Lamar Hall

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II (1825-1893), born in Putnam County, Georgia, moved to Mississippi in 1849 and joined the University of Mississippi faculty as adjunct professor of mathematics from 1850 to 1852 and again in 1861 as chair of ethics and metaphysics. During this period, he established himself as a lawyer, planter, and slaveowner, owning thirty-one slaves by 1860. His political career began with election to the Georgia state legislature in 1853 and then to the U.S. House of Representatives from Mississippi in 1856. After resigning from Congress in 1860, he served as a delegate from Lafayette County to Mississippi's Secession Convention and was chiefly responsible for writing the state's Ordinance of Secession. He helped raise the Nineteenth Mississippi Infantry Regiment, and another state regiment, the Fourteenth, was named the Lamar Rifles in his honor. Following the Civil War, he returned to the University of Mississippi faculty as professor of law and governmental science from 1867 to 1870. After Congress restored his political rights in 1873, he represented Mississippi in the House until 1877 and in the Senate from 1877 to 1885. His 1874 eulogy for abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner made him a national figure in postwar sectional politics, as anxious Northerners fearful of renewed sectional conflict seized upon his assurances of Southern fidelity. His national prominence obscured the active role he played in dismantling Reconstruction in Mississippi to the detriment of the state's African American citizens. In 1885, President Grover Cleveland named him Secretary of the Interior, where he was instrumental in the preservation of national park lands, especially Yellowstone National Park. In 1888, he was nominated to the United States Supreme Court, where he served until his death in 1893. He remains the only Mississippian to have served on the Supreme Court and one of two Americans to have served on that Court as well as in a cabinet post, the House, and the Senate.

University, Mississippi · United States