Milton Joseph Cunningham

Background

Born in DeSoto Parish, Cunningham was the son of John Hamilton Cunningham (1812-1886), a native of South Carolina, and the former Ann Buie (1814-1850), originally from Mississippi. He was the fourth of John Cunningham's twelve children by three wives. John Cunningham was a man of many occupations: a physician, merchant, planter, lawyer, and Christian minister, possibly Baptist. The family moved in the 1840s to Homer in Claiborne Parish, where John practiced medicine, and the children attended school. In his later years, John Cunningham was briefly a newspaperman, the editor of the Robeline Reporter, a weekly paper published in the 1880s in rural Robeline in western Natchitoches Parish.

Ann Buie Cunningham died of asthma when Joe was seven years of age. John then married the former Martha Elvia Shields, who became Joe's stepmother. When he was sixteen, Joe Cunningham left home to teach school from 1858 to 1860 in Cloutierville in south Natchitoches Parish. His family moved to Natchitoches, as he prepared to enter the Confederate Army in the American Civil War. He served in the Second Louisiana Infantry from 1861 to 1865.

Political career

Cunningham privately studied law and in 1868 was admitted to the bar. He was in the days of Reconstruction the chairman of the Natchitoches Parish Democratic Executive Committee. He served for ten months in 1868 as the district attorney of the 17th Judicial District. Thereafter, he was elected chief of police in Natchitoches, in which capacity he worked successfully to restore white supremacy to the community. He was one of fifty-two former Confederates or Confederate sympathizers who were arrested and tried by federal officials during Reconstruction.

Cunningham's political career soared in 1878, when he briefly became a state representative, a delegate to the 1879 state constitutional convention, and then for a single four-year term a state senator. He was elected attorney general in 1884 in the administration of Governor Samuel Douglas McEnery. After a four-year hiatus, he returned as attorney general under Governor Murphy J. Foster, Sr., grandfather of the last 20th century and first 21st century governor, Republican Mike Foster. In 1896, Cunningham prepared the legal brief of Plessy v. Ferguson. In the specific case, Homer Plessy, a New Orleans man, seven-eights white and one-eighth black, was criminally fined for riding in the white-only car on a train from New Orleans to Covington in St. Tammany Parish. The United States Supreme Court upheld by a seven-to-one margin the principle of "separate but equal" in public accommodations, a decision which stood for fifty-eight years until 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education school struck down as unconstitutional segregated public schools.

As attorney general, Cunningham rarely employed outside counsel and handled even complicated cases himself. In the process he saved taxpayers a considerable amount of money. In the 1890s, as attorney general, he worked successfully against the lottery companies. When the state was sued regarding a contract for work on the Red River, Cunningham defended the state against nine leading lawyers from New Orleans. He proved that the contract was illegal and had not been implemented. He hence secured a legal victory which saved the state $250,000. From 1900 to 1904, Governor William Wright Heard named Cunningham the public administrator for Orleans Parish, and he continued to practice law in New Orleans and held valuable farm lands in Natchitoches Parish. He was living on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans in 1904; on Coliseum Street, in the 1910 census.

Family and death

Cunningham's first two wives, Thalia Tharp (1843-1872) and Annie Peyton (1852-1878), died after short marriages. He was left to rear five young children, one of whom, a son, John Hamilton Cunningham, II, drowned at the age of nine. In 1880, at the age of thirty-eight, Cunningham married Cecile Hertzong (1860-1886), who was twenty. She had been reared at what is now Melrose Plantation in south Natchitoches Parish. From the third marriage were born four more children in addition to his previous four living children. When the fourth daughter was only a few months old, Cecile died at the age of twenty-six of either spinal meningitis or yellow fever. At some point, an African American former slave, Mary "Mammy" Pitcher (1847-1913), moved into the household to care for the children. Cunningham did not marry again until 1895, when he wed his fourth and final wife, Emma Mai Blouin (1876-1945), a member of a prominent New Orleans family and his surviving widow.

In the fall of 1916, Cunningham died in New Orleans at the age of seventy-four of atherosclerosis. His services were held at his home, after which the body was placed on a train and sent to Natchitoches for burial beside his first and third wives at American Cemetery. Also buried in the Cunningham plot is "Mammy", whose grave inscription reads: "'Our Mammy', who was the most faithful human being that ever lived.'"