Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée ed. by Sandra M. Gustafson and Robert S. Levine (review)

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• Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée ed. by Sandra M. Gustafson and Robert S. Levine
• Amanda K. Frisken

Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée. Edited by Sandra M. Gustafson and Robert S. Levine. Foreword by Carolyn L. Karcher. Reconstructing America. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. Pp. xviii, 280. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-1-5315-0137-2; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-1-5315-0136-5.)

Albion W. Tourgée, best remembered as lead counsel for the plaintiff in the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, was also a celebrated novelist in the decades after the Civil War. Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée restores its subject’s advocacy for Reconstruction-era advances in race relations and human rights as a novelist, editor, and literary critic. Grouped thematically in three sections, this collection’s essays illuminate Tourgée’s literary quest for racial justice.

The first section considers Tourgée’s approach to racial representation. Robert S. Levine argues that Tourgée channeled gothic tropes in his first novel, Toinette (1874), to suggest slavery’s lingering impact on postemancipation American life. While, as John Ernest contends, unacknowledged white privilege in A Fool’s Errand (1879) may limit the novel’s relevance today, Nancy Bentley’s essay argues that Tourgée also “uncovered a dissonance between white” legal conceptions of family and the complexities of Black kinship in his second Reconstruction-era novel, Bricks Without Straw (1880) (p. 50). Further, Tourgée’s insistence that “true Christians” repent for slavery distinguishes Pactolus Prime (1890), as DeLisa D. Hawkes points out, “as one of the earliest American novels to make a case for reparations” (pp. 60, 58). He also influenced African American literature. As Tess Chakkalakal’s essay demonstrates, his glowing endorsement of Charles W. Chesnutt’s early fiction helped Tourgée “alter the American literary landscape” (p. 76). Jennifer Rae [End Page 447] Greeson argues Tourgée’s “inescapable” literary presence left persisting traces in the fiction of both Chesnutt and Anna Julia Cooper (p. 85).

Part 2 explores Tourgée’s political ideals, beginning with his oft-repeated faith that the edifice of “republican citizenship” was sufficient to stem the tide of violence unleashed by former elites to reverse Reconstruction policies (p. 102). Though Tourgée’s ideals of citizenship often centered the experiences of elites rather than working-class Black communities, his Reconstruction-era fiction nevertheless established his expansive critique of life in a postslavery South as a “tangle of unfreedoms facing the freedpeople,” which, as Christine Holbo points out, informed his later legal arguments in Plessy (p. 126). In Button’s Inn (1887), Tourgée further expanded his vision of social justice to include a more equitable domestic economy. His combination of legal and literary advocacy here, and in Fool’s Errand, constituted “a sweeping intellectual effort to forge the new nation into being,” according to Almas Khan, while the sympathetic and realistic portrayals of a freedman seeking legal redress in With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys (1889) reflected Tourgée’s optimism in the years before the devastating Plessy decision (p. 151).

Tourgée’s moral vision for the nation animates the final section. His recurring figure of an amputee veteran as a Freedmen’s Bureau official, for example, made visible, as Sarah E. Chinn writes, the nation’s “sacrifice and commitment to permanent change in political, economic, and social relations” (p. 182). Annemarie Mott Ewing contends that Tourgée’s portrayals of the railroad situated citizenship struggles within “the larger context of the imperialistic practices of westward expansion enabled by corporate power” (p. 204). Yet for all of his advocacy, neither Tourgée’s novels nor his short-lived illustrated weekly Our Continent (1882–1884) managed to dislodge the penchant for national forgetting or the retreat from the ideal of the rights of the vulnerable. Immediately after the war, he embraced revenge narratives to resist the impulse to valorize the Confederacy and to defend the war’s moral victory. Ironically, by the turn of the...