Lucius Q. C. Lamar II

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II lived from September 17, 1825 to January 23, 1893 and was an American politician, diplomat and jurist and former Confederate soldier and official. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented Mississippi in both houses of Congress, served as United States Secretary of the Interior under President Grover Cleveland, and was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Born and educated in Georgia, Lamar moved to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1849 to establish a legal practice, was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1856, and helped draft Mississippis Ordinance of Secession in January 1861 before raising the 19th Mississippi Infantry Regiment and working on the staff of General James Longstreet; in 1862 Confederate president Jefferson Davis appointed him Special Confederate Commissioner to Russia. Following the Civil War, Lamar taught at the University of Mississippi and was a delegate to several state constitutional conventions before returning to the House of Representatives in 1873, the first Mississippi Democrat elected to the House since the Civil War, then representing Mississippi in the Senate from 1877 to 1885, where he opposed Reconstruction and voting rights for African Americans. In 1885 he accepted appointment as Secretary of the Interior, and in 1888 the Senate confirmed his nomination to the Supreme Court, making him the first Southerner appointed to the Court since the Civil War; he remained on the Court until his death in 1893.