Robert L. Caruthers

Robert L. Caruthers

Robert Looney Caruthers (born July 31, 1800 in Smith County , Tennessee , † October 2, 1882 in Lebanon , Tennessee) was an American politician in the US state of Tennessee.

Life

Caruthers went about a commercial activity between 1817 and 1819. He also attended Woodward Academy near Columbia , Tennessee and was from 1820 to 1821 at Greenville College . He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1823.

He decided to embark on a political career in 1824 by starting to work as a clerk for the Tennessee House of Representatives . He then served as a clerk for the Smith County Law Court and as an editor for the Tennessee Republican . In 1826 he moved to Lebanon. He served as Attorney General of Tennessee from 1827 to 1832 . He was then a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1835.

With his brother, Abraham Caruthers, he founded Cumberland University in Lebanon in 1842 and the Cumberland School of Law , one of the oldest law schools in the United States, in 1847 . During the 1960s, Cumberland University sold Cumberland Law School to Samford University in Birmingham , Alabama .

Caruthers was elected as a Whig in the 27th US Congress . There he was active in the US Congress from March 4, 1841 to March 3, 1843 . In 1852 he was appointed a judge at the Tennessee Supreme Court to fill a vacancy there. He was not officially elected to office until 1854 and held the post until the outbreak of the Civil War . He was also a member of the Peace Conference of 1861 in Washington, DC , which was supposed to prevent the impending war. Afterwards he represented his state in the Provisional Confederate Congress as a delegate . In 1863 he was elected Governor of Tennessee by the Confederate States . When he was about to be sworn in, however, they controlled only a relatively small part of Tennessee, so that strictly speaking he never served as governor. Because of this, Caruthers is not listed as the governor of Tennessee on official records. But the fact that he was elected is a reason for discrepancies in the reference books, since they only list the people who actually held the office.

After the war he was a law professor at Cumberland University and held this post until his death on October 2, 1882. He was buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery in Lebanon.

Web links

• Robert L. Caruthers in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Robert L. Caruthers in the database of Find a Grave (English)
• Robert L. Caruthers at The Political Graveyard

Individual evidence

1. ^ " Lebanon, Tennessee: A Tour of Our City ( Memento June 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive )" (PDF). Lebanon / Wilson County Chamber of Commerce. Retrieved February 5, 2007.