One would expect any decent Jeopardy! contestant to be able to name a man who argued the most famous Supreme Court case of the late nineteenth century, wrote one of the best-selling novels of that era, and was celebrated by W. E. B. Dubois's Niagara Movement as one of three great “Friends of Freedom” (along with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass). But I suspect that even within academia, few scholars outside the fields of post–Civil War history and literature are familiar with Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905), the attorney for Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the author of a wildly popular semiautobiographical portrait of a carpetbagger titled A Fool's Errand (1879), and a leading white voice for radical Reconstruction and racial justice. I hope that Mark Elliott's wonderful biography of Tourgée will bring more widespread recognition to this remarkable figure.

Although he lived during a time of increasing specialization, Tourgée's list of vocations—if not accomplishments—is worthy of Franklin or Jefferson: attorney, newspaper publisher, businessman, judge, law reformer, novelist, political essayist, newspaper columnist, literary critic, magazine publisher, founder of a national civil rights organization, inventor, and diplomat. As Elliott shows, Tourgée used most of these careers as vehicles to promote his vision of racial egalitarianism. Tourgée's family life (fascinatingly portrayed by Elliott) also reflected this vision; his wife, Emma, was similarly committed to racial equality, and one of their two daughters was an adopted former slave.

Elliott's primary purpose is to examine Tourgée's “radical individualism,” a term the author uses to designate a set of views that Tourgée inherited from the abolitionists and carried forward into the very different historical context of the Gilded Age. Unfortunately, Elliott does not define “radical individualism” concretely enough. He variously calls it an “ontological notion of the self” (7), a “political tradition” (315), and a “worldview” (8), and the contours of the groups and ideas encompassed by the term are never completely clear. According to Elliott, radical individualists presumed that one's physical biology was irrelevant to one's moral worth and that every person, regardless of race or gender, was “divinely endowed with a conscience, a soul, and the capacity for moral understanding” (7). They thus endorsed equality before the law and a civic ethics based on the Golden Rule. In addition, Elliott explains, radical individualism encouraged protest and agitation by demanding public engagement on matters of conscience. In this respect, the label “radical individualism” seems inapt; it calls to mind the libertarianism of Herbert Spencer, not a public-spirited ethos.

In Elliott's portrait, Tourgée's racial egalitarianism was only one aspect of a broader idealism. Tourgée believed that law could help construct a fair social order, that public education could provide cultural and economic uplift for black and white citizens alike, and that the best fiction had a moral and political purpose. Tourgée's lot, eloquently and at times poignantly portrayed by Elliott, was to be an increasingly solitary, frustrated, and embittered spokesman for racial equality and idealistic theories of self and society during the rise of Jim Crow and various deterministic intellectual movements—including political Mugwumpery, “scientific” racial taxonomy, and literary naturalism—that considered individuals to be “at the mercy of forces beyond their control” and governments to be helpless to overcome the “laws of nature” (11).

This is definitely not a triumphal biography. Tourgée was, in the final analysis, a failure during his lifetime; the Radical Republican opinions he espoused largely disappeared from U.S. political discourse, his business ventures collapsed, his later novels sold poorly, and he lost Plessy and with it his hope of establishing a color-blind Constitution. He died a virtual exile, serving as the U.S. consul to Bordeaux—an appointment he apparently received on the condition that he keep his mouth shut. Only in his family life did he, following the near breakdown of his marriage, finally find happiness.

Tourgée's struggle for color-blind radical individualism appears actually to have backfired in certain ways. Elliott describes how Tourgée's provocative arguments in Plessy impelled the Supreme Court to employ broad reasoning that undergirded segregationist legal decisions for the next half century. He also discusses how the style and approach of A Fool's Errand inspired a wave of influential anti-Reconstruction literature, emblematized by Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (the basis for D. W. Griffith's notorious film The Birth of a Nation).

Nonetheless, Elliott concludes that Tourgée ultimately had an important positive influence by keeping alive a “tradition[ ] of racial egalitarianism … that ha[s] shaped our understanding of citizenship, and concepts of the self, in ways not yet fully appreciated” (316). Indeed, the celebration of Tourgée at the 1905 founding of the Niagara Movement, a progenitor of the NAACP, suggests that despite his many disappointments, Tourgée's efforts on behalf of racial justice were ultimately not in vain.