Description
The Veteran and His Pipe by Albion W. Tourgée, published in 1888, being the first edition to bear his name.
Octavo, 269pp. Blue hardcover, title in gilt on spine and cover. Light wear to cloth at spine. Decorative endpapers, solid text block, appears unread. A near fine example of this scarce work. First published anonymously in 1886, this copy was the first to bear the author’s name. (Keller, Vol. 18, 272).
Albion W. Tourgée (1838-1905) was a writer, lawyer, civil rights activist and soldier in the Civil War. Serving in the war from 1861-1863, he suffered from a spinal injury and spent four months in Libby Prison. In 1865, he moved to North Carolina to assist in Reconstruction activities but was eventually chased out by the Ku Klux Klan. As a pioneering civil rights activist, he founded the National Citizens’ Rights Association and later Bennett College. He was the lead lawyer in Plessy v. Ferguson, where he was the first to write that justice should be “color-blind.”
