(1815–86). U.S. lawyer and politician David Davis was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1862 to 1877. He served during the American Civil War and postwar eras and was a close associate of Abraham Lincoln.
Davis was born on March 9, 1815, in Cecil county, Md. He graduated from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, in 1832 and earned a law degree from Yale in 1835. He was admitted to the Illinois bar the same year and in 1836 established a practice in Bloomington. Davis was elected to the Illinois legislature in 1844 on the Whig ticket. In 1847 he attended the state constitutional convention and the following year became a circuit judge.
Davis subsequently worked for Lincoln’s nomination and election at the Republican convention of 1860 and in the presidential campaign that followed. In early 1861 he accompanied the president-elect to Washington, D.C., and served as an adviser until Lincoln appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1862.
In 1872, while still a Supreme Court justice, Davis accepted the presidential nomination of the Labor Reform Convention as a stepping-stone to securing the nomination of the Liberal Republican Party. When the party instead nominated Horace Greeley, Davis withdrew as the Labor candidate. He then drifted closer to the Democrats, who expected him to cast the decisive vote for Samuel J. Tilden on the Electoral Commission of 1877. But Davis disqualified himself from the commission when he resigned from the Supreme Court in 1877 to accept election by the Illinois legislature to the U.S. Senate; he retired after one term. Davis died on June 26, 1886, in Bloomington, Ill.