- 
 y^ missioners of the Code. Raleigh. 
 '^874 "Toinette: a Novel." New York. [New 
 edition, 1875; revised edition, 1879.] 
 
 1878 'The Code of Civil Procedure of North Caro- 
 
 lina with Notes and Decisions." Raleigh. 
 
 1879 ''A Digest of Cited Cases in the North Carohna 
 / Reports." Raleigh. 
 
 ^'Tigs and Thistles. A Western Story." New 
 
 / York. [New edition, 1883.] 
 ^'A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools." New 
 York. [Printings: November (2), Decem- 
 ber (2); 1880, January, February, March, 
 April, May (2), June (2), August (2), 
 September, October, November (2), Decem- 
 ber (4). New edition with 'The Invisible 
 Empire," 1880, 1883, 1902.] 
 149 
 
150 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 1880 'The Invisible Empire." New York. 
 /Bricks without Straw." New York. [Several 
 
 reprints on unknown dates.] 
 
 1881 "A Royal Gentleman" ['Toinette" renamed] 
 
 and "Zouri's Christmas." New York. [Sec- 
 ond edition, 1884.] 
 
 ''Aaron's Rod in Politics." A^. A. Review, 
 February, pp. 139-162. 
 
 "Reform versus Reformation." A^. A. Review, 
 April, pp. 305-319- 
 
 "The Christian Citizen." The Chautauquan, 
 
 I November, pp. 86-91. 
 i882i/"John Eax and Mamelon, or The South without 
 the Shadow." New York. 
 
 Our Continent, weekly magazine, Philadelphia, 
 New York, February 15, 1882-August 20, 
 , 1884. 
 
 71883 "Hot Plowshares." New York. [Owr Conti- 
 nent, July, 1882-May, 1883.] 
 
 1884 "An Appeal to Caesar." New York. 
 
 1885 "A Man of Destiny." Chicago. [Inter-Ocean, 
 
 December, 1884-March, 1885.] 
 "Letters to a Mugwump." Inter-Ocean, Septem- 
 ber-November. 
 
 1886 "The Veteran and His Pipe." Chicago. [New 
 
 edition, 1903. Inter-Ocean, April-September.] 
 "A Child of Luck." Inter-Ocean, March-No- 
 vember. 
 "Study in Civilization." N. A. Review, Septem- 
 ber, pp. 246-261. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 151 
 
 1^887 "Black Ice." New York. 
 
 v^'Button's Inn." Boston. [New edition, 1897. 
 Chautauquan Book Store, 1908.] 
 "The Renaissance of Nationalism." N, A. Re- 
 mew ^ January, p. i-ii. 
 
 1888 "Eighty Nine." ["89"] New York. 
 "Letters to a King." Cincinnati. 
 
 "A Bystander's Notes." Inter-Ocean^ May, 
 1888 (with occasional lapses) to January, 
 1895; August, 1897-September, 1898. 
 
 "The South as a Field for Fiction." Forum, 
 December, pp. 404-413. 
 
 1889 New uniform edition of: "Black Ice," "Bricks 
 
 without Straw," "Figs and Thistles," "A 
 Fool's Errand," "Hot Plowshares," "John 
 Fax," "A Royal Gentleman." New York. 
 
 "With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys." Phila- 
 delphia. [Lippincotfs Monthly Magazine, 
 December, 1887- August, 1889.] 
 
 "Shall White Minorities Rule?" Forum, April 
 
 j PP- 143-155. 
 
 1890 "Pactolus Prime." New York. 
 
 J "Murvale Eastman, Christian Socialist." New 
 York. [New edition, 1892. The Advance, 
 Chicago, vol. XXXIL] 
 "The Right to Vote." Forum, March, pp. 78-92. 
 J 1 89 1 "John Workman's Notions." Inter-Ocean, July- 
 May, 1892. 
 1892 "A Son of Old Harry." New York. 
 
152 ALBION W. TOURGEE 
 
 ^ 1893 ''Out of the Sunset Sea." New York. 
 
 'The Anti-Trust Campaign." N. A. Review, 
 July, pp. 30-40. 
 
 1894 "An Outing with the Queen of Hearts." New 
 
 York. [Cosmopolitan J November, 1891, pp. 
 70-84.] 
 "A Man of Destiny." [Second series.] Inter- 
 Ocean, January-April. 
 
 1895 The Basis. Weekly, March-December; monthly, 
 
 December-April, 1896. Buffalo. 
 'yi896 "The Story of a Thousand." Buffalo. [Cos- 
 mopolitan (in part), November, 1894- April, 
 1895; completed in The Basis.] 
 
 "The War of the Standards." New York. 
 
 "The Mortgage on the Hip-Roof House." 
 Cincinnati. 
 
 "The Reversal of Malthus." Am. Jr, of 
 Sociology, July, pp. 13-24. 
 
 "An Astral Partner." The Green Bag, July- 
 August. 
 
 "Some Advice to Young Voters." The Golden 
 Rule, October i, pp. 4-5. 
 '1898 "The Man Who Outlived Himself." New 
 
 York. 
 1899 "A Quiet Comer in Europe." Independent, 
 June I, pp. 1483-1485. 
 
 "The Twentieth Century Peace-Makers." Con- 
 temp. Review, London, June, pp. 886-908. 
 1/ 1 90 1 "The Summerdale Brabble." The National 
 Tribune, Washington, March-April. 
 
 I. 
 
ALBION W. TOURGEE 153 
 
 1902 "Our Consular System." Independent, January 
 23, pp. 208-210. 
 
 Two foreign translations of "A Fool's Errand" have 
 been found : ''Eines Narren Narrenstreich," by E. 
 Pennet, Berlin, 1882, 3 vols.; "Hullum Hritys," by 
 Waldemar Churberg, Helsingissa, 1883, 2 vols. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbott, General Joseph, 69 
 
 Alger, Horatio, 122 
 
 Anderson, President M. B., 20, 23, 63 
 
 "Ann Veronica," 140 
 
 "Appeal to C^sar, An," 78, 94-6, in 
 
 Arena, 70 
 
 Arnold, Benedict, 12 
 
 Auerbach, Berthold, 137 
 
 Bacon, Lord, 16 
 
 Basis, The, 120-1 
 
 Beecher, Henry Ward, 109 
 
 Bennett, James Gordon, 89 
 
 "Black Ice," 101-4, 105, no, 13S 
 
 Blaine, James G., 85, 98 
 
 Bookman, 69 
 
 "Bricks without Straw," 61, 73-76, 95 
 
 Broughton, Rhoda, 139 
 
 Brown, John, 88 
 
 Buifalo Express, The, 62, 128-9 
 
 "Button's Inn," 104-6, 136 
 
 Byron, Lord, 17 
 
 "C" letters, 57-8, 97 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 27, 137-8 
 
 Cervantes, 27 
 
 Chace, Dr. Wm., 102 
 
 Chautauquan, The, 26 
 
 "Child of Luck, A," loo-i 
 
 Choate, Joseph H., 81 
 
 Cicero, 22 
 
 Cleveland, Grover, 96-9, lOO-i, 107, 119 
 
 "Code of Civil Procedure, The," 57 
 
 "Comedie Humaine," 23 
 
 Conkling, Roscoe, 98 „r , o^, « 
 
 "Correspondence of Jonathan Worth, ihe, 39 
 
 155 
 
156 INDEX 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 140 
 D'Aubigne, 16 
 Davis, Jefferson, 38 
 Davis, Robert, 84, 88 
 Denver Times, The, yz 
 Dial, 7S 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 135, 146 
 "Digest of Cited Cases, A," 57 
 Diogenes, loi 
 
 "Eighty-Nine," 106-8 
 Eliot, George, 135 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 137 
 Erie Dispatch, The, 31 
 
 "Figs and Thistles," 59, 61, 71-2, 74 
 
 "Fool's Errand, A," 59-70, 71, n, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 95, 145, 
 
 146, 148 
 Froude, James A., 137 
 
 Garfield, James A., 72, 76-8, 95 
 
 Grant, Ulysses S., 52, 6&, 81, 90, 98, 99 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, 116, 138-9 
 
 Harper's Magazine, 68 
 
 Henry, O., 52 
 
 Heywood, Chester W., 17 
 
 "History of American Literature, A," 146 
 
 "History of the United States," 33 
 
 Holden, Governor, 45 
 
 "Hot Plowshares," 61, 86-8 
 
 Howells, William Dean, 138 
 
 Hugo, Victor, 6^ 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, 56 
 
 Inter-Ocean, The Chicago, 27, 77, 97, 99, 100, 108, 109, no, 115, 
 
 116, 119, 125, 142 
 "Invisible Empire, The," 70-1 
 
 James, Henry, 138 
 
 Jay, John, 81 
 
 "John Eax," 54-5, 61, 88 
 
 "John Workman's Notions," 115 
 
 Johnson, Andrew, 35, 38 
 
 Kilbourne, Harmon, 18 
 Kilbourne, Mary Corwin, 18 
 
INDEX 157 
 
 Kingsley, Charles, 113 
 
 Kirk, Edmund, 69 
 
 Ku Klux Klan, 43-5, 57, 63, 64, 70, 75, 79, I07 
 
 Kuhn, Seneca, 34-5 
 
 "Letters of Junius," 58 
 "Letters to a King," 108, 138 
 "Letters to a Mugwump," 99-100 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 50, 88, 99 
 Lincoln, Robert, 85 
 Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, no. 
 Logan, John A., 109 
 Longfellow, Henry W., 134 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas B., 16 
 
 Mackaye, Steele, 78-9 
 
 McKinley, William, 122-3 
 
 "Mamelon," 54, 55-6 
 
 "Man of Destiny, A," 97-8, loi, 119 
 
 "Man Who Outlived Himself, The," 124-5 
 
 Mayville Sentinel, 82 
 
 Mendenhall, C. P., 32 
 
 Mitchell, Donald G., 85 
 
 Morgan, General J. H., 25 
 
 "Mortgage on the Hip-Roof House, The,' 122 
 
 "Murvale Eastman, Christian Socialist," 113-4, 120, 136, 137, 140 
 
 Nation, 96 
 
 National Tribune, 127 
 
 New York Tribune, 38, 59, 60, 67, 68, 69, 80 
 
 "Night Thoughts," 16 
 
 Nixon, William Penn, 97, 99, 116 
 
 North State, The, 57 
 
 "O. Henry Biography," 52, 7° 
 
 Our Continent, 62, 84-91, 95, 100, I04, 108, 121, 133, I34, I35, 
 
 137, 138, 139, 140, 145 
 "Out of the Sunset Sea," 117-8, 119 
 "Outing with the Queen of Hearts, An," 118-9,136-7, I39 
 
 "Pactolus Prime," 11 1-2 
 "Paradise Lost," 16 
 Pettingill, R. L., 34 
 "Pilgrim's Progress," 16 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 125 
 
158 INDEX 
 
 Raleigh Observer, The, 68 
 
 Reade, Charles, 133 
 
 "Reconstruction in North Carolina," 33, 40 
 
 "Reconstruction Political and Social," 33, 35, 65 
 
 Richardson, Samuel, 63 
 
 Robbins, Rebecka, 12 
 
 "Robinson Crusoe," 46 
 
 Roe, Edward P., 112, 134 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, 126. 128 
 
 "Royal Gentleman, A," 48, 61, 74 
 
 Royal, Wm. L., 79-81 
 
 Ruskin, John, 115, 135 
 
 "Scottish Chiefs," 16 
 
 Shakspere, William, 19 
 
 Snow, Rowena, 13, 14 
 
 "Son of Old Harry, A," 116-7, Ui 
 
 "Story of a Thousand," 25, 28, 29, 130 
 
 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 63, 64, 68, 69, 70, 85 
 
 "Summerdale Brabble, The," 127-8 
 
 'Toinette," 41, 48-51, MS 
 
 Tolstoi, Count Leo, 139-40 
 
 Tourgee, Aimee, 44, 118, 121, 124, 130, 143 
 
 Tourgee, Albion Winegar, ancestors, 12; father and mother, 
 12-3 ; their marriage and removal to Ohio, 13 ; birth, 13 ; 
 mother's death, 13; stepmother, 13-4; trip to Massachu- 
 setts, 14; youthful diversions, 14-5; reading, 15-6; return 
 to Ohio, 16; academy life, 16-7; early writings, 17; meets 
 future wife, 17-8; college life, 19-21; enlists in army, 21; 
 severely wounded, 21 ; slow recovery, 22 ; first book pub- 
 lished, 22-4; second enlistment, 25; first interest in negro, 
 25-6; prisoner of war, 26-7; marriage, 27; return to war, 
 28; army diary, 28; "The Story of a Thousand," 28-9; in- 
 dependence of character, leading to withdrawal from army, 
 29-30; admitted to bar, 31; removes to Greensboro, 32; at- 
 titude toward South, 33-4; business^ partnerships, 34; fail- 
 ure of nursery, 35; imprudent actions, 35-6; The Union 
 Register, 36-8; hatred of Governor Worth, 39; elected 
 judge, 40; plays important part in Constitutional Conven- 
 tion, 40-1; more imprudence, 41-2; experiences with Ku 
 Klux Klan, 43-5; failure of another business enterprise, 
 45-47; fragmentary literary labors, 47; first novel, 
 "Toinette," 48-51; duties as judge, 51; removes to Raleigh, 
 52; "John Eax" and "Mamelon," 53-6; lectures, 56; writ- 
 ings on legal matters, 56-7; "C" letters, 57-8; leaves South 
 
INDEX 159 
 
 and goes to New York, 58; "A Fool's Errand," S9-70; how 
 written, 60-1; one of series of works, 61-2; story told in 
 "A Fool's Errand," 62-4; its message, 64-7; its immediate 
 popularity, 67-9; later critical opinions, 69-70; "The Inyis- 
 ible Empire," 70-1; "Figs and Thistles," 71-2; settles in 
 Denver, 72-3; returns to New York, 'jz'y "Bricks withput 
 Straw," TZ-^\ campaigns for Garfield, ^^-T^ Garfield seeks 
 his advice, 77-8; dramatises "A Fool's Errand," 78-9; "A 
 Fool's Errand" attacked, 79-81 ; public dinner for him, 81 ; 
 purchases Thorheim, 81-2; makes home there, 82-3; goes 
 to Philadelphia, 84 ; Our Continent , 84-91 ; "Hot Plow- 
 shares" published in Our Continent, 86-8; troubles as ed- 
 itor and publisher, 88-9; magazine fails, 89-91; life at 
 Thorheim, 92-123; waning literary powers, 92; character 
 as shown in wife's diary, 92-4; "An Appeal to Caesar," 
 94-6; attacks on Cleveland, 97-9; "A Man of Destiny," 97-8; 
 'The Veteran and His Pipe," 99; "Letters to a Mugwump/' 
 99-100; "A Child of Luck," 100- 1 ; "Black Ice," 101-4; "But- 
 ton's Inn," 104-6; activities as inventor, 106; "Eighty-Nine," 
 106-8; "Letters to a King," 108; material contributed to 
 Inter-Ocean, 108-10; "With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys," 
 no; advocates educational measure, iio-i; "Pactolus 
 Prime," 11 1-2; "Murvale Eastman," 113-4; lectures at Buf- 
 falo Law School, 114-5; "John Workman's Notions," 115; 
 denounced for prophecy of negro insurrection, 116; "A Son 
 of Old Harry," 116-7; "Out of the Sunset Sea," 11 7-8; "An 
 Outing with the Queen of Hearts," 118-9; various troubles, 
 119-20; The Basis, 120- 1 ; "The War of the Standards," 
 121-2; "The Mortgage on the Hip-Roof House," 122; des- 
 perate financial situation, 122 ; appointed consul, 122-3 ; 
 goes to Bordeaux, 124; "The Man Who Outlived Himself," 
 124-5 ; trouble with French bailiff, 125-6 ; failing health, 
 126; abandons his educational theory for solving problem 
 of Reconstruction, 126-7; "The Summerdale Brabble," 127-8; 
 threatened with removal to Halifax, 128-9; final illness, 129- 
 30; death, 130; personal appearance, 130-1 ; critical esti- 
 mate of his character and writings, 132-48; limited liter- 
 ary abihty, 132-3; views on contemporaries, 133-40; typical 
 Victorian, 133-5; hatred of realistic fiction, 135-40; despises 
 Carlyle, 137-8; jealous of Howells and James, 138; abhor- 
 rence of Hardy and Tolstoi, 138-40; attitude toward sci- 
 ence, 140-1; narrow point of view, 141-2; too many inter- 
 ests, 142-3; attitude toward work, 143-4; his place in lit- 
 erature, 144-8 
 
 Tourgee, Cyrus, 13 
 
 Tourgee, Mrs. Emma Kilbourne, 18, 22, 27, 2S, 60, 61, 63, 73, 
 82, 88,89, 90, 92-4, 101-2, HI, 113, 118, 119, 122, 123, 128, 129, 130 
 
i6o INDEX 
 
 Tourgee, Peter, 12 
 
 Tourgee, Valentine, 12 
 
 Tourgee, Valentine Jr., 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 24, 87 
 
 Trollope, Anthony, 133 
 
 Turgenev, Ivan, 139 
 
 Union Register, The, 36-8 
 
 "Veteran and His Pipe, The," 99 
 
 "War of the Standards, The," 121-2 
 
 Warner, Joseph, 78 
 
 Warner, Mrs. Joseph, 78 
 
 Washington, Booker T., 126 
 
 Winegar, Jack, 13 
 
 Winegar, Jacob, 12 
 
 Winegar, Jacob Jr., 13, 14 
 
 Winegar, Louisa Emma, 12, 13 
 
 Winegar, Ulric, 12 
 
 "With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys," no 
 
 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 145 
 
 Worth, Governor Jonathan, 39, 42 
 
 Zola, Emile, 138