Cumberland University.
Mr. Lurton was born in Newport, Kentucky, United States, on February 26, 1844, to Sarah Ann Harmon Lurton and Lycurgus Leonidas Lurton. His father practiced medicine and pharmacy before becoming an Episcopalian minister. Horace Lurton would not follow his father's path in either medicine or ministry, but he would become an Episcopalian vestryman himself.
Horace Lurton received his early education in public schools in Clarksville, Tennessee. He traveled to Chicago at the age of 16 to enroll at Douglas University, which is no longer in existence. Within two years, however, the din of Civil War had distracted him from his academic career and drawn him into the ranks of the Confederate army. Mr. Lurton enlisted in the Fifth Tennessee Infantry in 1861, saw repeated action, and soon advanced to the rank of sergeant-major. By early February 1862, though, a sickness of the lungs had earned him a medical discharge and instructions to find rest at home. No sooner had he arrived in Clarksville than he heard word of General Ulysses S. Grant’s nearby presence. He immediately re-enlisted in the Second Kentucky Infantry, only to be taken prisoner when Grant subsequently took Fort Donnelson, where Mr. Lurton and 12,000 other Confederate soldiers were forced to surrender. Within a few weeks, he had escaped or, perhaps, was released. Horace Lurton promptly celebrated his freedom by attaching himself to the irregular guerrilla force of General John Hunt Morgan, which spent better than a year making calvary raids against railroads, bridges, and Union communication centers. Finally, in summer 1863, General Morgan’s force was captured and Mr. Lurton, a prisoner of war for the second time, found himself consigned for 18 months to a prison camp on Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie.
Stricken with tuberculosis, Mr. Lurton might have died there. But, according to his later account, his mother interceded on his behalf. After discovering his condition, she traveled to Washington and eventually obtained the ear of President Abraham Lincoln himself. Upon hearing her plea, the president ordered Horace Lurton released. "Let the boy go home with his mother," he ordered, and Mr. Lurton managed to spend the last two months of the war in Clarksville, where he gradually recovered.
Once the Civil War was over, Horace Lurton set his sights on a career in the law and enrolled at Cumberland University Law School, near Nashville, Tennessee. He graduated in the summer of 1867.
Mr. Lurton began his professional life by practicing first with Gustavus A. Henry and then with the firm of James E. Bailey. James Bailey himself was a prominent Democratic politician appointed in 1870 to complete the term of former president and U.S. senator Andrew Johnson, who died in congressional office. The same year, Tennessee governor James G. Porter appointed 31-year-old Horace Lurton as presiding judge of the Sixth Chancery Division of Tennessee when the previous judge resigned. Already recognized as a solid attorney, Mr. Lurton’s service as chancery judge so impressed his colleagues on the bench that they voted unanimously on his continuation as presiding judge once his initial term had expired. By 1878, though, the financial needs of Mr. Lurton’s family proved more substantial that his judge’s salary would accommodate, and he consequently returned to the private practice of law. The next eight years saw him well-established financially and socially. By the mid-1880s he had become president of Farmers and Merchants National Bank, a vestryman in the Trinity Episcopal Church, and a trustee of the University of the South.
In 1886 Horace Lurton’s reputation in the state was sufficient to win him election to the Tennessee Supreme Court. There he established a reputation for courtesy, diligence, and fairmindedness, qualities that would subsequently accompany him in steadily advancing judicial responsibilities. The departure of the chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court in January 1893 promptly resulted in his advancement to this position, but an even more prestigious opportunity presented itself when President Grover Cleveland appointed Lurton that same year to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, filling the seat left vacant after the president appointed Howell Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Lurton joined a court presided over by 36-year-old Republican William Howard Taft, and the two, though divided by party lines, soon formed a fast friendship. Several years after Horace Lurton arrived on the court, William Day, an Ohio Republican, was appointed to it. Mr. Lurton, and Mr. Day would ultimately produce important dividends for Horace Lurton. For the time being, as a federal appeals judge, Lurton reinforced the reputation for civility, fairness, and meticulousness that he had first established on the Tennessee Supreme Court. To his work as a federal judge, he added teaching and administrative responsibilities at Vanderbilt University, where he taught constitutional law from 1898 to 1905 and served as dean of the law school from 1905 until 1910. Mr. Lurton eventually became presiding judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, after Taft departed to become governor of the Philippines.
While Horace Lurton remained on the federal Court of Appeals, his two friends, Taft and Day, each left the court for other public positions: Mr. Taft to become chair of the Philippine Commission and later civil governor of the Philippines, and then, in 1904, secretary of war under President Theodore Roosevelt; Mr. Day to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1903. Both men interceded for Horace Lurton with President Roosevelt when a seat on the Court became vacant in 1906 with the retirement of Henry Billings Brown. President Roosevelt seriously considered appointing Horace Lurton but eventually nominated his friend and attorney general, William Henry Moody, instead. Three years later, however, William Howard Taft was in a position to do more than intercede for Lurton. By the time Associate Justice Rufus Peckham died in October 1909, Mr. Taft had become president himself. He pondered over the appointment briefly, because although he wished to elevate his friend to the high Court, Mr. Lurton’s 65 years of age seemed excessively venerable for such an appointment, at least to some observers.
It was perhaps too much to expect that Lurton might conclude an already notable judicial career with a long and illustrious career on the Supreme Court. Mr. Lurton was, both by age and judicial temperament, unlikely to find his way into the company of the Court’s luminaries. His advanced age prognosticated a short term, and his general fondness for the status quo, paired with a conciliatory judicial temperament, made it likely that he would side with the modest progressive movement of the Court over the few years he sat on it. He authored 87 opinions during his four years on the high bench, none of great historical note. He supplemented his work on the Court by agreeing in 1911 to serve on the Committee to Revise the Equity Rules in Federal Court and devoted himself so energetically to this project that the culminating publication, the New Federal Equity Rules, when published in 1913, was dedicated to him. The following year illness forced Horace Lurton to miss several weeks on the Court, though he recovered and finished out the term. In summer 1914 he traveled with his wife to Atlantic City for a vacation and died there unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1914.
Horace Lurton belonged to the Democratic Party of the United States. He became deeply involved in the effort to reform the equity rules in federal courts. He was a constitutional conservative and opposed the concept that social changes be brought about through judicial interpretation.
In 1867 he married Mary Francis Owen. This union would last until Lurton’s death 44 years later and would produce three sons and two daughters.
