Muscogee County GaArchives Photo Person.....Lamar, Mirabeau Buonaparte 
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Christine Thacker http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00033.html#0008100 May 21, 2007, 3:31 pm

Source:             Sesquicentennial Supplement IV, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
Name:               Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar
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                       Founder of Enquirer Was Always an Editor

                                By Nolan Walters 
                                Enquirer Staff Writer

  Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, founder of The Columbus Enquirer 150 years ago 
this May, served at various times in his life as soldier of  fortune, 
politician, hero of wars with the Indians and Mexico, second President of the 
Republic of Texas, father of the Texas educational system and United Slates 
ambassador, twice.
  But he was also a newspaper editor.
  Editors don't change. When all else has twisted and changed into 
unrecognizable forms, Editors will remain essentially the same.
  Take for example his comments on sloppy journalism, penned in 1817:
  "Scribblers there are who ne'er to truth aspire;
      Insensible to guilt's compunctious shame, They prostitute their venal 
minds to nire,   And stab, assassin-like at worth and fame. Oh, let them to 
their destined hell depart.
 As deeply damned as they're corrupt in heart!" Many a rookie reporter has been 
sent off to the same locale with a similar parting, although perhaps not as 
nicely turned.

                          * * * *

  Throughout his life, Mirabeau Lamar followed the frontiers of America, 
battling anything or any group of people that stood in his way - Indians or 
Mexicans.
  Born Aug. 8, 1798 in Jefferson County, near Indian Territory, he followed its 
borders first to Columbus in the 1820s, then took a stage to Texas when that 
area was being wrested from Mexico in the 1830s. He ended his official life as 
a United States ambassador in a Central American outpost.
  As proud in his day for his ability with a horse, fencing sword, and shotgun 
as for his prowess with a pen, history has decided to remember him more for his 
service in refining the rough backwoods than for his part in obtaining it.
  Principally, Texas remembers Lamar for founding its educational system, 
dedicating Lamar Technicological University to his name. 
   Lamar may have been a rip-roaring swashbuckler by 1970's standards, but he 
had the ironic misfortune of living in a time and region with such notables as 
Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and, Sam Houston, none of them small competition for 
the limelight.
  His most celebrated utterance is on the subject of  education and etched on 
buildings and stationary throughout the state: "A cultivated mind is the 
guardian genius of democracy and while guided and controlled by virtue is the 
noblest attribute of man."

                         * * * *
  For a man who was to found a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper and a 
university system, Lamar began his life with relatively few rounds of school-
learned ammunition.
  "It has not been my good fortune to wander far in the labyrinth of letters." 
he later said. Misspellings in surviving manuscripts attest to a slow start in 
letters, if not an  occupational hazard for journalists.  
  In 1819, 21-year-old Lamar left his East Georgia homeland and traveled to 
Cahawba, west of the Georgia boundry in Alabama. The mercantile business did 
not agree with him and, he joined the Cahawba Press, his first recorded 
adventure with  public print.
  Soon a hot political battle in his native state and the election to the 
governorship by two votes of George B. Troup drew the young reporter back to 
Georgia. A friend managed to establish Lamar as a secretary with the governor.
  Lamar soon became  known as a devotee of states' rights politics, as believed 
first expounded by Thomas Jefferson. That belief in the preservation of the 
individual states' ability to manage their own affairs separate from Washington 
stayed with Lamar his entire life and presages the War Between the States.
A trenchant belief in sectional independence also led Lamar to feuds and nearly 
a Texan - duel with Sam Houston over statehood for the new republic. He wrote:
"I love the bright Lone Star, that gems the banner of the brave; 
  I love the light the guideth men
                 To freedom or the grave
                         * * * 
  Expulsion of the Lower Creek Indians from now Muscogee County was not 
followed long by the arrival of young Lamar, and while the property stakes were 
still being pounded for Columbus, he established his newspaper.
  The bustling town had two sides then, as it, has now. Among the unparalleled 
scenery of rushing free springs; cataracts, and virgin forest, Columbus was 
becoming Georgia's third largest industrial center, complete with duels, fights 
and ruffians. Both sides had their effect on Lamar's literary and political 
life.
  To a fellow newspaper man, he had this advice for wending a path between the 
two extremes and staying alive
  ‘'I have had same experience in editing a paper and can sympathize with you 
in the troubles and vexations . . . the best counsel that I can give you is to 
use the strongest arguments and the blandest words." A position Lamar held in 
Columbus politics which might be envied by modern newspaper people was Chairman 
of the Committee of Toasts.        
  On July 4, 1832, the editor scheduled 13 toasts, each to be followed by a 
cannon shot and three cheers from the crowd - except the toast to women, which 
would be followed by two gunshots. 47 impromptu toasts followed the programmed 
events, and a good time, presumably, was had by all.
  Lamar, historians write, finally left Columbus because his political desires 
were frustrated by a caucus system that didn't want him to be U.S. congressman.
  Nevertheless, he did win one term as a Georgia congressman and resigned an 
attempt at a second term because of the sudden death of his wife.
  For a time, Tabitha's death, plunged Lamar into such despair he resigned his 
position with the Enquirer, sold his stock and went into seclusion.
  Political career failing, wife dead and other family members ill and soon to 
die, a bitter Lamar once wrote "Some persons make a great mistake and think it 
is the editor and not his newspaper that they buy for three dollars a year."
                           * * *
If Lamar's surviving poems are any true indication, women played more than a 
supporting role in his life, especially where the beloved Tabitha is concerned.
  In a collection compiled by the University of North Carolina Press are 
assembled odes and songs to unspecified Fannys, Octavias, Sophias, Sallys, 
Susannahs and Emmlys. 
  He wrote:
"O, do not say that I'm to blame-
                        Tis Natures fault that made me so;
Heaven knows my love's a constant flame.
                        But who I love – I do not know." 
That question was answered by Miss Tabitha Jordan, whom Lamar is said to have 
glimpsed when she was only 14. Three years later he asked for her hand, and  
was promptly refused. She married him Jan. 1, 1826. 
  One story has it that not long after the marriage their carriage ran away and 
Tabitha fell, cutting her beautiful face to the bone.  Philip Graham, a 
biographer, wrote Lamar placed her head on his knee and trimmed the ragged 
wound with his razor and sewed the flesh back together, leaving no visible scar 
after healing.
  "You loved me for my beauty and now it is gone," Tabitha is reputed to have 
told him.
  Not long after her death in 1830 by tuberculosis, Lamar left Georgia to 
return only for short periods.
  Riding from his native state on the coach to Montgomery, he wrote he 
was "miserably dyspeptic and melancholy . . . in the company with three other 
passengers, who, soon falling asleep, snored away at the comfortable rate of 
ten knots an hour, interrupted occasionally by the violent collision of sulls 
which only made them swear a prayer or two and sleep again. . ." 
  It was an inauspicious parting for a native Georgia son soon to establish his 
own nation in the mysterious West

Special Sesquicentennial Supplement IV
 Ledger-Enquirer, Sunday , May 7, 1978. Pg S-2.


Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar (born Aug. 16, 1798, Louisville, Ga., U.S. — died 
Dec. 19, 1859, Richmond, Texas) 
http://www.answers.com/topic/mirabeau-b-lamar  (Google search)

             

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