Horace Harmon Lurton earned a law degree from Cumberland University in 1856. Raised in Clarksville, Tennessee, he attended the University of Chicago before joining the Confederate Army, where he rose from private to sergeant major. Captured twice by Union forces, he was paroled by President Lincoln after his mother traveled to Washington, obtained an audience with the president, and requested her ill son's release from a federal prison camp. After graduating from Cumberland, he practiced law in Clarksville and went on to serve as a state court chancellor, a justice and chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court, and a judge and chief judge on the federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1909, President William Howard Taft nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court. He had more prior judicial experience than anyone ever appointed to that court, and during his brief four-year tenure he wrote 84 opinions. He died while serving on the Court.