Justice Horace Harmon Lurton
From Pieces of the Past, Volume 2, page 63-64 by Jim Reis
and reprinted here with his permission.
Horace Harmon Lurton was born in Newport on February 26, 1844, the son of
Sarah Ann Harmon and Lycurgus L Lurton, a doctor. Dr. Lurton became an
Episcopal minister after he moved his family to Clarksville, Tenn. in the 1850s.
Horace Lurton attended school in Clarksville until 1859 when he left home at age 16 to enroll in Douglas University in Chicago. Lurton was there when the Civil War broke out. Only 17, he joined the 35th Tennessee Confederate regiment at Bowling Green. He quickly rose to sergeant major but was forced to leave the Army in 1862 because of ill health. After a few days of recuperation, Lurton joined the Confederate 2nd Kentucky Infantry and fought in the battle of Fort Donnelson on the Cumberland River in February 1863. When the Confederate fort surrendered to General Ulysses S Grant, Lurton was captured and imprisoned at Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio.
He escaped and re-enlisted in General John Hunt Morgan's 3rd Kentucky Calvary. He was captured again in July 1863 during Morgan's raid into Ohio. He was sent to the infamous prisoner of war camp on Johnson Island on Lake Erie, north of Sandusky, Ohio. Lurton became ill with what officials thought was tuberculosis. When his mother learned of his illness, she went to Washington to plead for her son's release. On February 23, 1865, she was granted a few minutes with President Abraham Lincoln to ask for her son's release. Lincoln at first refused, but then relented and wrote a simple message, "Let the boy go home with his mother."
Lurton was allowed to return to Tennessee with his mother. The Civil War ended a few months later and Lurton, after regaining his health, enrolled at the Cumberland University Law school at Lebanon, Tenn. He graduated in June 1867. That year he married Mary Frances Owen, the daughter of a Lebanon, Tenn. doctor. Lurton returned to Clarksville to practice law and in 1875 was appointed a judge in Tennessee's Sixth Chancery Division. He was 31 and the youngest state judge.
In 1886 Lurton was appointed to the Tennessee Supreme Court and in 1893 President Grover Cleveland appointed him to the Sixth U.S. Circuit of Appeals, based in Cincinnati. There he became friends with William Howard Taft. When Taft became president, he named Lurton an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1910.
Lurton became ill in December 1913 and to regain his health, he spent the winter in Florida; the next summer he went to Atlantic City, N.J. where he died on July 12, 1914. He was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Clarksville.
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