Roscoe Pound, a former dean of the Harvard Law School, described the period from the Revolution to the Civil War as the “golden age of American law,” when the bar was led by illustrious lawyers like Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate and the judiciary claimed such eminent judges as John Marshall and Joseph Story on the United States Supreme Court as well as James Kent of New York and Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts. More recently, however, Peter Karsten has noted the tendency “of those who have written of this Golden Age of American Law . . . to focus on...

On June 7, 1867, an obituary in the Savannah Daily News and Herald reported the death of Joseph Henry Lumpkin three days earlier and commented that, among his other qualities, “He had a most happy faculty of seizing the right moment to make an impression.” It seems that Lumpkin was born with that faculty, arriving just in time to qualify as a child of the eighteenth century. Moreover, his birth, on December 23, 1799, in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, occurred during a period of national mourning for George Washington, whose death at Mt. Vernon on December 14 symbolized the end of...

In 1816, when Joseph Henry Lumpkin entered the University of Georgia (then commonly known as Franklin College), it was still a young and struggling academic institution. Although it had been chartered by the legislature as a state university in 1785 (the first in the country), it did not open for classes until 1801. The legislature had dedicated a tract of 40,000 acres for the benefit of the university, but only 36 acres had been cleared for the original campus, on which a few wooden buildings had been erected. With the completion in 1803 of a three-story brick building, called Old...

Soon after his return to Lexington from Princeton in the fall of 1819, Lumpkin set out to become a lawyer. He might have chosen to study in the law department established at the College of William and Mary in 1779 or at the nation’s first law school, founded at Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1774 by Tapping Reeve. The Litchfield Law School attracted many students from the South, including John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. If Lumpkin had been a northerner rather than a southerner, he might have chosen to attend the fledgling Harvard Law School, which had opened in 1817. Instead,...

By 1825, when he finished his second and last term in the legislature, Joseph Henry Lumpkin already had six years of legal experience and enjoyed a reputation as a hard-working and skillful lawyer. He was beginning to capitalize on the valuable connections and visibility gained through his political exposure, and his law practice was expanding well beyond Lexington and Oglethorpe County. His clients came from all the counties of the Northern Circuit and parts of the Western and Ocmulgee Circuits as well. As W. T. Brantly recalled, “There was not an important case tried in any part of his circuit...

Even though Joseph Henry Lumpkin’s father was not a particularly religious man, his devout mother provided enough Christian influence within the family that two of his older brothers became Baptist ministers. The elder of these, Jack, was born in 1785 and ordained in 1812 by Jesse Mercer, one of the most influential of the early Baptist ministers in Georgia and the founder of a college bearing his name. Jack was pastor of a church at Antioch, Georgia, for twenty-five years and, according to one commentator, “no pastor was more beloved. His affectionate manner and feeling preaching endeared him very much...

Lumpkin named his first son, Joseph Troup Lumpkin, in honor of Governor Troup, who had been his political mentor during his legislative years. When his third son (sixth child) was born in 1829, he was named William Wilberforce Lumpkin, after one of the major figures in the English evangelical reform movement. William Wilberforce (1759–1833), an Anglican cleric, was the architect of legislation in the British Parliament that outlawed the slave trade in 1807. He was also the head of a group of evangelical philanthropists and reformers called “The Clapham Sect,” which organized and sponsored numerous benevolent societies to attack...

Whether he was winning academic honors in his youth, achieving success as a lawyer, or serving with distinction on the supreme court, at each stage of his life Lumpkin managed to combine a keen intellect with abundant energy. Armed with those talents, he sought and achieved a prominent position in what Jefferson’s generation called the “aristocracy of talent.” As an evangelical Presbyterian, he believed in the perfectibility of everyone, even blacks. However, as both a southerner and a Whig, he believed that the future prosperity of the region would be achieved more through a system of meritocracy than through the...

Throughout his married life, Lumpkin was frequently away from home and family, while living in Milledgeville as a young legislator, riding the superior court circuit with his fellow lawyers, making speeches as far away as Boston and Philadelphia on behalf of temperance or other benevolent causes, and presiding over supreme court sessions in cities around the state. During these absences, he always missed the comfort of sleeping in his own bed and dining at his own table, but most of all he desired the company and affection of his wife and children. From the few letters between Lumpkin and his...

If there was any doubt that Georgia’s supreme court faced a daunting challenge from its inception, Lumpkinset the record straight in 1849. As part of a memorial to James M. Kelly, the first supreme court reporter, he wrote,

It is well known that when the court bill was passed in 1845, a large majority of the people were decidedly hostile to it. To secure its enactment, by accommodating its provisions to the wishes of all, it contained inherent defects, well calculated to insure its miscarriage. To obtain the service of suitable men, under the circumstances, to fill the offices, to...

By 1850 Lumpkin’s reputation as an influential appellate judge and advocate of legal and economic reforms had begun to be recognized in the North as well as throughout the southern states. This was due, at least in part, to the publication of his report to the Georgia legislature on law reform and his speech to the South-Carolina Institute in some influential national journals. One indication of this increased recognition was his receipt of an honorary doctorate of laws from his alma mater, Princeton, in June of 1851. He was also one of a select number of judges and lawyers from...

When the Georgia Supreme Court met for the first time at Talbotton in January of 1846, it was fifty-eight years after Georgia was admitted to the Union and just a month since Texas had become the twenty-eighth state. Development of jurisprudence in Georgia had lagged behind the twelve other original states and many of the newer ones, but Lumpkin was determined to lead the new court rapidly out of its judicial infancy into the front rank of state appellate courts. At the outset, his principal models for the Georgia court were in New York, where he found that “the Supreme...

Anticipating his speech to the South-Carolina Institute the following year, Lumpkin wrote with conviction in Young and Calhoun v. Harrison and Harrison (1849): “Civilization must advance; the improvements of society, diffusing plenty and prosperity, knowledge and refinement and morality all around, must not, cannot be restrained; public opinion has willed it, decreed it, and there is no higher power to which to appeal—Vox Populi, vox Dei.” Expanding that concept globally in Haywood v. the Mayor (1853), he predicted: “Free Trade is destined to become the permanent and paramount policy of the world. And I rejoice it is so. It...

Although Joseph Henry Lumpkin was not selected by Roscoe Pound as one of the ten greatest judges of the antebellum era, his slavery opinions have probably received more attention from legal scholars and historians in the past thirty years than any other southern jurist, with the possible exception of Thomas Ruffin. He did not attract such academic interest because of a lack of other candidates, as there were nearly two hundred judges on the southern state appellate courts during the antebellum period, according to one scholar’s count. Included in that number were such distinguished judges as Spencer Roane of Virginia...

Despite occasional periods of poor health, Lumpkin’s energy reached a peak during 1859 and 1860, just as he turned sixty. The supreme court heard appeals in 733 cases in those two years, and he authored 271 of the opinions, almost as many as he had written in his first six years on the court. He also had to assume a greater workload when three judges left the court in a period of fifteen months. The first to go was Judge McDonald, who resigned in May of 1859 because of failing health. His successor, Linton Stephens, who was only age thirty-five...