But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America's becoming humane and reasonable.
- Kurt Vonnegut
“Then the appeal to arms may be heroic; but it is the heroism of folly, the faith – or hope, rather, of the fool.”
- Albion W. Tourgée
“The time between the cradle and the grave is too short for the reconstruction of a human soul.”
- Albion W. Tourgée
Thanksgiving Overture
Only a “free-love nigger missionary” idiot would come down from the North after the Civil War and attempt to change Southern hearts and minds. A man who did so, and who imagined a world of social equality for the emancipated freedmen, was an idealistic fool. Colonel Comfort Servosse, a creation of Albion W. Tourgée in his autobiographical novel A Fool’s Errand, was such a man. And yes those damned Yankees forced upon the South our great American Thanksgiving. That Thanksgiving thing was a Pilgrim thing. There were no Pilgrims in the South. Cannot even count the Quakers as Thanksgiving lovers. No, the Pilgrim with the musket and the turkey with his proud fan? That so-called holiday is a Northern cultural incursion, insidious and unfashionable, and they forced this imperialism on the South. The fictional Verdenton Gazette, newspaper for the nearest town to Comfort Servosse’s decrepit, war-ravaged plantation, Warrington, called the Michigan-born Union soldier a “Canadian Yankee” and termed him “one of those fanatical abolitionists whose infamous doctrines were the real cause of all the suffering and bloodshed of the last four years.” As the good people of the county initially welcomed Colonel Servosse with their genuine Southern hospitality, they and the newspaper were shocked to discover that the Servosse family, wife Metta and daughter Lily, were entertaining white Northern girls who had come south to teach the newly emancipated Negro. With unbridled invective, the newspaper announced to its readers that Colonel Servosse “had all these free-love nigger missionaries of the female persuasion out at Warrington to celebrate the new Yankee holiday,” which had been inserted into Southern culture against the local will, and “added to the governmental calendar since the first year of Lincoln’s reign.” And oh, yes, the paper continued with the stridency of ultimate conviction, claiming that “the day itself is a relic of New England Puritanical hypocrisy” and it was certain to be understood that the good Colonel Servosse and his wife and, dare we say it, black guests and young innocent white females had engaged an evening where “they ate and drank and sung ‘John Brown.’”
Introduction
The above fictional anecdote helps to illustrate the difficulties that remained after the Civil War, those sectional antagonisms between the North and the South that still simmered, and the complications Northern Radical Republicans faced in their efforts to help integrate the South according to their vision of the new America, the reunified exigencies of Nation. The article in the invented Verdenton Gazette, which Albion W. Tourgée almost certainly took from a real source, is merely the surface expression of a deep-seated willingness in the South to oppose Northern attempts to reorganize their society. Though they had just lost a devastating war, the local battles contained within the daily workings of social life, underneath the surface, continued.
James McPherson, in The Abolitionist Legacy and The Struggle For Equality, searched for what had happened to the original abolitionist impetus, that antebellum thrust that led up to the Civil War. William Lloyd Garrison felt that the abolitionists’ job was done after emancipation, and he disbanded the American Anti-Slavery Society, ceasing publication of his long-running newspaper the Liberator. Wendell Phillips, however, thought more work had to be done, as did Frederick Douglass. McPherson questioned what had happened to the “first generation” of abolitionists after the Civil War. He traced their reformist tendencies and agitational bents into an array of other causes - social work, temperance unions, working with the freedmen in the South, opening schools. But he did not address psychological or even philosophical currents that existed in the postbellum period, either in the North or the South. David Blight, in his study on Frederick Douglass and the Civil War, did indeed engage the sentiment, the psychology and the philosophy of millennialism.
But Blight’s concerns queried Douglass’s intellectual development and he did not write a book that addressed these feelings explicitly. He explored millennial optimism: that belief in God’s deliverance of the people, the age, and America’s role in the world as divinely ordained for greatness, for the new experiments of democracy to enlighten the world, and for the necessary Second Coming. He discussed millennial pessimism, an eschatological belief in the Apocalypse, in the End of the World. But that is as far as he went, given the focus of his study. Other scholars have written about the literary realism of the period, and the lingering and often more popularly competing romance. There emerged the philosophy, or at least a declaration of an American sentiment, by William James called pragmatism, but what else? Other cultural and individual attitudes and values rose to the national surface during the postbellum period. As in Richard White’s Middle Ground, which denied traditional binaries between colonist and colonized, White Man and Indian, imperial center in Paris and contingencies in a vividly, real-world context in the Great Lakes regions. It is possible to locate other sentiments besides those and, say, the sarcasm found in Twain’s and Warner’s The Gilded Aged. Indications of alternate possibilities in the national psyche can be found in the work of Albion W. Tourgée, mostly notably in his Reconstruction novel A Fool’s Errand.
Readers may judge for themselves whether the cynicism, the bitterness, the fatalistic outlook that residers at the center of the novel, and in Tourgée’s other work, formed a distinctive element of his personal psychology, including his bouts with depression. Perhaps alternatively, the novel captured the penetrating turpitude of the time, at least among Radical Republican and certain strains of Northerners. In either case the novel, like a work of fiction always does – a cultural artifact; a piece of cultural material that both reflects culture and performs upon society – provided indication of a sensibility that existed in American society. Tourgée’s novel captured a way of seeing, of identifying that feeling, in the traumatic postbellum and post-Reconstruction era that I attempt to capture and define.
This palpable sensibility also performed a role in history. The war, as discussed below, brought such a level of destruction and psychological torture, a deep rupture of the American soul, that there simply had to have been spiritual, near-universal wounds underneath the surface of reunion gloss. And the millennialist strain in America fractured and became many other expressible tensions in the American presence, not all of it laudable or glorious. Yes, American exceptionalism remained, and the American Dream, even as Richard Slotkin painted it in his story of the frontier mythology, continued to exist. Certainly millennial optimism subsisted in those who believed in Progress, and the magical wonders of large corporations and the era of the tycoon.
However, millennialism occasionally received a blow, especially during the time Tourgée wrote A Fool’s Errand in the late 1870s. Slotkin asked about frontier optimism, “what if the Frontier should somehow be exhausted or closed? In times of expansion and optimism, this question disappeared in the golden haze of expectation. But in times of severe economic contraction and political or social division (such as the 1850s and 1870s) the end of the frontier was imagined as a permanent expulsion from Eden, to be followed by subordination, poverty, toil, and strife.” The traditional rhetoric of American greatness, American promise, and the belief in America’s role in the world, remained. Some Americans believed in the railroad; some were ardent expansionists, and the imperialist expressions during the Spanish-American war illustrated this particular cultural remnant.
But there was also discontent, frustration, and a deep anger in the failures of America. Slotkin explored labor unrest and the Panic of 1873 and the insidious spread of capitalism couched in a mythology of the West. Not to ignore Indian dispossession, which Karl Marx identified as “primitive accumulation.” Twain and Warner wrote The Gilded Age. Labor movements organized and engaged battle with large corporate power; there was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, there were the Indian Wars, corruption in government, and more: in short, a litany of unrest and turmoil. Mark Elliott, Tourgée’s most recent biographer, wrote that “scientific racism, the threat of labor unrest, and the demands of imperialism and of northern hegemony over the South had all joined together to frustrate the crusade for racial justice by the 1890s.” This generation of Northerners, not the first generation of abolitionists like Garrison, who came of age during the Civil War and Reconstruction, were frustrated by a seeming lack of penetration into the minds of Americans and a lack of effectiveness in the South against the white supremacist counter-revolution. Was there a cultural sensibility that registered a kind of spiritual complaint? Was there a cultural feeling, expressed perhaps in literature, that captured the spirit of the above list? Slotkin mentioned the frontier myth, Blight demonstrated Douglass’s millennialism and the great orator’s continuation of the struggle for racial equality, McPherson traced the abolitionist personages in the postwar period, but I want to tease something else out of the cultural fabric of the period, using Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand. The social and cultural history of fatalism, a sense of giving up, a spiritual malaise, a soul-weariness, may have been more pervasive in American culture than scholars have previously expressed. Pete Daniel, who wrote on the “metamorphosis of slavery” after the Civil War, claimed that the era of Reconstruction became “too emotionally charge to explain rationally.” If this was the case, then A Fool’s Errand illuminated a national and cultural type that deserves mention.
I argue that this book, published in 1879, tells us more about post-Reconstruction Northern angst rather than providing insights into the Civil War or Reconstruction; or for that matter general glosses found in plantation school novels, Lost Cause tracts or emblems of reunification. Instead, A Fool’s Errand portrayed the anger, frustration, and general malaise that existed in some Americans during the 1870s. Lawrence Levine wrote: “popular culture functions in ways similar to folk culture and acts as a form of folklore for people living in urban industrial societies, and can thus be used to reconstruct people’s attitudes, values and reactions.” Important concepts, tropes, ideologies, psychological underpinnings of some individuals in society can be illuminated by reading the text closely. A Fool’s Errand provided a window into a world, a glimpse into the psyche of individuals and the judges of the morality of a society. It portrayed hopes and aspirations, failed dreams, and the recoil of fatalistic interpretations of humankind. It was bitter, sarcastic, angry, desperate, an appeal to a people, a voice calling out in the postwar wilderness.
Even Frederick Douglass’s increasingly strident efforts to continue the abolitionist’s work after the war, to not relinquish civil rights activism or forsake the plight of the freedmen, did not portray the sense of malaise and moral exhaustion that existed in some groups of Americans. His continued freedom struggle provided evidence of the desire to facilitate reunification. As David Blight wrote, “after Reconstruction, Douglass was one of a small band of old abolitionists and reformers (led by Wendell Phillips and Albion Tourgée) who struggled to sustain an ideological interpretation of the Civil War” and “theirs was a persuasion under much duress by the 1880s, a collective voice nearly drowned out by the chorus of reconciliation.” Douglass’s pleas, however, when read in the light of a desperate call to an unheeding nation, can be better understood when one explores the attitudes of fatalism in the 1870s and 1880s. William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, first published in 1831, had seen almost fifty years of sectional tensions and oppressive issues of racial inequality that bore down on America’s equilibrium. The individual and psychological trauma that impacted social reality in the twenty years after the terrible destruction of the Civil War deserves closer study. Perhaps Miller saw correctly that “Tourgée shapes his novel into a political counter-attack to the cultural ideology of redemption.” Colonel Servosse and Tourgée do not change American hearts and minds in their lifetimes, and Tourgée’s novel must be representative of many Radical Republican, old-guard abolitionist, and mainstream Northern viewpoints of frustration and resignation. Resignation is not millennialism. There may be a negative connotation – in short, apocalypse – to millennialism, but frustration, giving up, pawning off responsibility to future generations, was not a part of it. Blight, in Race and Reunion, wrote that “indeed, Tourgée’s writing provides the literary equivalent of Frederick Douglass’s oratory in the development of Civil War memory in the late nineteenth century.” But where Douglass never relinquished the abolitionist mantle nor the millennialist thrust, Tourgée gave voice to his frustrations as much as any maintenance of agitation. In fact, for a moment, and perhaps even today, it looked as if racial schisms and racial cultural and political battles would remain forever.
Frederick Douglass and Millennialism
Now that God had brought the Civil War upon the nation, instigated a fratricidal Armageddon, and had seemingly resolved it with emancipation at its core, the question for postbellum America was, Now What? What did God want? Was this even Hegel’s dialectical march of Spirit? Where did this millennialist spirit find an outlet? How did Tourgée’s belief in God or racial equality and social justice fit into the picture? And how should scholars account for his mounting bitterness and frustrations, his agony, as the century continued to unfold? Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction that the four million slaves who anticipated emancipation, who could feel it in the air, knew that “God was real. They knew him. To these black folk it was the Apocalypse. The magnificent trumpet tones of Hebrew Scripture.” Yes, and Lincoln, was he the Second Coming? Traditional lore maintained that blacks genuflected in Lincoln’s presence as he walked in postwar Richmond, to his great embarrassment. But for many people, white and black, the Civil War was prophecy. Human individuals, however, working within a very human society, had to deal with the aftermath. And how to do so? And what of the intense frustrations of failure after the dissolution of Reconstruction? Where did that energy go?
Tourgée expressed his own feelings in A Fool’s Errand. We can see how a Radical Republican Northern politician and writer experienced a monumental life-altering letdown. We read between the lines and notice an intense, even an exquisite, vein of fatalism. It was this crystallized sentiment, at least as presented by one man intimately involved in the agonies of the war itself: of injury, of loss, of living in the South. And while residing below the Mason-Dixon line he found the time to rewrite North Carolina’s constitution, for desperate and dangerous engagement with the Ku Klux Klan, witnessing the collapse of Reconstruction firsthand, then removing himself from the intractable South and writing strident polemical articles and finally novels. All of these experiences existed in the core of Tourgée’s first novel.
David Blight dedicated a career to studying Civil War memory and how Americans have told the story of their destructive war to themselves. His work dealt with the intellectual, moral and traditional interpretations that followed the conflict. He wrote that “the desperate nature of the conflict and the totality of its aims invoked the spiritual side of the American character . . . Examples of the millennialist response to the Civil War abound.” He reminded us that “Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Second Inaugural Address’ provides a famous illustration. Searching for the meaning of emancipations, Lincoln declared that the ‘Almighty has his own purposes’ and gave the country ‘this terrible war, as the woe due to those by who the offence came.’” A Fool’s Errand, however, was most dramatically not a millennialist response to this horrific conflict. The novel evinced a condemnation and a collapse; the spirit, even at times in jest, seemed to have gone out of Tourgée. Blight quoted Julia Ward Howe’s ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as the “clearest apocalyptic statement.” If Howe, as Blight intoned, “captured in poetry one of the central ideological and spiritual traditions of her age,” then where does A Fool’s Errand fit in? What kind of expression did it provide? Who identified with it? Howe’s opening line is “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord” and this “struck the essential chord of millennialism,” according to Blight. If this perspective illustrated the tradition that Fredrick Douglass strove to uphold, even through his anger at declension, in his political speeches up to his death, one wonders where Tourgée’s disaffection, and transference to future generations the problems of the age, was positioned.
Tourgée was not an abolitionist, though, as we will see, he was influenced by its tradition. And in the post-Reconstruction era, he expressed a strain in American sensibility that was not the same as Douglass’s continued millenarianism. Blight wrote that, “in nineteenth-century America, millennialism was a cluster of religious and secular ideas inherited from the Puritans, refashioned through the Revolutionary era, nurtured through numerous waves of revivalism, and forged into a national creed during the antebellum period.” The philosophical and spiritual strain of millennialism “helped foster an American sense of mission, a belief that the United States was the ‘redeemer nation’ destined to perform a special role in history.” Many Americans believed that the Civil War was God’s moment of reckoning, and that after “an apocalyptic war” there would be a “new era of peace and freedom.” Unquestionably, according to Tourgée, the new era of peace and freedom seemed to have slipped through America’s grasp. There was nothing Americans could do in the 1880s, Tourgée voiced in dispirited mood. Novels would be written but effectively ignored, and he knew that his generation, that “neo-abolitionist” generation that matured during the nation’s worst conflict, would pass away unsuccessful. During this same time he would also lose Plessy v. Ferguson, his seminal civil-rights lawsuit in the South for which he wrote the brief. Tourgée’s optimism seems to have been seriously bruised, if not entirely quashed.
What happened between Emancipation Day, January 1, 1863, when Frederick Douglass led a crowd in a moment he called “the trump of jubilee” and the 1880s, with corruption in the Grant Administration, Reconstruction having failed, lynching rampant in the South and the counter-revolution effective? There was no regeneration for Tourgée after Reconstruction collapsed and he observed the South reclaim a white supremacist political, social and cultural environment. There was sense of repentance for sins past, no feeling that God had resolved to instigate a new, positive upswing to the American national landscape. It seemed that there had been no healing. Rather, the United States experienced a reinforced suffering. There was something else he was feeling, perhaps a secular letting go, early potential twinges of a cynical age derided by Mark Twain in The Gilded Age. Tourgée found himself caught between abolitionist stridency, the bloody painful meaning of the Civil War and emancipation, and the shock of failure and collapse at the end of Reconstruction. The New South was certainly not the “new birth” that Lincoln envisioned when he gave the Gettysburg Address. Douglass, Blight insisted, “believed in American mission, in a providential God who shaped history, in history that could reshape nations in a few calamitous years” whereas Tourgée and many others began to wonder whether anything had in fact changed at all.
Albion W. Tourgée Grew Up To Write A Book
Tourgée came from a tradition of activism. As Elliott wrote, he was “born and raised in the Western Reserve of Ohio, a region renowned for its antislavery fervor in the 1850s.” He attended Rochester University, where he “absorbed the moral individualism that characterized abolitionism as well as other utopian movements that erupted in those regions.” Rochester was the home of many abolitionists and reformers, including Frederick Douglass. Tourgée carried with him an idealized radicalism when he entered the Civil War and when he went South to find his destiny. Elliott wrote that Tourgée “advanced this secularized gospel” because he fervently believed in “its eventual triumph.” Personal failure coupled with the collapse of Reconstruction, the “unfinished revolution” of Eric Foner, left Tourgée “disillusion and shattered.” His divergence from the distinct millennialism outlined by Blight is evidenced in a letter he wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century. The fool trope had stayed with him throughout his postbellum years. “I was never more a Fool,” he wrote, “than when I thought knowledge and Christian civilization would peacefully reconcile the new barbarism with the Christ-idea of justice between man and man, and race and race.”
At a memorial service for Frederick Douglass that Tourgée gave in Boston, he told a story of meeting Douglass when he was a teenager in Ohio’s Western Reserve. Elliott estimates that Tourgée was probably sixteen at the time Tourgée met Douglass. Tourgée had gone to see Douglass lecture. There were hecklers; somebody threw an egg. Tourgée laughed aloud, and then was later embarrassed by the incident. The next day Tourgée decided to apologize in person to Douglass, and received instead of thanks a thorough dressing down. The encounter had an impact on Tourgée, and he recounted it in Boston after the great orator’s death in 1895. Elliott tells us that during Tourgée’s youth, “boisterous public debates were regular events.” Sojourner Truth’s “Aren’t I A Woman?” speech was delivered in the region. The area also played an integral role in the Underground Railroad.
Albion was the only child of Valentine and Louisa Tourgée. The two had moved from Massachusetts to begin a life in the West. Perhaps this was why Tourgée regularly refers to the West in his novels. Louise then contracted tuberculosis and died when Albion was four years old. Valentine eventually remarried and, according to Elliott and Otto Olsen, the young Tourgée never got along with his stepmother. When she gave birth to her own daughter, all accounts have it that she and Tourgée never attempted to overcome the strain that existed between them. Tourgée’s father continued to write letters to Louisa’s parents back in Massachusetts, and the letters “belied any guise of happiness in his new marriage and revealed a fatalistic outlook.” Valentine wrote that “happiness dwells not on earth,” and he looked forward to a peaceful residence in Heaven. Perhaps there was a link between Valentine’s earthly resignation and Albion’s post-Reconstruction personal and existential blues. Tourgée himself wrote, in An Appeal To Caesar, “What had God to do with time? If He puts a task before us, shall we not undertake it because we may not live to see the end?” Tourgée’s dejection after Reconstruction led him to believe in some future salvation. To complicate matters, as Tourgée grew older, he and his father began fighting with regularity. When he was a teenager he went to live with Louisa’s sister for a few years. Hints in the surviving archive materials indicated that Valentine abused alcohol, and it is clear, and even Tourgée admitted it in later writings, the rift between father and son never healed. Tourgée left to join the Union Army and walked away form his boyhood home for good. He did not attend his father’s funeral and wrote a bizarre excusatory open letter to Valentine’s hometown.
Tourgée became known for his so-called grouping of Reconstruction novels, of which A Fool’s Errand, Pactolus Prime and Bricks Without Straw were a few. As he matured as a novelist, he eventually decided to move away from Reconstruction and cover some of the other periods surrounding the Civil War. Perhaps he saw himself as a great American writer of the Civil War, which would fulfill his childhood ambition of being a great writer who had graduated from Harvard University. Instead, he became a good writer, a great polemicist and propagandist who had attended the University of Rochester. According to Elliott, his ambitions were always of the highest reach, including aspirations of a Federal judgeship or a place in Congress. Understanding this driving motivation helps one see why he would join the war effort, hoping to engage a “thorough and complete revolution and renovation” of America, why moving to the South might occur to him, and why he pushed political potential as far as he could. His professional arc took him to the Superior Court of North Carolina, and his stint as an influential journalist and novelist, but it ended as consul in Bordeaux attempting to regulate French consumption of wine. His determination to be a great novelist led him to attempt an antebellum novel, called Hot Plowshares, published in 1883. This novel contained a glimpse of what his prewar views may have been, and how they contributed to his development as social agitator. Elliott wrote that the novel reveals Tourgée’s belief that “the abolitionists . . . awakened the moral conscience of the North and set in motion the events that destroyed slavery.” Though Tourgée was not an abolitionist, as he came of age in the generation that succeeded the first wave of abolitionists, he was still figuring out his place in the world. He admired the abolitionists’ “courage of their convictions” and called them “prophets.” This hard-driving commitment to one’s ideals and uncompromising fervent became the cornerstone of Tourgée’s public life as agitator. “The success of the abolitionist movement” Elliott wrote, “convinced Tourgée that public opinion, no matter how hostile, could be transformed by an uncompromising assertion of the truth.” Early influences also include his wife Emma, who was swayed by abolitionist and woman’s rights issues, as were many educated women of the period. This familial impression on Tourgée reminds one of Emerson’s own contextual relationship with abolitionism, residing in abolitionist hotbed Concord and married to Lydian, an avid abolitionist and member of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. It is possible that the headstrong and radical individualist Tourgée required repeated convincing before he would actually join any earnestly activist group or ascribe to any ideology.
During the Civil War, Tourgée’s Ohio 105th Volunteer Infantry, principally made up of men from the Western Reserve, possessed distinctly antislavery views. Tourgée had witnessed slavery up close in the Ohio 105th. The regiment was also aided by former slaves, and he lived on a Kentucky plantation while convalescing from his second war wound, a time during which he had an intimate view of slavery. According to his biographer, Tourgée’s radicalism coalesced into a presentable cohesion with the Emancipation Proclamation. Tourgée, an intelligent, civically-engaged man, had been thinking about what the war actually meant and what his role in it represented. He also believed that the war would bring about a “national revolution” that would “bind the states together” and “alter Federal-State powers.” A final solidification of Tourgée’s personal intransigence occurred when he was captured by the Confederates and sent to prison.
Tourgée spent four months in the infamous camp of Richmond’s Libby prison. His “prison experience only seemed to deepen his fierce commitment to the war and the cause of freedom.” In a letter to Emma he exclaimed, “Freedom! The word means more to me than it ever did before . . . it means life, manhood, volition – being – existence and all its pleasures” and it fundamentally opposes bondage. By 1863 Tourgée’s “worldview” began to find expression, and he experienced a “deepening commitment to the cause of Emancipation.”
Elliott wrote that Tourgée’s military service was the “touchstone of politics for the rest of his life.” He never subscribed to the “anarchist” tendencies of higher law doctrine pervasive in the Ohio Reserve, but he did begin to unite his admiration for the abolitionists’ commitment and “moral worth of the individual” with a belief in the need for “a stronger federal government.” When the war ended, he had become an “avid Radical Republican whose extreme individualism had beset merged with. . . a commitment to the national ideal.” And rather than join the ranks of postbellum Americans who valorized the bravery of men, North and South, and sang the song of reunification, Tourgée, like Douglass, held onto the root cause of the war for the rest of his life and in fact made the act of reminding Americans of the war’s purpose one of the focuses of his professional career.
Tourgée became a Delegate to the State Constitution at the 1868 Convention in Raleigh, a process whereby blacks and whites worked together to rewrite the legal code of North Carolina. Members of the planter class and old Confederates were appalled. When they took the floor during debates, they spoke of the innate inequality of black human beings to rule themselves, much less contribute to a civil society. A weary Tourgée found himself forced to listen to racist harangues. And so, when he finally took the floor, he gave “perhaps his most salient speech” on his feelings about blacks and whites, and his agitations for equality before the law. He had evolved as a young man from the Western Reserve, through the University of Rochester and the Civil War, to become a leading activist for the Radical Republicans in the South. He spoke, and the words echoed in much of his later work. “’Man is man is the keynote to our civilization . . . there is no color before the law,” he said. “Black and white citizens alike of our glorious nationality” are unquestionably “co-laborers in working out her destiny and heirs alike with the glories purchased with their mingled blood.” Tourgée was at his best with rhetorical flourishes and turns of phrase such as these. The polemical poetics of his non-fiction reached an eloquent, fevered pitch in all of his writings and speeches, including the long slabs of dense prose in his novels – mere political and argumentative breaks from any forward movement in plot – and in the brief he wrote for Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson. This was Tourgée the writer at his best.
Life in the South for Northerners was difficult, but especially so for political agitators such as Tourgée. The Tourgée’s even adopted a former slave, a 13-year-old girl named Adaline, which gave the conservative press in North Carolina material for repeated condemnation and the inevitable innuendo. The family sent her to the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where she was Booker T. Washington’s classmate. The social and political pressure on the Tourgée’s was immense. A Fool’s Errand captured the tension the Servosse family endured, and reflected the Tourgée’s own reality. Emma and daughter Aimee left Albion in North Carolina. The constant threat of danger was too much for a woman who simply desired to make a home for herself. Tourgée was absent much of the time, and she could not take the social isolation any longer. Metta, Servosse’s wife in A Fool’s Errand, experienced many of the same frustrations. Tourgée remained in North Carolina to make it or admit bust on his own. This individual reality weighed heavily on him, and exacerbated the personal tension he was already feeling from being an outspoken radical Northerner in the South.
Tourgée’s life in the South played a large creative role in his fiction and was reflected in A Fool’s Errand. But even that account did not do justice to the inimical reality on the ground, which went a long way towards explaining why Emma left the South. According to his biographer, “a plot to assassinate him in his courtroom went awry when Tourgée stared down the potential assassin and caused the man to lose his nerve.” Potential assassins feared Tourgee. The Ku Klux Klan hatched two plots “against his life” but abandoned them because of potential retaliation “by a large force of armed men that Tourgée controlled.” Tourgée, like social justice activists in the South before and after the war, maintained an armed presence at his home, and thus “ouch a villain as had been conjured in the public imagination surely could not be easily defeated.”
After these life-threatening episodes, Tourgée and Emma experienced a constrained relationship. Much of their life, even after the early success of his novels, was spent in debt. Tourgée wrote and worked under the strain of incessant political and financial pressure. And it was when separated from his family, alone and isolated, vilified by the locals in North Carolina, forgotten by those in North, seemingly a failure in his vital attempts at social equality during Reconstruction, deep in a depression, that he sat down to write A Fool’s Errand.
The Novel and Tourgée’s Art of Fiction
A Fool’s Errand was published in 1879 in New York and became a bestseller in its day, selling over 200,000 copies. According to Jeffrey W. Miller, in one of the more recent studies of Tourgée’s fiction, “assuming four or five readers per copy, A Fool’s Errand reached almost one million readers and probably accounted for informing more readers about Reconstruction than any other source,” an astounding feat for those days. The book was a polemical, epistolary, pedantic, romantic and mediocre novel. It aimed at social agitation and sought to present a feasible solution to the problems experienced by four million emancipated slaves. The work took aim at the entrenched hypocrisy of American liberty, at Northern complacency and abandonment of the freedmen after Reconstruction ended, at the Southern culture of white supremacy and well-rooted notions about the servile status of black people. As Miller noted, “A Fool’s Errand formed part of the counter-redemption, not because it inverted the power structure or reversed redemption, but because it performed ideological work that agitated against it.”
But nowhere in Miller’s study did he explain the fatalistic paradox that simmered throughout Tourgée’s work. Namely, the belief that he would continue social agitation but knew it would fail in his lifetime, and despairingly, well after his death in racist America. Neither Tourgée’s primary biographers, Otto Olson or Mark Elliott, nor scholars like Miller, effectively portrayed the anxious emotions of doubt and resignation in A Fool’s Errand. The novel reflected bitterness, sarcasm, and desperation. It expressed a deep cynicism about Northern and Southern people, about Americans. And yet it could not escape the structural faith and hope of its author. The book presented a fatalism about the present juxtaposed with a desperate hopefulness for the future - for America simply had to solve its race problem.
Comfort Servosse was not just a Northerner, but he was from the West, from Michigan. The idea of the West, of the frontier, of a hopefulness engendered by Western possibilities and by the fatalistic interpretation of the contemporaneous North and South, played a role in the novel. Servosse was disturbed by reports of the early loss at the first Bull Run, and informed Metta, his wife, that he must join the Union Army. There represented the characteristic female wailing of a nineteenth-century romantic novel, and Servosse comforted her. It was 1861 and there arose “a great struggle which the nation is waging with the wrong!” But here the Fool began to show signs of being a fool. His wife saw that it was “useless to argue with a mind so evidently distorted in its apprehension of facts,” and, indeed, the warped mind of the idealist who failed and failed miserably was one of the themes of the novel.
Comfort Servosse joined the Union Army. In a short time he “marched forth clad in the foolish foppery of war.” Along with an “irresistible inclination to the wearing of blue clothing” the new soldiers joined the ranks of weapon-carrying human beings who possessed a “readiness to use them in a very unpleasant and reckless manner.” In the North these brave soldiers were called “Boys in Blue” and “The Country’s Hope” and “Our Brave Soldier-Boys,” while these same soldiers were known in the South as “Lincoln’s Hirelings,” “Abolition Hordes” and “Yankee Vandals.” It was a war of ideas and a war of words. And a million Americans died or were wounded fighting one another. What was the result? Was the carnage worth it? The Fool recommended the fight as necessary, but he caustically condemned the failure of the Nation after the war. The North and the South, dichotomies presented, opposing ideologies, indeed, civilizations, maintained sectional antagonisms despite the rhetoric of reunification. The words used to describe Northern fighters, by either section, “meant the same thing.” As it was, the Narrator informed us, “all these names, when properly translated, signified Fools.”
Servosse fought in the war and, like Tourgée, was injured, captured by the enemy and escaped from a Rebel prison. Because he was gone fighting for four years, he lost much of his law practice. Then the war concluded, and he searched for something to do. Because of his war wound, a doctor recommended a genial climate. This was his “only chance for length of days.” But he also saw a business opportunity and a possibility to help with the rebuilding efforts. Servosse moved his young family to the South and bought Warrington, the old plantation. The novel was organized around a series of letters and pedantic presentations of information in the form of solemn fireside conversations between earnest men, peppered with told-not-shown violence at the hands and horses of the Ku Klux Klan, strained relations between the citizens of Verdenton and the incursive Northern Radical cur - Servosse. There existed arguments at the stump, descending mobs and a few wild horse chases, a couple of outrageous murders, a few scenes in a black church of weepin’ and hollerin’, political distillations, a lynching, and the ubiquitous romance between a Southern gentleman and the quickly-grown-up Lily Servosse, fair-haired and fair-skinned and a damned fine horsewoman.
But mostly the book was a polemical mass of words. Words seemingly captured from Tourgée’s political writings, newspaper clippings slightly fictionalized, and letters from Northern Wise Men – politicians like Senator Charles Sumner – and Servosse himself, explaining the merits of States’ Rights or the bitter acrimonies extended in the South to the newly “emancipated” Negro. The Narrator claimed that slavery still existed after the war and the slaves had been emancipated by proclamation and by Constitutional amendments. The novel caustically condemned Americans for losing sight of the moral causes of the war. In this tale, the Southern gentleman did not get the Northern girl, and Colonel Servosse died in Warrington, surrounded by the blacks who loved him and his former enemies who respected him.
Elliott wrote that the novel “had tapped into a growing discontent with Hayes’s Southern policy . . . and uncovered a lingering sympathy for the original goals of Reconstruction.” I wonder, too, whether or not there was a revealing identification with the fatalistic disgust that runs throughout the book. Tourgée felt these feelings and wrote about them, and certainly fellow Radical Republics wistful for the old dreams may have identified with him. But it is interesting to contemplate the extent to which the sentiments of bitterness and cynicism ran through the fabric of society, at least in the North.
Tourgée himself attempted to define currents in contemporaneous fiction. He felt that the Civil War, Reconstruction, and most importantly, black people, had to have created an intense crucible for the emergence of a great American literature. Given Tourgée’s great ambition, it was certain that he hoped his own novels would fit into that classic tradition. He wrote novels of Reconstruction, the war itself, the antebellum period, the rise of industry, and even local color novels set in upstate New York. He worked diligently to solidify a place in American letters and to express the consciousness of a period. His attempts were valiant. In an essay titled “The South As a Field For Fiction” Tourgée explained his views of Southern literature and the hope for a unified American literature that would elevate to become a canonical standard bearer in world literature. While criticizing the romantic Southern plantation literature, he wrote “the dreamy idealism that still paints the master and the slave as complements of a remembered millennial state” and from this state he moved onward, into something else, difficult to define, a new space elucidated by an agonizing generation.
Tourgée’s essay effectively expressed his interpretations of contemporary literature and his role in it. But it also provided a sense of what he was up against, the consternation and pleading in his tone with his readers. Black people played two stock characters in American fiction. The first trope represented the “devoted slave” who will do anything because of profound thankfulness for his master or mistress. He or she felt an “obligation” to serve. The other character was the “poor ‘nigger’ to whom liberty has brought only misfortune, and who was relieved by the disinterested friendship of some white man whose property he once was.” This dichotomy meant that “about the Negro as a man, with hopes, fears, and aspirations like other men, our literature is very nearly silent. Much has been written of the slave and something of the freeman, but thus far no one has been found able to weld the new life to the old.” This seemed to be a call, and one which Tourgée of course answered in Fool’s Errand and Bricks Without Straw. One can see the central focus of Tourgée’s activism when he wrote “but the slave as a man, with his hopes, his fears, his faith, has been touched, and only touched, by the pen of the novelist.” Tourgée hoped to addressed that silence and supply that missing American voice.
Tourgée also expressed his views of realism. Occasionally he dared to criticize even William Dean Howells and Henry James. “Pathos lies at the bottom of all enduring fiction” wrote Tourgée, and “agony is the key of immortality.” He considered the Negro when he wrote this, but perhaps he saw some of his own tribulations in the statement. And hinting at the fatalism that we see in A Fool’s Errand, he felt that “the ills of fate, irreparable misfortune, untoward but unavoidable destiny: these are the things that make for enduring fame.” The “realists profess to be truth-tellers, but are in fact the worst of falsifiers, since they tell only the weakest and meanest part of the grand truth which makes up the continued story of every life.” The Civil War and Reconstruction were catastrophes, he exclaimed, and “the man who fights and wins is only common in human esteem. The downfall of empire is always the epoch of romance. The brave but unfortunate reap always the richest measure of immortality.”
Tourgée challenged convention and presumption, in fact, he went after convention with the thrust of mania. Henry James wrote, “Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying gin the face of presumptions. . .” Tourgée turned to fiction for propagandist reasons, as he admitted that his activist work should be legal and literary. He encouraged a “systematic process of attacking inequality: the National Citizens’ Right Association (NCRA), which foreshadowed the NAACP, approached their task following “a two-pronged strategy, attacking segregation through the judicial system and also through the mobilization of public opinion.” However, like James Fenimore Cooper and his novel The Pioneers, in which he attempted to form the world to his vision of things after the loss of his inheritance and the crumbling of his estate, Tourgée may have turned to writing as a form of solace. His wife had left him in the South. He suffered, according to some scholars, a parry with depression, and he felt that his writing not only was an escape, but a way to get back at the world. James explained in his essay “The Art of Fiction” that “no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase – a kind of revelation – of freedom.” This perspective certainly found resonance in Tourgée’s work.
It is also important to understand the role of social activism, propagandistic agitation, and didacticism in fiction. Scholars and literary critics agreed that Tourgée’s fiction suffered from political diatribes set as feverish asides, whether delivered in speeches, conversations among learned men, or epistles. Pages of didactic presentation marred the movement of his novels. But this merely relegated them to what they truly became: polemical novels that did not quite hit the level of Henry James or Charles Dickens or Edith Wharton, and that is okay. His novels bore the traits of other social agitators contemporaneous to himself. James cautioned in his essay, a subtle crushing of the scholar to whom he addressed the article, “try and catch the colour of life itself.” Social activist writers, such as Emile Zola in France, pessimistic works filled with “aberrations of a shallow optimism,” which rendered these books less than exceptional. “Remember,” James declared, “that your first duty is to be as complete as possible – to make as perfect a work.”
Emile Zola wrote social-cause novels of massive breadth. The American most often compared to him was Frank Norris and his anti-railroad novel The Octopus. Like much social activist fiction, these works contained didacticism and pessimism laced with that underlying prayer for an optimistic social outcome - the reason for the work’s existence to begin with. Tourgée represented the type. His work suffered for many of the same reasons James outlined in “The Art of Fiction,” but it also stood the test of time for definitions of merit outlined in the essay, and not merely that the novel be “interesting.” It strikes one now that any hope contained in the novel – and in A Fool’s Errand there was plenty of hope – was weakened by the fatalism that Tourgée unwittingly placed in print.
Fatalism in A Fool’s Errand
Tourgée wrote his Comfort Servosse the way he lived himself. The reasons Servosse gave his wife, Metta, for wanting to leave the comfort of their Northern home for the South were the same Tourgée offered to Emma. The women’s reactions were similar. The novel was intensely and unapologetically autobiographical, which even encompassed the inclusion of actual letters, speeches and newspaper articles that Tourgée took directly from his scrapbook. He wrote the novel while living alone, at the end of his failed career in the South, combining a fit of exasperation and desperate hope of saving himself from depression, or worse. He was successful, in so far that he finished the book and located once more some excitement.
Servosse was a flat character, rarely giving us any emotion or expression of guts, though his actions at times were heroic enough to elicit admiration. He expressed his desire to go South by saying “I think the country will settle up rapidly, now that slavery is out of the way. Manufactures will spring up, immigration will pour in, and it will be just the pleasantest part of the country.” He tried to convince her. But the Narrator cautioned, “so he talked, forgetful of the fact that the social conditions of three hundred years are not to be overthrown in a moment, and that differences which have outlasted generations, and finally ripened into war, are never healed by simple victory, - that the broken link can not be securely joined by mere juxtaposition of the fragments, but must be fused and hammered before its fibers will really unite.” Servosse failed to see the impossibility of this task. He was infused with an optimism that convinced him to go South, and he cannot yet see that he will eventually be quite mistaken, and his family will flee from their home back to the North.
The element of fatalism in the novel began of course with the title. The idea, the mere idealistic thought, that a Northerner could go south and affect positive social change was a fool’s errand of the highest proportions. Tourgée was not trying to be humorous; and the repercussions of such idealism meeting reality head-on ended in failure, and the South’s recommencing white supremacist rule over the emancipated freedmen. “The life of the Fool proper is full of the poetry of faith,” the Narrator allowed. The potential for failure was great. Most people did not undertake brave attempts at affecting social change. If the individual succeeded in his work though, “the world stops laughing, and calls him a Genius.” However, if the person failed, as the fatalist would claim as most likely, the world “laughs the more, and derides his undertaking as A FOOL’S ERRAND.” Tourgée felt in his own work, as Superior Court judge in North Carolina, as novelist and journalist, and as lawyer for Homer Plessy in the famous separate-but-equal Supreme Court case Homer v. Plessy, 1896, that his work in his time had failed. But he believed that future generations would utilize the seed that had been planted by him and reap the harvest of social justice that had been his original design. Thus, an idealistic dreamer could end up being a fool his entire life, his work ridiculed, “and a genius after his death, or a fool to one century and a genius to the next, or a fool at home and a prodigy abroad.”
Northerners looked with scorn at such a writing attempt. “It seemed to them to be not only absurd, but inspired by a malicious desire to keep alive the memory of an epoch which it was the duty of every one to help bury in impenetrable oblivion,” claimed the discontented Narrator. America seemed to desire to forget the racial elements of America’s problems, and yearned to ignore the causes of the Civil War. Judged from a standpoint of trauma, there was room in the postbellum period for cultural forgetting, that sense of collective amnesia against which Frederick Douglass so adamantly fought. Tourgée battled this social neglect, this leaving behind and attempt to reunify, and it left him embattled and spiritually frustrated, the frustration of coming up against that form of willful national forgetting so evident in the novel. Furthermore, it leads one to ask the question, Why did the nation attempt to forget and move on? The horrors of the war, the trials of battle and sacrifice, even the intellectual struggles of the antebellum period, the entire exercise of sectional compromise and political party cohesion, coupled with the complex anxieties contained in the slave-freedmen issue, led to general existential doubt. It was time to move on, and to do so quickly, even at the expense of the newly freed black population, and at the expense of any unifying or expressible manifesto of What’s Next.
The postbellum era was a time to regroup into like-minded camps and prepare for renewed ideological struggles in the future, whether they were issues North-South, black-white, urban-rural, big business-small farmer. At the moment when the Nation experienced redefinition, federal powers asserted, individuals concerned with Identity and Self and other aspects of modernity, Tourgée expressed the ineffable angst of some of his generation caught in limbo between assertive abolitionist self-assurance and the burgeoning excesses of the Gilded Age. It was a coming-of-age during the Civil War, for Northerners and Southerners, that did not yield a profound comprehensive platform, something to grip affirmatively, to stay anxiety, to provide foundational balance. For Radical Republicans and Southern white supremacists alike, and especially for the black population, this was a time of uncertainty and frailty. These conditions necessarily gave rise to certain manifestations of bitterness, frustration and severe doubt.
Tourgée exposed a flaw, according to him, in the millennialist visions of Southerners. The Narrator discussed Southerners the way Tourgée had in “The South as a Field For Fiction.” Tourgée said of the local people he found in the South regarding abolition, “they regard the abolition of slavery only as a temporary triumph of fanaticism over divine truth. They do not believe the Negro intended or designed for any other sphere in life.” Those in the South, adherents of the plantation school of literature and the Lost Cause ideology, spun their own version of God’s roll in the war: “they may think the relation was abused by bad masters and speculators and all that, and consequently God permitted its overthrow; but they have no idea that he will permit the permanent establishment of any system which does not retain the African in a subordinate and servile relation.” God resided right there, allowing the fratricidal ruinous fight to commence, but certainly He meant blacks to continue serving white people in a system of economic exploitation that exists to this day. This was, after all, the law of Nature, an expression of divinity, and even a reality substantiated by the findings of Science. Southerners maintained a millennialist vision, and it yielded in Tourgée an expression of disgust.
The seething hostility that still existed in the South led Servosse to sustain his stubborn agenda, but contained in the Narrator’s remarks was the bitterness Tourgée still felt in 1879. In a conversation between Servosse and his neighbor, the Squire, a man who had been responsible for the beatings of two Northern preachers before the war, the two hashed out their feelings about the war, shared differences, and in doing so expressed a fatalism that weaved its way throughout the novel. The Squire said, “It’s a thousand pities we couldn’t have talked these things over, and have come to the right understanding of them without this terrible war.” And Servosse answered, “That was quite impossible, Squire. We could never have agreed. I have learned enough of the former state of affairs here already to see that. Each party distrusted the other’s sincerity, and despised the other’s knowledge. War was inevitable: sooner or later it must have come.” The inevitability of war demonstrated a fatalistic attitude, especially when not expressed in the terms of a millennial apocalypse, controlled by an all-seeing God who desired to teach America a lesson. Servosse added ruefully, “It seems to be human nature, Squire.” The bitterness and cynicism of a man who failed in the South, perhaps? A Radical Republican at the end of his proverbial rope? It just very well might be.
Tourgée rationalized the impossibility of “defeating” the South. In a letter from “the old doctor,” George D. Garnet, we see more impressions of slavery, the war, and its aftermath, and Tourgée’s belief that his generation could do no more, that their effectiveness was over, and that later generations would have to continue the act of moral reconstruction of real people. “You must remember, dear Colonel,” the doctor said in yet another didactic conversation, “that neither the nature, habits of thought, nor prejudices of men, are changed by war or its results. The institution of slavery is abolished; but the prejudice, intolerance, and bitterness which it fostered and nourished, are still alive, and will live until those who were raised beneath its glare have moldered back to dust.” Tourgée’s generation that came of age during the war and Reconstruction, who missed the essential antebellum fights of abolitionism, who fought in the war, could not follow through with programs for equality, with the principal emancipatory thrust of the war itself. Unfortunately for them, their time seemed to have been spent in the war efforts. Tourgée felt this sensibility, and fought against it, as did Douglass. “A new generation,” continued the doctor, “perhaps many new generations – must arise before the North and the South can be one people, or the prejudices, resentments, and ideas of slavery intensified by unsuccessful war, can be obliterated.” America, though, would also live through a Jim Crow era and a “new Jim Crow,” which legal scholar Michelle Alexander recently so eloquently uncovered.
A melancholy resignation percolated to the surface of Tourgée’s novel. In an expression of cynicism and Twain-like sarcasm, the Narrator claimed that there were three classes of people who would be inclined to work with the freed blacks in the South: “martyrs, who were willing to endure ostracism and obloquy for the sake of principle; self-seekers, who were wiling to do or be anything and everything for the sake of power, place, and gain; and fools, who hoped that in some inscrutable way the laws of human nature would be suspended, or that the state of affairs at first presented itself would be but temporary.” Of martyrs there were a very small number, especially “were they not to be looked for in a section where public opinion had been dominated by an active and potent minority, until independent thought upon certain subjects had been utterly strangled.” There appeared always to be a huge number of self-seekers, “while fools who have stamina enough to swim for any great time against a strong popular current are not to be looked for in any great numbers in any ordinary community.”
Sarcasm and a kind of bitterness jumped from the page in every chapter. In one, Tourgée dissed the Old and confirmed the New. He said that after going through war and Reconstruction he no longer had the attitude of reverence for vaunted figures, especially politicians. “Due veneration” and a healthy “regard for age and rank” were those attributes that he now seemed to be missing and they reflected qualities of a “well-ordered mind.” The Narrator continued: “Experience of the fallibility of the few very wise men whom he had met had no doubt tended to increase the effects of his infirmity, and confirm an unfortunate delusion which he had, that even wise men are capable of error.” And so America’s leaders pressed a dialectic into war and supposedly the racial nation improved.
Tourgée often felt the intense frustration that emanated from the point of view of someone working close to the issues at hand. He derided Northern politicians for passing laws and attempting various Reconstruction projects without truly understanding local conditions. Washington D.C., according to Tourgée, may as well have been Mongolia. He wrote earnest letters to politicians on a regular basis, from an often-sympathetic Charles Sumner to James Garfield, his temporary political patron. In a letter to a Northern Wise Man, the sarcastic term he used for politicians in Washington who made policy and knew nothing about the realities on the ground in the South, Servosse voiced the frustrations which emanated directly from Tourgée’s experiences: “You do not seem to appreciate the fact, which all history teaches, that there is no feeling in the human breast more blind and desperate in its manifestations, or so intense and ineradicable in its nature, as the bitter scorn of a long dominant race for one they have held in bondage.” There was no way, in other words, that the projects that politicians had outlined were going to work. The Fool wasted his time and, worse, risked his life.
Tourgée, through his Narrator, rationalized the failure of Radical Republicans, and his tone exampled evidence of a personal hurt and attendant bitterness. Emancipation was sudden, the war devastating, and the arrival of radical Northerners in the South too quick, for the existing policies to go very far. On the ground, southerners found it easy to resist them and keep the federal power at bay. Tourgée the idealist, like Servosse, did not understand this fact before eagerly descending from their postwar comfort zones into an intense cauldron of confusion, hatred and white supremacist backlash. Tourgée wrote about this quick transition that was inexpressibly confusing and painful, and he continued condemning the North: “That a nation, after four years of war, the loss of a million of men and uncounted millions of treasure, should relax its grip upon the subjugated territory, relieve its people of all disabilities” and “restore” the rebellious territory to equal status illustrated failure that would take years to address. The book contained a torrent of such declarations, and a resignation impossible to resolve by the living generation.
Olsen called his biography of Tourgée Carpetbagger’s Crusade. Tourgée even named his embattled and bulwarked home (he had fortified it to protect himself from the Ku Klux Klan) “Carpet-Bag Lodge” in defiance. As a “matter of national and personal honor,” wrote Olsen, Tourgée “remained open and direct, often aggressive and self-righteous.” Not only did he name his home in such a manner, but “his Negro friends were not strangers there.” This flouted local tradition and shocked Southern conservatives, and, as the novel expressed, endangered his and his family’s lives. The Narrator had some fun discussing carpetbaggery and abolitionism, and claimed that “abolitionist” meant only one who was in favor of the abolition of slavery. At the North it had this significance, and no more. At the South it meant also, one who was in favor of, and sought to promote, negro-equality, miscegenation, rape, murder, arson, and anarchy, with all the untold horrors which the people there believed would follow the uprising or liberation of a race of untaught savages, lustful as apes, bloodthirsty as cannibals, and artful as satyrs.” The humor, which at times sounded like Twain’s anti-war diatribes, verged toward the unfunny, however.
Politicians in Washington, Tourgée claimed, ignored their supporters in the South. They denied the evidence of Ku Klux Klan activity until it was well-entrenched, they ignored the Southern Unionists who had sided with them during the war, and they neglected and then abandoned the freedmen. This negligence and even betrayal was unconscionable, Tourgée thought. He expressed his anger on every page, his bitterness lurks throughout the novel. “Perhaps there is no other instance in history in which the conquering power has discredited its own agents,” he bellowed at Northern politicians for disavowing Northerners who had moved to the South, “denounced those of its own blood and faith, espoused the prejudices of its conquered foes,” a dig at the North for subscribing to reunion romance and Lost Cause ideology, “and poured the vials of its wrath and contempt upon the only class in the conquered territory who defended its acts, supported its policy, promoted its aim, or desired its preservation and continuance.” The polemics in the novel were easy to see, and Tourgée eventually resigned his faith in the efficacy of his activities and consigned them to future generations, and perhaps the possibilities of learning from our own history. And what did he say of blacks, and even of himself, who resisted the murderous campaign of the KKK? “As matters stood, however, it was the sheerest folly. When experience, wealth, and intelligence combine against ignorance, poverty, and inexperience, resistance is useless.”
Tourgée spent much of his journalistic energies against lynching, mostly in columns he wrote for the Chicago Inter-Ocean, which he called “A Bystander’s Notes.” Some scholars compared his work, and his personality, to Ida B. Wells. On one occasion he received a photo of a lynched black person to run alongside his column. This strange fruit, a formerly subjective human being, dangled from a tree in front of white kids posing gleefully. Elliott informed us that “Tourgée promptly passed the picture on to Ida B. Wells, who subsequently used it to great effect on her 1894 speaking tour of Great Britain to publicize the horrors of lynching.” Tourgée decided not to engage trans-Atlantic travel, however, “because he continued to believe that ‘silent sympathizers’ in America should receive his attention. They merely needed to be properly informed of the facts, shaken from their quietism, and pointed to their public duty.” In A Fool’s Errand, members of the KKK surrounded the black settlement next to Servosse’s old estate. They blocked the roads and stood guard – guns and men on horses – next to all the homes. And they extricated Uncle Jerry, the old crippled conjurer, from his bed. It was a Sunday, and the world peaceful; the tone of bitter sarcasm endured: “Over all pulsed the sacred echo of the Sabbath bells . . . A few idlers sat upon the steps of the court-house, and gazed carelessly at the ghastly burden on the oak. The brightly-dressed church-goers enlivened the streets. Not a colored man was to be seen. All except the brown cadaver on the tree spoke of peace and prayer – a holy day among a godly people, with whom rested the benison of peace.”
An example of Tourgée’s understanding of his deviation from abolitionist millennialism, and the complications some members of his wartime generation experienced in finding themselves, occurred in a conversation between Servosse and his old schoolmaster. The exchanged letters mimicked the same that Tourgée sent to his mentor at the University of Rochester. The letters were written toward the end of Servosse’s stay in the South, and they illustrated deep exasperation. Like McPherson’s attempt to define the legacy of the first generation of abolitionists, Tourgée gave expression to at least some of the feelings and sensibilities of the post-abolitionist generation, the younger generation that Tourgée represented and that that came of age during the Civil War. Additionally, the epistolary interchange provided evidence of a fatalistic worry about postbellum relations between North and South. And Servosse wondered whether it was in fact extinct. Servosse wrote “that is just where our mistake . . . We have assumed that slavery was dead,” and the Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution, seemed to suggest, to the thinking man of the time, that slavery was dead, and a new age had dawned on America, a true freedom, and a final uniting of the sections. And so: “The Antislavery Society met, and congratulated itself on the accomplishment of its mission, on having no more worlds to conquer, no more oppression to resist, and no more victims to succor.” Professional activists deserved a taste of the good life, and the declared “end” of the struggle “was farcical in the extreme. I don’t blame Garrison and Phillips and yourself, and all the others of the old guard of abolitionists. It was natural that you should at least wish to try on your laurels while alive.”
It was their fault, too, Servosse claimed. The “youngsters” – that post-abolitionist generation – had just survived the war, had “come out of the furnace-fire.” Blacks were freed, indeed, but that generation who fought the war should have known that “only the shell was gone.” Slavery had ended, the president, the war, and the slaves themselves had seen to that. However, unfreedom and injustice remained. Slavery still existed, claimed a dejected Servosse. “As a form of society, it could be abolished by proclamation and enactment: as a moral entity, it is as indestructible as the souls on which it has left its mark.” Here lived and breathed the sentiment of resignation. And, unlike many histories of the period or novels of the Civil War, a general feeling of the impossibility of the task, an understanding of the Southern heart and mind, remained one of the merits of the novel. Servosse continued his lament, “we tried to 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.”
Like the great American myth, however, Tourgée continued to claw his way back, after bouts with depression, devastating losses, and unceasing debt. The perseverance of American Dream ideology was, and is, astounding. Fatalism, indeed, did not mean the end of hope. It meant that things were how they were and there was nothing you could do about it, save, in Tourgée’s case, plant the seeds for some future harvest. Here, expressed in An Appeal to Caesar, was that fatalism contained within the umbrella of hope: of the South, Tourgée and other Northerners, and Garfield in particular (to whom Caesar was addressed, though Garfield had been assassinated), believed that their way, their industrial way and their ideas of freedom, would prevail: they “expected the whole region to be transformed by the power of commerce, manufactures, and the incursion of Northern life, thought, capital, industry, enterprise. To his imagination the South which had been devastated by war was to blossom like the rose almost within an hour.” The Narrator of A Fool’s Errand echoed this sensibility, as well as provided indication of Tourgée’s sense of Time, when he claimed that “the ideas of generations do not perish in an hour. Divergent civilizations can not be made instantly identical by uprooting a single institution.”
Fatalism combined with hope in occasional glimpses of the West, too. After a reunion with Emma, and after finally quitting the South, they decided to give up on the East and move to Denver. That move lasted for about a year, as the novel became a bestseller and they, now the temporary toast of literary and political society, moved to New York City. Tourgée’s dream of being a writer seemed finally to have arrived. But the impetus to move West, and to find a new home there, had expression throughout A Fool’s Errand. The safety-valve was always there. If one could not find success in the corrupted and conflictual, intransigent North or South, then it was time to follow the pioneers and move to the West and start over. In a conversation between Servosse and a Union man they discussed the sanctification of the rebels in the new Nation, and how the general sentiment seemed to be with the Confederacy, the pessimistic Unionist claimed that “the war will not amount to any certain sum, so far as liberty and progress are concerned.” Union men and black people “will be worse off in fact than they were during the war.” And then the man looked at Servosse and exclaimed, “I’m ‘fraid it’s going to be so, Colonel; and I feel as if I ought to go to the West, where I and my children can be free and safe.” And the Servosse family did leave the South after all. Incapable of enduring any longer, frustrated by failure and worried for their lives, the women moved North and Comfort went to South America, where he contracted yellow fever. Tourgée was set to kill off his hero, his failure, his fool.
Final Hope
The Verdenton Gazette changed its tone now that Colonel Servosse lay on his deathbed with disease. The article ended with a positive spin, and showed hope. If nothing else, there has always been in American thought and soul a certain kind of hopefulness, a belief in the American Dream among the rich and the poor. Even the most jaded cynic and anti-Americanist must concede that much. The article eulogized and concluded with acceptance, after the county had attempted to chase Servosse and his family away, and offered a deeper understanding, a hope for future generations. This hope placed in the future accorded with Tourgée’s notions of time and the work of historical and social change. “He was an active and able political leader,” the article read. “That he was a man of marked ability is now universally admitted . . . a man of fine qualities, who made many and fast friends . . . his audacious and unsparing ridicule of the men and measures he opposed” prevented the locals from seeing his good qualities, the “attractive elements of his character.” And no matter how locals felt about him, they were sad to see him go. Tourgée killed off Servosse, but not himself. This article replicated one that spoke about Tourgée’s departure. Tourgée removed himself from the South in order to reunite with Emma. He did not want to leave. He felt that he had work yet to do, a continuation of the unfinished revolution. Tourgée the Narrator wrote that “there were grave, solemn-faced men who had been his friends, and others who had been enemies, who stood side by side around the open grave under the noblest of the trees which he had loved.” Tourgée’s biographer commented that Tourgée loved those trees around his home in North Carolina, and some of them still stand today.