2021/03/01 by Joseph Angelillo · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #American History and Culture #Race, History, and American Society #Nomination #Cabinet (room) #Law #Supreme court #Political science #Economic Justice #History #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1111/jsch.12256
openalex publication_date 2021/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
The “Unrepentant Secessionist”: The Nomination of L.Q.C. Lamar and the Retreat from Reconstruction Joseph Angelillo (bio) On December 6, 1887, President Grover Cleveland sent a stack of papers to the United States Senate. The pile contained a host of nominations, as Congress had resumed its session the day before and the twenty-second president had several posts within his Cabinet to fill. These included Secretary of the Interior, Postmaster General, Secretary of the Treasury, two assistant cabinet secretaries, and—though it lay outside of his cabinet, perhaps most important—an associate justiceship of the Supreme Court.1 About to enter the final year of his first term as president, Cleveland was not inexperienced in sending nominations over for the Senate’s “advice and consent.” However, the first Democrat elected president since the Civil War, Cleveland entered into his toughest confirmation battle by including a note reading “I nominate Lucius Q.C. Lamar of Mississippi, to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, in place of William B. Woods, deceased.”2 The president had chosen Lamar, his sixty-two-year-old Secretary of the Interior, to sit on the Supreme Court. More than a prominent member of Cleveland’s cabinet, Lamar was a Southerner and a former secessionist, who had personally drafted the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession in 1861. Seemingly departing from his rebel background, Lamar had since eulogized arch-Radical Charles Sumner in 1874 and emerged as a proponent of national reunion, serving in the House of Representatives and Senate. President Cleveland appointed Lamar to serve as Secretary of the Interior in 1884, and when a Supreme Court vacancy occurred in 1887, Cleveland nominated Lamar to fill it. It had been three and a half decades since the last Southerner, John A. Campbell, had been nominated to the Court. Following debate in the national press and the Senate, Lamar was confirmed by a two-vote margin, making him only the fifth justice until that time to be confirmed by [End Page 42] a margin of less than five votes.3 Thus, appearing a “reconstructed” rebel who served in the nation’s highest court, Lamar developed a reputation as a conciliatory figure and symbol of national reunion.4 Indeed, Lamar epitomized national reunion to some contemporaries, with moderate Republicans at the New York Times responding to his nomination by calling him “a man of vigorous mind and studious habits and of unquestionable integrity.”5 Yet the debate over his nomination reveals much that clouds his reputation as an amiable figure. In his service with the Confederacy and post-war political career, he confronted Black suffrage in a manner that was anything but conciliatory to Black Americans. He further antagonized Black suffrage when, as a Senator, he took a stance on the legality and validity of the Reconstruction Amendments and the federal government’s power to enforce voting rights under the Amendments. These actions proved central points of contention during the debate over his nomination, and press reactions revealed the shifting tide of support for the Reconstruction Amendments and Black suffrage. In short, his nomination reveals that, rather than a lauded leader in the advance toward national reunion, Lamar should be regarded as central in the retreat from Reconstruction. Secessionist Roots Lamar’s antebellum career saw him emerge as a secessionist. Born in Georgia and named after his father, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II came into the world on September 17, 1825. He studied at Emory College in Atlanta, and while he did not receive an extensive legal education, he followed his father-in-law to the University of Mississippi to teach law. He took up politics and developed a friendship with Jefferson Davis, and both won election to Congress in 1856 as Democrats. With the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln causing several slaveholding states to fear for the fate of their peculiar institution, secessionist fervor grew in Mississippi, and both Lamar and Davis resigned their congressional seats, Lamar doing so to participate in the 1861 Mississippi secession convention. There, at age 35, he personally drafted the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession and the resolution supporting South Carolina’s secession from the Union.6 The Mississippi Secession...