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Book Review
| Paul DeForest Hicks, Joseph Henry Lumpkin: Georgia's First Chief Justice, Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 183. $39.95 (ISBN 0-8203-2365-9).
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| The decades between 1800 and the Civil War have often been described as the "Golden Age of American Law." In this era the United States developed its own legal system, with doctrines attuned to the needs of a new nation. Appellate judges, including Marshall, Kent, Story, and Shaw, were central figures. The role of the South in this process, however, is ambiguous. After all, the region's pride and joy, a legal structure built around black slavery, collapsed during the unpleasantness of the 1860s. Important work has explored southern courts, but the biographical field remains undeveloped. This is the context of Hicks's brief (152 pages of text) and useful biography of Joseph Henry Lumpkin, a member of the Georgia Supreme Court from 1845 to 1867. |
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Most of the biography describes Lumpkin's life before he ascended to the court. It clearly establishes Lumpkin's privileged background and acceptance of white southern values. Joseph Henry's grandfather, an officer in the Revolution, moved to the upcountry Georgia frontier from Virginia in 1784, settling on what was likely a land grant of more than 1,200 acres. His father, John Lumpkin, was a farmer and slaveholder who served as a judge and member of the state assembly. Joseph Henry, born in 1799, displayed substantial intellectual gifts at an early age. An excellent student and speaker, he received a classical education at a local academy. He enrolled at the University of Georgia and Princeton, receiving a degree from the latter in 1819. After college, he studied law with a Georgia attorney, Thomas W. Cobb, and received a law license in 1820. |
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For the next twenty-five years Lumpkin was an attorney in Lexington, Georgia, occasionally worked in politics, and supported a number of reform efforts. Voters elected him to the state assembly in 1824, yet he never developed a passion for the legislature. Instead, he concentrated on practicing law. Lumpkin mastered a wide variety of skills, from drafting documents to trying all manner of cases on the circuit. He did especially well in public advocacy, meeting oratorical challenges in courtroom combat. In the law office, he provided counsel in matters involving slave property and probate. He represented the Georgia Rail Road and Banking Company when it first sold stock in 1836. While a young lawyer, Lumpkin converted to evangelical Christianity. The resulting optimism contributed to his active encouragement of temperance, education, and economic development, including manufacturing and the construction of railroads. |
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Hicks's account of these years suggests the complex, evolving, and contradictory relationship between Lumpkin's religious faith, interest in reform, and slavery. Lumpkin was an honest advocate of temperance, but he opposed strong government action to force prohibition, perhaps because he feared the precedent it might set for slavery. He gave a speech in Boston in 1833 that seemed to endorse emancipation. Yet he approved of slavery, he was a slaveholder, and he belonged to Georgia's State Rights political faction. In the 1840s, Lumpkin endorsed the American Colonization Society as a way of exporting free blacks. Within a few years, however, he considered colonization a failure: Liberia was a land of a "few thousand thiftless, lazy semi-savages, dying of famine, because they will not work" (60). As he aged, the advantages of the slave system came to inform virtually every aspect of Lumpkin's worldview. The North had no right to even discuss slavery in a political context. On the other hand, Lumpkin thought the South should be congratulated for its "mild and humane" treatment of the black "barbarians" it was transforming into "civilized Christians" (62). |
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In 1845 the Georgia legislature created a supreme court and selected Lumpkin as one of its three members. Hicks describes the severe constraints under which the early court operated: a burdensome requirement of traveling over the state, an excessively broad power of review, and a mandate that each case be decided in the same term it was heard, usually only a matter of weeks. Lumpkin hoped to give the new court prestige, expressly modeling it after appellate tribunals in New York, Massachusetts, and South Carolina. Hicks maintains that Lumpkin the judge should be viewed as an instrumentalist and a pragmatist who adopted "pro-business principles" (115). Lumpkin's opinions promoted adjustment of law to advance trade and encourage economic development, capital, and corporations. In contrast, Lumpkin proved less interested in new freedoms when it came to white women and blacks. He accepted the demise of the common law merger of man and wife for purposes of property rights hesitantly; he disdained divorce. As for slavery, he assumed it derived from no less a source than God and that the Bible expressly indicated the peculiar institution would last until the end of time. Lumpkin's "primary consideration" in an important class of slavery disputes, according to Hicks, was "the broader strategic objective of finding the best way to preserve the institution of slavery" (134). By 1860 Lumpkin concluded human bondage could be protected best by secession and an independent southern nation. He died on June 4, 1867, still a member of the Georgia Supreme Court. |
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Hicks's biography makes it clear how antebellum southern state judges can offer a different perspective on the "Golden Age of American Law." To be sure, Lumpkin worshipped at the altar of corporate capital, railroads, free trade, manufacturing, exploitation of natural resources, and market competition. These faiths link him to the more celebrated northern brethren. On the other hand, his overall view of legal order was a nightmarish state in which black people, white women, and poor whites—the overwhelming majority of Georgians—were permanently submerged under their betters. An impecunious white man could obtain approval and significance only by embracing industrial commerce and slaveholding. Temperance even foreclosed the opportunities offered by liquor. That this was supposedly justified by the teachings of Jesus Christ, thereby making any challenge atheistic heresy, makes Lumpkin's legal perspective even more disturbing. Hicks states that he wrote "as a biographer rather than as a legal historian," specifically considering Lumpkin's "slavery opinions in the context of his religious, political, and cultural views as they evolved over time" (151). This was the right approach. It would have been a mistake to engage merely in an "internal analysis" of Lumpkin's opinions, particularly given that the judge was outspoken, thoughtful, and informed on the political issues of his day. To consider Lumpkin apart from his bigotry, his elitism, his constricted view of economic and political progress, and his perverse Christianity would be to miss the essence of the man and the meaning of his judicial labors. Hicks shows that good biography can expose the deeper motivations that are often hidden in judicial opinions. |
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| James L. Hunt
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| Mercer University |
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