David Davis senator: Encyclopedia - David Davis senator

David Davis (senator)

David Davis III (March 9, 1815 - June 26, 1886) was a United States Senator from Illinois and associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Davis, a cousin of Henry Winter Davis, was born to a wealthy family in Cecil County, Maryland, where he attended the public schools. After graduating from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 1832 he went on to study law at Yale University, and upon his graduation from Yale in 1835, moved to Bloomington, Illinois, to practice law. From 1848-1862, Davis presided over the local judicial circuit, the same circuit where attorney Abraham Lincoln was practicing. Davis assisted Lincoln in Lincoln's presidential campaign in 1860.

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 of the Democratic Party. 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 (42).
• Benjamin Gratz Brown (18).
• Charles J. Jenkins (2).
• David Davis (1).

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

David Davis senator - 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 Comission, and the minority party would get two. Both parties agreed to this arrangement because it was understood that the Commssion would have seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and Davis, who was arguably the most trusted independent in the nation.

However, before the Electoral Commission could take up its business, the Illinois legislature elected Davis to the U.S. Senate. 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. All remaining members of the Court were Republicans, and 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 had Davis and the commission 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. He was succeeded by Republican Shelby Moore Cullom.

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

Categories: 1815 births | 1886 deaths | American lawyers | U.S. Supreme Court justices | United States presidential candidates | United States Senators from Illinois

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