Yesterday I had workmen in my place and had to be out for four hours. I went down to the University of Miami Law Library.
You walk in through the glass doors, through the metal detectors. On your right down a short hall are the federal reporters. If you walk straight back, a bank of elevators take you to the higher floors. On the third floor are the state reporters. That's where I usually went and where I went yesterday.
But as soon as I got out of the elevator I thought better of it. There's a lot of stress and hard work in my memory on the third floor so I got back in the elevator and went back down to the first floor, turned left into the federal reporter wing and went up aimlessly to U.S. Reports, the Supreme Court, one, two, three aisles in.
The books of the national reporter system are identical in shape, size and lettering, the only distinction being the volume number and the term and year. I wasn't looking for anything in particular and chose at random the October Term 1914 for my reading.
The reporters begin the same, in the case of the U.S. Reports with a list of the Supreme Court Justices followed by the table of cases reported and cited in that volume. This volume, October Term 1914, however had several pages devoted to the passing of Supreme Court Justice Horace Harmon Lurton. WHO?! In my life I had never heard of Horace Harmon Lurton. He was on the Supreme Court?!
I'm a student, so I read. There were remarks by the Attorney General and, I believe, by the Chief Justice on Justice Lurton's passing. I first noticed in the tributes the terms "loving" and "lovable" used more than once. It was a point of emphasis. "Loving" and lovable", not words I am accustomed to reading in tributes to a deceased Supreme Court Justice. The brief summary of his life was astounding. Born in Tennessee, went to the "Old University of Chicago" but his studies were interrupted by the secession of the slave states from the United States and the start of the Civil War. Lurton promptly left Chicago and went back home and enlisted with a Tennessee regiment. He was 16 years old.
Then he got captured and sent to a Union prison.
Then he escaped.
Then he reenlisted with a Confederate Kentucky regiment.
Then he got captured again. This time they sent him to a war prison in Ohio.
He wasn't used to the Northern climate, Lurton wasn't, and his health deteriorated. His mother back home in Tennessee got wind of it and did what mothers do for one of their distressed cubs. She contacted every Tennessee official she could and those in the despised Yankee states (pfft pfft) too! Somehow, according to the anecdote young Lurton recounted innumerable times after, repeated by the Chief Justice (who seemed to find Lurton lovable indeed), Mama Lurton found herself with Abraham Lincoln. The details of how that encounter could possibly have come about were not recounted by the Chief Justice in his encomium but as an informal student of the Civil War the undersigned does know that among President Lincoln's most taxing trials (in addition to that of his wife) was the CONSTANT parade of office-seekers and favor-askers. I may be wrong on this but in my memory you could walk into the Executive Mansion then and ask to see the president. In any event the meeting of Mama Lurton and President Lincoln did not strike me as not believable for the time. (The fact that the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court was recounting it probably added to its credibility with me.)
The Chief Justice then did something that Chief Justices do not do, in my knowledge of their writings. He said that he was going to engage in a "fancy," a fictional recreation, of the meeting. Lincoln heard the mother's plea and with that singular "empathy" that he had "with malice toward none, charity for all", said, "Let the mother have her boy", and Lurton was released.
He went on to study law at Cumberland Law School, then entered a fabulous practice. Now having enough money he accepted appointment to the Tennessee bench and made it to the state Supreme Court. He was then appointed to the federal bench, by, as I recall, President Cleveland, and then by his friend President Taft to the Supreme Court in 1910.
Lurton was, at age 65, then the oldest man ever appointed to the top court.
In the summary of Lurton's judicial career given by the Chief Justice (whose name, I apologize, I do not remember), he saw fit to say in a single sentence paragraph of its own,
"He was a Democrat."
Which made me smile. The Reconstruction years were not kind to Democrats, and for decades after the war it was not uncommon for a Republican in the chambers of the national legislature to silence a Southern critic by "waving the bloody flag" of his Union regiment. Justice Lurton had one of those who could have raised a bloody flag as one of his brethren on the Supreme Court.
You know those Gettysburg Reunions? Strange, no? Deeply affecting. Septuagenarian former Rebs reenacting Pickett's Charge and then falling into embraces with their coulda-been murderers at the Stone Wall. "Was it not real?" The first of those reunions was in 1913. Justice Lurton died of a heart attack in Atlantic City in 1914. He had been on the high court bench only four years.
Both the Attorney General and the Chief Justice emphasized the point of those reunions without mentioning them in the life of Justice Lurton. Who would have thought, the Chief Justice said, that no sooner was the surrender signed than those mortal enemies laid down their weapons and took up the tools of good, contributory citizenship? It takes a "great" people to do that and it had only been done once (i.e. by the greatest of peoples that ever were).
I read over the moving passages two or three times to set them in my mind and then my four hours was up and I walked out those glass doors and drove home.
The first thing I did was look up Lurton. The Mama-Lincoln meeting was apocryphal; Lurton was paroled for good behavior. Made a good story though. I then saw a photo of Lurton on his (scant) Wikipedia page.
"Loving", "lovable"...no, those are not facially evident in Justice Lurton. The thick, bushy mustache was so typical of the Civil War generation in later life, like,
Lurton wrote eighty-seven opinions during his more than four years on the court, voting most frequently with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., yet he did not author any major decisions.
The old pragmatist and progressive hero himself. The War deeply affected Holmes for the rest of his life. Once, near the end, he tried to recount his experiences to Mrs. Felix Frankfurter and he broke down sobbing. He wrote to a friend on why he and Fanny never had children, "I never thought this was a world I wanted to bring another into." At his death as his clerks cleared out his chambers they found in his closet three of his uniforms. "These are the uniforms I wore in the Civil War and the stains upon them are my blood."
Twice-captured Sgt. Maj. Horace Harmon Lurton, Confederate States of America, and thrice-wounded Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 20th Massachusetts. There they are, seated right next to each other on the Supreme Court of the United States in 1912. I like being a student.
