Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 27: L.Q.C. Lamar

LQC Lamar - Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar was his full Southern pompous name - is another of the somewhat better-known villains of American history. He was a true disciple of John Calhoun, the official evil spirit of American history. But he was also an important innovator of the post-Civil War "moderate" Southern segregationist and white racist.

My favorite stodgy-but-reliable source, Britannica Online, gives some information about his background:

Lamar was admitted to the bar in Georgia in 1847 and was a member of the Georgia House of Representatives (1853). He moved to Mississippi in 1855 and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives the following year, serving until December 1860, when he resigned to participate in the Mississippi secession convention. He was the author of the Mississippi ordinance of secession (Jan. 9, 1861) and served in the Confederate army.

After the war Lamar taught law at the University of Mississippi (1866–73). He then served in the U.S. Congress, both in the House (1873–77) and in the Senate (1877–85), where his moderating influence during Reconstruction won him the sobriquet “the Great Pacificator.” President Grover Cleveland appointed Lamar secretary of the interior (1885) and later associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1888). [my emphasis]

Okay, that was a little heavy on the stodgy part. No, Lamar was not a "moderating influence during Reconstruction." He was a hardcore white supremacist and enemy of the Reconstruction democracies in the South that recognized African-Americans as equal citizens. He specialty, though, was putting on a polite face in Congress for Northerners who were tired of supporting the democratic Reconstruction so they could pretend that what was happening in the post-Reconstruction South wasn't so bad.

Dennis Mitchell in A New History of Mississippi (2014) explains how Lamar established his moderate schtick by giving a half-decent tribute to the Abolitionist Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner after Sumner death in 1874:

During his first months back in Congress, Lamar kept quiet, waiting for an opportunity to establish himself as spokesman for reconciliation between the South and North that would persuade the North to abandon its protection of the freedmen in Mississippi. Charles Sumner's death provided the perfect occasion. Before his death, Sumner had called for amnesty and forgiveness for the South, and Lamar used that as a springboard to praise Sumner and make his appeal for reconciliation between northerners and southerners, concluding: "My countrymen know one another and you will love one another:' The timing and tone proved to be perfect, winning the former fire-eater the reputation of peacemaker and conciliator and gaining lavish praise from the press. In the next Congress, Democrats elected him chairman of their caucus, further enhancing his status. As the face of the Mississippi Democratic Party, Lamar practiced the big lie technique as his allies back home brutally wrestled control away from [Mississippi's Republican Gov. Adelbert] Ames and his black majority. Lamar and his fellow Democrats adopted the face of reasonableness and conciliation to the white North while their allies employed violence to eliminate blacks from the political process in Mississippi. Confronted with accounts of murder and white intimidation of voters, they simply lied and denied the evidence. [my emphasis]

Did you catch the part in the Britannica quote about how Lamar was the author of the Mississippi ordinance of secession? A leading traitor to the United States, in other words. What a shock that less than a decade later he wanted to "persuade the North to abandon its protection of the freedmen in Mississippi"! Who could have predicted it?

Adelbert Ames is one of the genuine heroes of American democracy who seriously tried as Governor to defend democratic government in Mississippi. Mississippi suffers to this day from the fact that people like Lamar were on the winning side back then instead of those like Ames and his supporters.