Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II

While compiling the data that went into our Supreme Court Timeplot, a few justices stood out from the crowd. The name “Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II,” the 50^th justice of the Supreme Court, sparked my curiosity—so I looked into it.

L.Q.C. Lamar was named after his father, who was named after the ancient Roman consul and dictator Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. Interestingly, LQC II’s father’s brother was the second president of the Republic of Texas; named Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, they were apparently both named after historical heroes of their eccentric uncle.

L.Q.C. Lamar had quite the career before he was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Grover Cleveland in 1888.

Lamar was elected to numerous political offices, serving in the Mississippi and Georgia state houses and the U.S. House in 1856 (from which he resigned following the founding of the confederacy). He was the drafter of the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession, and was Confederate Foreign Minister to Russia. After the Civil War, Lamar directed the University of Mississippi School of Law, where he introduced the “case method” of law school study. Lamar returned to U.S. House from 1873-77, served in the U.S. Senate from 1877-1885, and as Secretary of the Interior from 1885-88.

L.Q.C. Lamar was profiled in John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage. He was noted for the courage of his eulogy of Northerner Charles Sumner, the vocal abolitionist senator from Massachusetts. Sumner had been vilified in the South during the Civil War. When L.Q.C. delivered Sumner’s eulogy, his words and his passion apparently caused congressmen on both sides of the aisle to weep openly. Press reports across the nation were effusive in their praise.

Here is the closing portion of his speech:

Bound to each other by a common constitution, destined to live together under a common government, forming unitedly but a single member of the great family of nations, shall we not now at last endeavor to grow toward each other once more in heart, as we are already indissolubly linked to each other in fortunes?

Shall we not, over the honored remains of this great champion of human liberty, this feeling sympathizer with human sorrow, this earnest pleader for the exercise of human tenderness and charity, lay aside the concealments which serve only to perpetuate misunderstandings and distrust, and frankly confess that on both sides we most earnestly desire to be one ; one not merely in community of language and literature and traditions and country; but more, and better than all that, one also in feeling and in heart? . . .

I know well the sentiments of these, my Southern brothers, whose hearts are so infolded that the feeling of each is the feeling of all; and I see on both sides only the seeming of a constraint, which each apparently hesitates to dismiss. The South prostrate, exhausted, drained of her lifeblood, as well as of her material resources, yet still honorable and true accepts the bitter award of the bloody arbitrament without reservation, resolutely determined to abide the result with chivalrous fidelity; yet, as if struck dumb by the magnitude of her reverses, she suffers on in silence.

The North, exultant in her triumph, and elated by success, still cherishes, as we are assured, a heart full of magnanimous emotions toward her disarmed and discomfited antagonist; and yet, as if mastered by some mysterious spell, silencing her better impulses, her words and acts are the words and acts of suspicion and distrust.

Would that the spirit of the illustrious dead whom we lament today could speak from the grave to both parties to this deplorable discord in tones which should reach each and every heart throughout this broad territory: “My countrymen! Know one another, and you will love one another.”