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Horace Harmon Lurton of Tennessee was appointed to the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1893 to succeed Howell E. Jackson. His colleagues on the Court were William Howard Taft and later William R. Day. In 1910 President Taft appointed his old friend and fellow jurist as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, where he served again with Associate Justice Day.
Horace Harmon Lurton was born February 26, 1844, in Newport, Kentucky. A student at the University of Chicago at the outbreak of the Civil War, he went to Tennessee and joined the Confederate army. He graduated from the Cumberland University Law School at Lebanon, Tennessee, in 1867, and entered law practice at Clarksville, Tennessee, where he later served as Chancellor. In 1886 he was elected Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Tennessee and was Chief Justice of Tennessee at the time he resigned to accept appointment as United States Circuit Judge. He wrote a history of the Supreme Court of Tennessee which is published at 176 Tenn. 876. He became a professor of constitutional law at Vanderbilt University in 1898 and was Dean of the Vanderbilt Law School from 1905 to 1909, serving at the same time as Circuit Judge.
In two battles of the Civil War, Sergeant Major Lurton fought against Captain John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky of the Union Army. These two jurists, one a Confederate veteran and the other a Union veteran, later served together on the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, where Mr. Justice Harlan presided in his capacity as Circuit Justice, and still later they were colleagues on the Supreme Court. Twice taken prisoner during the Civil War, Sergeant Major Lurton escaped after his first confinement. He was captured again in 1863 during Morgan's raid on Ohio. In 186S President Lincoln ordered him released on parole in response to a personal appeal by his mother. President Lincoln wrote this order in longhand: "Let the boy go home with his mother."
Judge Lurton died July 12, 1914, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. |
