David Davis (Supreme Court justice)

David Davis (March 9, 1815 – June 26, 1886) was a United States Senator from Illinois and associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. He also served as Abraham Lincoln's campaign manager at the 1860 Republican National Convention. He is a distant cousin of United States President George W. Bush and former president George H. W. Bush.

Early life

He was born to a wealthy family in Cecil County, Maryland, where he attended public school. After graduating from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 1832, he went on to study law at Yale University. Upon his graduation from Yale in 1835, Davis moved to Bloomington, Illinois, to practice law. He also served as a member of the Illinois House of Representatives in 1845 and a delegate to the Illinois constitutional convention in McLean County, 1847. From 1848 to 1862, Davis presided over the local judicial circuit, the same circuit where attorney Abraham Lincoln was practicing.

In 1860, Davis was a delegate to Republican National Convention in Chicago. Davis then assisted Lincoln in Lincoln's 1860 Presidential nomination from the Republican Party.

National stage

In 1862, President Lincoln appointed Davis to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he became famous for writing one of the most profound decisions in the Supreme Court history, Ex Parte Milligan (1866). In that decision, the court set aside the death sentence imposed during the Civil War by a military commission upon a civilian, Lambdin P. Milligan. Milligan had been found guilty of inciting insurrection. The Supreme Court held that since the civil courts were operative, the trial of a civilian by a military tribunal was unconstitutional. The opinion denounced arbitrary military power, effectively becoming one of the bulwarks of held notions of American civil liberty.

After refusing calls to become Chief Justice, Davis, a registered independent, was nominated for President by the Labor Reform Convention in 1872, but withdrew when he failed to receive the Liberal Republican Party nomination. The Party supported Horace Greeley, who received the nomination of the Democratic Party as well. Greeley, however, died after the popular election and before the return of the electoral vote. His electoral votes were divided between four apparent Presidential candidates:

• Thomas Andrews Hendricks
• Benjamin Gratz Brown
• Charles Jones Jenkins
• David Davis (1).

The 1872 election was won by incumbent President Ulysses Simpson Grant of the Republican Party.

Disputed election of 1876

In 1877, Davis narrowly avoided the opportunity to be the only person to ever single-handedly elect the President of the United States. In the disputed Presidential election of 1876 between the Republican Rutherford Hayes and the Democrat Samuel Tilden, Congress created a special Electoral Commission to decide to whom to award a total of 20 electoral votes which were disputed from the states of Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oregon. The Commission was to be composed of 15 members: five drawn from the U.S. House of Representatives, five from the U.S. Senate, and five from the U.S. Supreme Court. The majority party in each legislative chamber would get three seats on the Commission, and the minority party would get two. Both parties agreed to this arrangement because it was understood that the Commission would have seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and Davis, who was arguably the most trusted independent in the nation.

According to one historian, "[n]o one, perhaps not even Davis himself, knew which presidential candidate he preferred." Just as the Electoral Commission Bill was passing Congress, the Legislature of Illinois elected Davis to the Senate. Democrats in the Illinois Legislature believed that they had purchased Davis' support by voting for him. However, they had made a miscalculation; instead of staying on the Supreme Court so that he could serve on the Commission, he promptly resigned as a Justice in order to take his Senate seat. Because of this, Davis was unable to assume the spot, always intended for him, as one of the Supreme Court's members of the Commission. His replacement on the Commission was Joseph Philo Bradley, a Republican, thus the Commission ended up with an 8-7 Republican majority. Each of the 20 disputed electoral votes was eventually awarded to Hayes, the Republican, by that same 8-7 majority; Hayes won the election, 185 electoral votes to 184. Had Davis been on the Commission, his would have been the deciding vote, and Tilden would have been elected president if Davis and the commission had awarded him even a single electoral vote.

Davis served a single term as U.S. Senator from Illinois, and was elected President pro tempore of the Senate in October 1881, because Vice President Chester A. Arthur had succeeded to the Presidency. The Senate was evenly divided between the parties, and preferred an independent. He was succeeded by Republican George F. Edmunds.

Upon his death in 1886, he was interred at Evergreen Cemetery in Bloomington, Illinois.

His home in that city, the David Davis Mansion, is a state historic site. At his death, he was the largest landowner in Illinois, and his estate was worth between four and five million dollars.

Family

Davis was a cousin of U.S. Representative Henry Winter Davis, and his grandfather John Mercer was an ancestor of Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush through George Herbert Walker, the son of Davis's first cousin David Davis Walker, a successful St. Louis businessman. As David Davis Walker's first cousin, he is first cousin three times removed to George H.W. Bush's generation of the Bush family and first cousin four times removed to George W. Bush's generation of the Bush family.

References

External links

• David Davis at Find A Grave