Lurton, Horace Harmon

Lurton, Horace Harmon (b. Newport, Ky., 26 Feb. 1844; d. Atlantic City, N.J., 12 July 1914; interred Greenwood Cemetery, Clarksville, Tenn.), associate justice, 1910–1914. Born in northern Kentucky, the son of a pious doctor who became an Episcopalian minister, Horace Harmon Lurton was taken by his parents while still a child to Clarksville, Tennessee, the town he ever after regarded as home. His college education at Douglas University in Chicago interrupted by the Civil War, the teenage Lurton proved himself an ardent Confederate soldier, reenlisting after a discharge for physical disability and after escape from a northern prisoner‐of‐war camp. Serving under General John Hunt Morgan during the raid into Ohio, Lurton was again captured, this time allegedly gaining parole by President Abraham Lincoln in response to his mother's appeal. After the war the young veteran entered law school at Cumberland University, from which he graduated in 1867. Married the same year to Mary Frances Owen, Lurton was admitted to the Tennessee bar and settled in Clarksville, where he practiced law until 1886 except for 1875–1878, when he served as one of the state's chancellors. Elected to the Tennessee supreme court on the Democratic ticket in 1886, the forty‐two‐year‐old Lurton began a judicial career that lasted the rest of his life.

In January 1893 he became chief justice of Tennessee, only to resign a few months later when President Grover Cleveland appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati. On the federal bench Lurton developed a warm friendship with William Howard Taft, then presiding judge. Despite active judicial service, Lurton found time to teach law at Vanderbilt University from 1898 and was dean of the law school from 1905. In December 1909 President Taft named his friend to the Supreme Court. At age sixty‐five Lurton was the oldest man ever appointed; as a southern Democrat and Confederate veteran, he was a surprising choice for a Republican president.

Soon after his appointment, Lurton addressed a meeting of the Maryland and Virginia Bar Associations. His speech on the topic “A Government of Law or a Government of Men?” was an uninspired restatement of conservative judicial values, eschewing liberal construction of the Constitution, judicial lawmaking in the interests of social advancement, and infringements on states' rights, spiced by nativist fears of foreign immigrants (see Judicial Review; Federalism). His opinions as an associate justice during his brief tenure were in accord with this opening statement, although he did prove willing to tolerate modest progressive reform; at his death even his eulogist confessed that he had rendered “no startling or sensational decisions.” Perhaps his most significant contribution was in drafting the Federal Equity Rules of 1912, which remained in force until the abolition of federal equity practice in 1938.

A Cleveland Democrat who reached the Court during the era of Republican ascendancy, Lurton typified the consensus that underlay party differences. A sincere believer in the verities of small‐town America, Lurton was one of a generation of judges who retarded needed reforms, not least by his transparent honesty and integrity.

Bibliography

James F. Watts, Jr. , Horace Harmon Lurton, in The Justices of the United States Supreme Court, 1789–1969, Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel, eds. vol. 3 (1969), pp. 1847–1863.

John V. Orth