Born near Eatonton, Georgia in 1825, Lucuis Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar graduated from Emory College in Georgia in 1845. Admitted to the bar in 1847, he moved to Oxford, Mississippi two years later to practice law and served one year as the professor of mathematics at the University of Mississippi. Lamar returned to Georgia in 1852 and became a member of the Georgia State House of Representatives a year later. In 1855, he returned to Mississippi where he served as a U.S. Representative from that state from 1857 to 1860. Lamar retired from Congress to become a member of the Mississippi Secession Convention, and he drafted the state�s Ordinance of Secession. During the Civil War, he served as a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army until 1862 when Jefferson Davis appointed him as Confederate minister to Russia and special envoy to England and France. After the war, Lamar returned to Mississippi to practice law and served as the professor of metaphysics, social science, and law at the University of Mississippi. He also served as a member of Mississippi constitutional conventions in 1865, 1868, 1875, 1877, and 1881. In 1873, Lamar became the first Democrat from Mississippi to sit in the U.S. House of Representatives since the Civil War. In 1877, he became the first former high-ranking Confederate to sit in the U.S. Senate.