Lucius Q.C. Lamar

The standard modern life, in LSU Press's Southern Biography Series. Murphy's title is his thesis: Lamar was less the mystic statesman of reconciliation legend than a supremely practical politician who read which way history was moving and moved with it — from drafting Mississippi's ordinance of secession in 1861 to eulogizing Charles Sumner in 1874. Murphy is strongest on the congressional and Senate years, where Lamar did his real work; the five-year Court coda gets briefer treatment, fairly enough. Skeptical without being hostile — the corrective the Lamar legend needed, and the biography to read first.

The big one — nearly six hundred pages from the University of North Carolina Press, written when men who had known Lamar were barely a generation gone. Cate had deep access to the papers and it shows: the Confederate mission to Russia (which the Confederate Senate scuttled before Lamar ever reached St. Petersburg), the postwar rebuilding, the Interior years all get room to breathe. It is also a product of 1935, sympathetic to the white South's version of Reconstruction in ways a modern reader must discount. Read it as the fullest narrative of the life, checked against Murphy's harder judgments.

The monumental contemporary life-and-letters, by Lamar's son-in-law — nearly nine hundred pages of biography and speeches published three years after his death. Partisan and adoring, but the indispensable documentary source. Publishing House of the M.E. Church, South.

The reason most readers have heard of Lamar at all. Kennedy's Pulitzer-winning gallery gives him a full chapter, built on the April 1874 moment when the man who had drafted Mississippi's secession ordinance stood in the House and eulogized Charles Sumner — abolitionism's fiercest voice — closing with the plea 'My countrymen! know one another, and you will love one another.' It is hagiography, and its cost is what it leaves out: the reconciliation Lamar embodied was reconciliation among white men, purchased with Reconstruction's abandonment. Read it for the legend, then read the legend critically. Harper & Brothers.

The Holmes Devise volume for the Court Lamar joined in 1888 — the new standing era anchor as this shelf crosses into the Fuller years. Lamar is a minor figure here — five years, failing health, a modest opinion count — but the volume supplies what no biography does: the doctrinal world of his service, including In re Neagle (1890), where Lamar and Chief Justice Fuller dissented alone against implied executive power to post an armed bodyguard beside Justice Field (§38) after the Terry affair. Macmillan.

The only substantial Lamar scholarship since Murphy's 1973 biography — and a sharper-eyed one: the 1888 confirmation of a Confederate drafter of Mississippi's secession ordinance read as a milestone in the North's retreat from Reconstruction, not merely the reconciliation JFK celebrated.

The standard article-length account of the nomination fight itself — the first ex-Confederate named to the Court, confirmed 32–28 after a battle that previewed the modern ideological confirmation war.

The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.

The one-volume reference on the Court: more than a thousand signed entries on cases, doctrines, institutions and the justices, current to 2005. Cases and people share one alphabet, so a citation can be followed without changing volumes, and the biographical entries are short, written by specialists, and better than a longer sketch at carrying the historiography — what the argument about a justice currently is. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.