Lucius Q. C. Lamar, US Senator, US Sec'y of the Interior, Justice US Sup. Ct

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quintus_Cincinnatus_Lamar_(II)

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (September 17, 1825 – January 23, 1893) was an American politician and jurist from Mississippi. A United States Representative and Senator, he also served as 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.

Early life and career

Lamar was born near Eatonton, Putnam County, Georgia, and was named after ancient Roman consul and dictator Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. He was a cousin of future associate justice Joseph Lamar, and nephew of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, second president of the Republic of Texas. He graduated from Emory College (now Emory University), then located in Oxford, Georgia, in 1845, and married the daughter of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, one of the school's early presidents. He was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and later established the fraternity's chapter at the University of Mississippi.

In 1849, Lamar's father-in-law, Professor Longstreet, moved to Oxford, Mississippi to take the position of Chancellor at the recently established University of Mississippi. Lamar followed him and took a position as a professor of mathematics for a single year. He also practiced law in Oxford, eventually taking up the role as planter, establishing a cotton plantation named Solitude in northern Lafayette County, near Abbeville.

In 1852, Lamar moved to Covington, Georgia where he practiced law, and in 1853 he was elected to the Georgia State House of Representatives.

Congressional career and Civil War

In 1855 he returned to Mississippi and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1856, beginning his service in 1857. When Mississippi seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy on January 9, 1861, Lamar said:

"Thank God, we have a country at last: to live for, to pray for, and if need be, to die for."

Lamar retired from the House in December 1860 to become a member in the Mississippi Secession Convention. The state's Ordinance of Secession (see also Mississippi Ordinance of Secession) was drafted by Lamar. Lamar considered a staff appointment, but abandoned that to co-operate with his former law partner, Christopher H. Mott. Lamar raised, and funded out of his own pocket, the 19th Mississippi Volunteer Infantry. Mott was made Colonel, as he had served as an officer in the war with Mexico, and Lamar elected Lieutenant Colonel. Lamar then resigned his professorship in the university and was, on May 14, in Montgomery, offering his regiment to the Confederate War Department. On May 15, 1862, Colonel Lamar, while reviewing his regiment, fell with an attack of vertigo, which had previously disabled him, and his service as a soldier was ended. After this he served as a judge advocate, and aide to his cousin, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet. Later in 1862, Confederate States President Jefferson Davis appointed Lamar as Confederate minister to Russia and special envoy to England and France. When the Civil War was over, he returned to the University of Mississippi where he was a professor of metaphysics, social science and law. In 1865, 1868, 1875, 1877, and 1881, he was also a member of Mississippi's constitutional conventions. After having his civil rights restored following the war, Lamar returned to the House in 1873, the first Democrat from Mississippi to sit in the U.S. House of Representatives since the Civil War. He served there until 1877. Lamar would go on to represent Mississippi in the U.S. Senate from 1877 to 1885.

Later career

Lamar served as United States Secretary of the Interior under President Grover Cleveland from March 6, 1885 to January 10, 1888. As part of the first Democratic administration in 24 years, and as head of the corrupt Interior Department rife with political patronage, Lamar was besieged by visitors seeking jobs. One day a visitor came that was not seeking a job and, as The New York Times later reported:

In the outer room were several prominent Democrats, including a high judicial officer, several Senators, and any number of members of the House. Mr. Lamar waved his visitor to a chair without saying a word. . . . By and by his visitor said that he would go away and return at some other time, as he feared that he was keeping the people outside. "Pray sit still," requested Mr. Lamar. "You rest me. I can look at you, and you do not ask me for anything; and you keep those people out as long as you stay in." As secretary, Lamar removed the Department's fleet of carriages for its officials and only used his personal one-horse rockaway.

During an 1884-85 Geological Survey, Geologist Arnold Hague named the East Fork of the Yellowstone River in Yellowstone National Park the Lamar River in his honor. The Lamar Valley, or the Secluded Valley of Trapper Osborne Russell and other park features or administrative names which contain Lamar are derived from this original naming in honor of Secretary of the Interior Lamar.

President Cleveland appointed Lamar to the Supreme Court of the United States, and he was confirmed on January 16, 1888. He served on the court until his death on January 23, 1893. He is the only Mississippian to have served on the court.

Lamar was originally interred at Riverside Cemetery in Macon, Georgia, but was reinterred at St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1894.

Three U.S. counties are named in his honor: Lamar County, Alabama; Lamar County, Georgia; and Lamar County, Mississippi. Lamar was also featured in John F. Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage, both for his eulogy speech for Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in 1874, and for his unpopular vote against the Bland-Allison Act of 1878.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar is one of only two men in history to serve in the US president’s cabinet, in both the US Senate and the US House of Representatives, and on the US Supreme Court. He is also the only Mississippian ever to serve on the Court. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy featured Lamar and seven other prominent American leaders, among them John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and Sam Houston. Lamar was a national figure with celebrity appeal, considered by many to be one of the greatest speakers of the nineteenth century. His efforts to promote national reconciliation after the Civil War included an eloquent eulogy for Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, a Radical Republican, and Lamar’s transformation from a slave owner and reluctant secessionist to a defender of black civil rights and education is one of the great American stories of personal redemption.

L. Q. C. Lamar, the fourth of eight children of Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar and Sarah Williamson Bird Lamar, was born in Putnam County, Georgia, on 17 September 1825. His uncle, Mirabeau B. Lamar, served as president of the Republic of Texas. Lamar graduated from Emory College, where he met his future father-in-law and mentor, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, then serving as the school’s president. Lamar married Virginia Longstreet in 1847, and they moved to Oxford soon after her father became president of the University of Mississippi.

A lawyer and professor at the university, Lamar first won election as to the US Congress in 1857. Sometimes mistakenly referred to as a fire-eater because of his impassioned speeches defending the South’s point of view, Lamar knew the destructive consequences of secession and advised Mississippi’s governor and the rest of the state’s congressional delegation against it. Nevertheless, he resigned from Congress in 1860 after secession became inevitable. Expressing concern that the more radical elements supporting secession might experiment with new models of government, Lamar assumed responsibility for drafting Mississippi’s ordinance of secession.

During the Civil War Lamar served as a colonel of the 19th Mississippi Infantry and earned praise for heroism under fire at the Battle of Williamsburg before resigning because of poor health. Lamar subsequently served as Confederate minister to Russia and special envoy to France and England and as a judge advocate for the Confederacy and witnessed Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

In 1872 Lamar became the first former Confederate and Democrat from Mississippi elected to Congress; five years later he was elected to the Senate. Lamar promoted reconciliation through important symbolic actions such as his famous eulogy of Sumner, negotiated the Compromise of 1877, and was the only southerner to support a pension for an ailing and broke Ulysses Grant, positions that at times invoked the wrath of constituents still bitter over losing loved ones and homes in the war. But Lamar also encouraged the South to accept the new social realities by taking the extraordinary step of publicly encouraging the appointment of a black cabinet member (though almost a century passed before an African American would gain that distinction). In addition, Lamar defended black voting rights in general and specifically opposed James Z. George’s 1890 push for a new state constitution with the express purpose of disenfranchising blacks. Lamar also joined a few other southerners in supporting direct federal aid to local public schools, emphasizing the benefits for the former slaves. These positions were quite radical for a leading white southern politician of the time. Responding to frequent yellow fever epidemics, Lamar broke with convention again by introducing bills giving the federal government responsibility for public health instead of relying on the various state health boards, efforts that eventually led to the creation of what is now the US Public Health Service.

In 1884, when Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president since the Civil War, he appointed Lamar secretary of the interior. While in office, Lamar introduced a distinctly more progressive policy of relations with American Indians and fought to protect their lands from homesteading. His environmental policies, such as protecting Yellowstone National Park, were enlightened for the time and helped prepare the way for the first national conservation policy under Theodore Roosevelt a few years later. In 1888 Cleveland named the Mississippian to serve on the US Supreme Court.

Lamar died on 23 January 1893 and is buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford. His home in Oxford has been restored and is open to the public as a museum.

In the 1970s a group of southern writers, politicians, business leaders, and journalists, including Willie Morris and William Winter, created the L. Q. C. Lamar Society, which sought to improve race relations and encourage economic development. The group’s founders declared that Lamar’s “struggle for reconciliation between the races and the regions of the country in the divisive 1870s is worthy of emulation by his fellow Southerners in the 1970s.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=5695

US Congressman, Civil War Confederate Army Officer, US Senator, Presidential Cabinet Secretary, United States Associate Supreme Court Justice. He was born in Putnam County, Georgia, he was the son of a superior court judge. He was named after his father but wasn't a junior; therefore he's also refered to as Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II.

The Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park is named after him.