MidLaw and Divers Items
Albion Tourgée
Multiple biographies and profiles recite that Albion Tourgée was a founder of Bennett College. That’s the tradition. Wikipedia says it’s so.
He lived almost next door.
BUT nobody can cite a primary source and he is not named in the original charter issued by the General Assembly. (Wait, is Wikipedia a primary source?)
I bet that the first one to find a primary source will get a free Bennett T-shirt or cap. Shoot, I’ll get you one.
MidLaw spoke to the East Greensboro Rotary Club this morning. They convene at 7:30 AM in Jones Hall on the campus of Bennett College (they have one handsome dining hall in there but they do gather at an early hour).
Compared and contrasted the careers of Albion Tourgée and George Henry White. That is a very cool topic, but you gotta be a member of the East Greensboro Rotary Club to know why.
(Tourgée was a founder of Bennett College, draftsman of the Education Clause in NC’s 1868 Constitution among many other things. For comparison’s sake, White secured the charter of Livingston College. But that’s not what the talk was about.)
We are at a cultural moment.
Sexual boundaries seem to be the “acutest issue” of the moment.
These are not new questions to North Carolina. This moment is not the first.
In Greensboro in 1878, Quaker editor David Swaim thundered in Greensboro’s leading newspaper: “Blast the prejudice that puts women down as only fit to be men’s playthings!”
His conservative counterpart, former Supreme Court Justice and founder of the UNC Law School, William Horn Battle rejoined: “No Southern lady should be permitted to sully her sweetness by breathing the pestiferous air of the courtroom.”
They were arguing about whether women should be permitted to practice law.
The issue was joined in Greensboro and taken to Raleigh. Leading North Carolina legal figures of the day took up the question: Albion Tourgée, William Horn Battle, Richmond Mumford Pearson.
It is the story of Jamestown native Tabitha Holton who became the first woman lawyer in the South.
A circular published when Holton died proclaimed:
The power of thy genius has broken the iron bands of brutality which had been rivited [sic] for ages upon thy sex. No more can the barbed shaft of prejudice and envy reach thee in thy eternal repose.
First in all the Sunny South to claim, and obtain, the full rights of womanhood
Tabitha Holton’s story is fabulized here. Her victory, which upset the custom and practice of centuries, was, in the end, based on merit. Opposition based on her status as a woman failed to stand against her unquestioned merit as a lawyer.
We have gotten past the elections now, if not their consequences. So this may be a good time for me to say that I believe judges should be selected on the basis of merit and competence rather than elected, reflecting membership in a political party or adherence to a political ideology.
Albion Tourgee
The vast preponderance of decisions that judges make – about contracts, torts, crimes, etc. – have nothing at all to do with politics. Justice flows from judges who are independent, unbiased, able and wise – and appear to be so.
I like seeing judges come from all quarters and without labels. And, on the other hand, I am able to identify idiots in every political party. (In fact, this is a talent of mine, and I can do it on very short notice.)
Several years ago, I visited my thoughts about this on the Greensboro Bar Association, in the context of 19th Century Greensboro lawyer and judge Albion Winegar Tourgée and the judicial partisanship in his day. What I said follows, changed only a little.
Judge Tourgée, was the carpetbagger, radical and crusader for racial justice who moved to Greensboro immediately after the Civil War. Ultimately, Greensboro citizens ostracized, threatened and drove him from town. For a time though, Tourgée, the Republican Party and their allies enjoyed political sway here, and during that period Tourgée was elected to the bench.
Judge Tourgée was roundly despised by his political opponents. In the extremely partisan election campaign for his seat, one newspaper characterized Tourgée as “a shallow-brained revengeful yankee.” Another opined that he was “the meanest looking man it has ever been our misfortune to meet.” Not content with that general observation, it went on to say
The pirate; the cutthroat; the despicable, mean, cowardly, crawling, sneaking villain have been portrayed by nature … in every lineament of his countenance. The mark of infamy is stamped indelibly on his brow in the shape of a large protuberance that strikes the beholder with ineffable disgust.
Still others saw in him “a cannibal, a gorilla, the wandering Jew, a Ku Klux or Anti-Christ” and charged (falsely) that he had served time in a penitentiary.
And yet, he was elected to the bench.
Tourgée’s opponents did not desist in their opposition to him after the election. To the contrary, a plot was hatched to assassinate him in his Guilford County courtroom as he presided over criminal proceedings against members of the KKK. The plot was not consummated, but surely a planned assassination betokens an extreme of partisanship.
Despite all the invective, even Tourgée’s opponents at the bar credited him as an able, fair and, most amazingly of all, an impartial judge.
Interestingly, in Tourgée’s time politicians divided up along generally the same lines as they do today; except, in Tourgée’s time it was the Republicans and their Whiggish allies who advocated for an activist government, loose interpretation of the Constitution and levying taxes as needed to support their activist program. Democrats on the other hand, decried government participation in commerce, supported strict constructionism and abominated taxes.
Clearly, deeper wisdom has since come to both parties and they have re-wrought their ideologies accordingly. But it makes you wonder about the merits of partisanship as a guide to enduring truth.
Now, I am not suggesting that partisan judicial elections lead to assassination plots or pirates on the bench. But … that is exactly what did happen once upon a time in old Guilford County.
Just saying . . .
MidLaw and Divers Items 