Judson Claudius Clements

Background

Judson Claudius Clements was born on February 12, 1846 on his father’s farm in Villanow, Georgia, United States. He was the son of Dr. Adam Clements and Mary (Park) Clements.

Education

Clements attended the ordinary schools and matriculated in the law school of Cumberland University at Lebanon, Tennessee. He was admitted to the bar in Georgia in La Fayette, Walker County.

Career

Clements served in the Confederate army from 1864 to 1865. He started to practise law about 1869 in La Fayette, Georgia and continued until 1892. Between 1872 and 1876 he was a member of the Georgia legislature; was a state senator for one year, 1877; and from 1881 to 1891 represented his district in Congress. At the time of his election to Congress, he was president of the Rome & Northern Railway Company, and it was natural that in Congress his primary interest should be in transportation matters. He was appointed by President Cleveland to membership on the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1892. Cleveland’s successors reappointed him four times, so that he had twenty-five years’ consecutive service in that important regulatory body.

On March 17, 1917, the officers and employees of the Commission celebrated the completion of Clements’s quarter-century of service. The speeches made by the chairman and others, and the numerous telegrams received by Clements, attest the value placed upon his work by those best fitted to judge it. Three months later he died in his seventy-first year. All witnesses agree that his official conduct was characterized by a high degree of strength, courage, fairness, and sagacity. In an obituary notice the Washington Evening Star bracketed him with Henry G. Turner and Charles F. Crisp, as the ablest men Georgia had sent to Congress since the Civil War, and said that “he had mastered as perhaps no other person the large, complicated and important question of railroad transportation. ”

Achievements

• Judson C. Clements rendered the most valuable service while working at Interstate Commerce Commission. He helped perfect the Interstate Commerce Act and was among the commissioners who urged the Commission to get real power over the railroads which resulted in the passing of the Hepburn Act in 1906.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Federal Supervision of Railroads: Address

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Politics

Clements was a member of the Democratic Party.

Connections

Clements was twice married: first, to Elizabeth Wardlaw, who died in 1875, and second, on December 2, 1886, to Lizzie Dulaney of Louisville, Kentucky, by whom he had three daughters.

Father:

Adam Clements

Mother:

Mary (Park) Clements

Spouse:

Elizabeth Wardlaw

Spouse:

Lizzie Dulaney

References

• Georgia Biographical Dictionary