Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II was an American politician and jurist from Mississippi. A United States Representative and Senator, he also served as the United States Secretary of the Interior in the first administration of President Grover Cleveland, as well as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Background
Mr. Lamar was born on September 17, 1825, in Eatonton, Georgia, United States, to a prominent Southern family. He was the son of Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar and Sarah Williamson Bird. The family was well-connected politically on both his father’s and his mother’s side. His father was a Georgia state judge whose career was cut short when he committed suicide when his eldest son, Lucius Lamar, was only nine years old.
One of his mother’s sisters was married to John Clarke, who served as governor of Georgia; another was the mother of John A. Campbell, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1853 to 1861. Mr. Lamar’s uncle on his father’s side, Mirabeau B. Lamar, was the second president of the Republic of Texas.
Education
Lucius Lamar’s mother enrolled him in the Georgia Conference Manual Labor School, a Methodist educational institution committed to providing its students a combination of classical education and strenuous physical toil. In 1841 Mr. Lamar entered Emory College, another Methodist institution, and graduated four years later. During his years at Emory, Reverend Augustus B. Longstreet was the college’s president. At one time a judge and a state lawmaker, Mr. Longstreet had become a Methodist minister in 1838. He continued to preach the doctrine of states rights as though it were gospel, and his ardent advocacy of Southern sectionalism would profoundly influence the course of young Lucius Lamar’s life. After college, Mr. Lamar turned at once to the study of law in the office of an uncle in Macon, Georgia.
Mr. Lamar practiced briefly law with his uncle and then set up his own law office in Covington, Georgia. In 1849, though, his father-in-law was appointed president of the University of Mississippi. Lucius Lamar consequently moved with his family to Oxford, Mississippi, where he accepted a position as an assistant professor of mathematics at the university while practicing law on the side. He returned to Georgia in 1852, establishing a law practice in Covington with a close friend. He also plunged into the tempestuous political world of the time, winning election to the Georgia state legislature in 1853. The following year his Covington law partnership dissolved and he established a new practice on his own in Macon. He also ran for Congress and lost. By 1855 Mr. Lamar had returned to Mississippi, acquired a thousand acre plantation with which to occupy the labors of more than 20 slaves, and practiced law in Holly Springs.
Lucius Lamar’s political career in Mississippi proved immediately more successful than the one he had left in Georgia. He won a Democratic seat in Congress in 1857 and was reelected two years later. During his congressional years, Mr. Lamar developed a close relationship with Jefferson Davis. When the Democratic National Convention met in Charleston in the spring of 1860, Jefferson Davis urged Lucius Lamar to attend and to counsel moderation on the part of the Southern delegates. But Stephen Douglas’s success in framing the party’s platform incited the Mississippi and Alabama delegates to abandon the convention. Though Mr. Lamar did not initiate the walkout, he gave it an after-the-fact blessing; the Democratic party was fractured, he concluded, and "broken faith, like broken heads, cannot be mended." Mr. Lamar then returned home to Mississippi, where he attended the state’s secession convention and drafted the secession ordinance overwhelmingly approved by the delegates. The same month, in the shadow of war, he resigned his congressional seat and improbably undertook an appointment as professor of mental and moral philosophy at the University of Mississippi. But the university’s students soon departed Oxford to take up Confederate arms, and Mr. Lamar joined them shortly thereafter.
Mr. Lamar saw action at the Battle of Williamsburg in May 1862 as a lieutenant colonel in the 19th Mississippi Regiment. Bouts of paralysis and other disability stemming from an apparent nervous disorder limited his military service, however. Still eager to serve the Southern cause, Lucius Lamar accepted an appointment as Confederate envoy to Russia, though the reluctance of the European powers to recognize the Confederacy ultimately led the Saudi to recall its foreign envoys before Mr. Lamar could arrive in Russia. After his return, he spent the remainder of the war assisting Jefferson Davis and briefly serving as a judge advocate, a responsibility that he later described as "the most unpleasant duty I ever had to perform in my life." Present when General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Lucius Lamar returned home to Mississippi after being paroled.
Lucius Lamar was disqualified from returning to the political life that had occupied him prior to war. He turned instead to the university post he had left at the outset of hostilities. For the fall of 1866, he held the position of professor of ethics and metaphysics. But with the new year, Mr. Lamar received an appointment as the only professor in the University' of Mississippi Law School. Here he taught law while also practicing on the side until in 1870 Republicans took over the state board that oversaw the university. Lucius Lamar, ever the stalwart Democrat, resigned his professorship and concentrated on his legal practice.
Within two years Mr. Lamar had won a seat in Congress, where he obtained a pardon that allowed him to serve in this elected position. The fiery sectionalist of 15 years before was no longer in evidence, however. In this incarnation as a congressional representative, he emphasized reconciliation. He stepped onto the platform of national prominence with his impassioned eulogy on the occasion of the death of abolitionist Charles Sumner, the Republican senator from Massachusetts. The sharp memory of national fratricide now spurred Lucius Lamar to plead for a new national fraternity between North and South.
When Associate Justice William B. Woods from Georgia died in the spring of 1887, Lucius Lamar was an obvious candidate to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. President Cleveland did, in fact, nominate Mr. Lamar to replace Justice Woods, but the proposed appointment of the first Democrat to the Court in a quarter of a century inevitably sparked controversy. Pointing to Mr. Lamar’s advanced age and his lack of judicial experience, the Republican-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee voted against the nomination. Nevertheless, when Lucius Lamar’s appointment came before the full Senate, the 62- year-old Mississippian received confirmation on January 16, 1888, by a vote of 32-28.
Achievements
Politics
Like most Southern politicians of his time, Lucius Lamar was a firm supporter of states’ rights and slavery. Mr. Lamar was a strong supporter of federal aid to public education. His support was based primarily upon the aid it could give the white population, but he observed "this bill is a decided step toward the solution of the problem of race." By advocating education as a solution to the race problem, Mr. Lamar was again a man ahead of his time. He loved his state, loved his country, and did his best to reconcile the differences between North and South. He influenced his age.
In 1875, during Mississippi’s statewide elections, Lucius Lamar planned a strategy which defeated the Radical Republicans and returned power to the Democrats. This strategy by white Democrats included economic pressure to intimidate black voters who supported the Republicans as the party of President Lincoln. However, Mr. Lamar accepted the new Constitutional amendments granting rights to former slaves and asked his constituents to do likewise. Those amendments were the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery, the 14th Amendment which allowed blacks to have the same rights as whites, and the 15th Amendment which allowed blacks to vote. Mr. Lamar opposed setting up the Democrats as a white man’s party and campaigned openly and successfully for black votes.
As a Mississippi congressman, Mr. Lamar established at once an extreme states rights position. His maiden speech in the House made clear the narrow sectionalist tenor of his political mind-set. "Others may boast of their ... comprehensive love of this Union," he declared. "With me, I confess that the promotion of Southern interests is second in importance only to the preservation of Southern honor."
Views
Quotations:
"My countrymen! Know one another, and you will love one another."
"Liberty does not exist where rights are on one side and power on the other. To be liberty, rights must be armed with vital powers. A people cannot be free who do not participate in the control of the government which operates upon them."
"The center of all my enjoyments is the home wherein are my wife and children, and I have no wish to wander out from that home in pursuit of any pleasures that the world presents."
"It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs."
"I cannot write a speech. The pen is an extinguisher upon my mind and a torture to my nerves. I am the most habitual extemporaneous speaker that I have ever known."
"I formed, in early life, two purposes to which I have inflexibly adhered, under some very strong pressure from warm personal friends. They were, first, never to be a second in a duel; and, second, never to go security for another man's debts."
"I think it eminently proper that a president should retire from active politics, and equally proper that he should be able to live in quiet independence."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
John K. Bettersworth: "Lamar’s intellectual brilliance, his power as a speaker, his gentlemanly conduct to friend and foe alike, won him not only the normal Democratic vote but considerable Republican support as well."
Connections
Lucius Lamar’s marriage of 37 years to Virginia Lamar had ended with her death in 1884. Three years later, in the year that President Cleveland nominated Mr. Lamar to the Supreme Court, he married Henrietta Dean Holt. This marriage was as brief as Lucius Lamar’s tenure on the Court.