Book Review: David Davis: Abraham Lincoln’s Favorite Judge
David Davis: Abraham Lincoln’s Favorite Judge. By Raymond J. McKoski. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2025. Hardcover., pp. 352 $50.00.
Reviewed by Zachery A. Fry
In David Davis: Abraham Lincoln’s Favorite Judge, retired circuit judge and law professor Raymond McKoski examines the career and influence of one of the president’s many Illinois friends. A hinterland judge who often eschewed legal formalities, David Davis managed Lincoln’s political rise behind the scenes and eventually benefitted from it by assuming a seat on the Supreme Court. McKoski makes his case clear on the importance of this friendship to the president’s professional life and, consequently, to the nation: “The political partnership between Judge Davis and Lincoln put Lincoln in the White House.” (236) Far from assuming a dispassionate and nonpartisan role in issues of the day as a member of the judiciary—a sacrosanct principle today—Davis nominated Lincoln on the Republican convention floor in 1860, worked tirelessly as his campaign manager behind the scenes, and used his “political savvy” to guide the president-elect in making key cabinet appointments. (231)
Lincoln and Davis, who came up together on the Illinois circuit as attorney and judge, were both loyal to the Whig legacy of Henry Clay, and they both approached politics with a blend of principle and pragmatism. Davis, like Lincoln, was an avowed antislavery man, but he despaired of how radical abolitionism undermined the broad appeal of the free soil movement. McKoski acknowledges the Lincoln-Davis friendship may not have had the personal strength of the future president’s connection with Joshua Speed or Orville Browning, but their connection showed how “different periods of Lincoln’s life demanded friends with skills fashioned to meet the needs of the time.” (236) Davis proved crucial to Lincoln’s meteoric rise in national politics in the late 1850s, managing the senate campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858 alongside Leonard Swett, William Herndon, and Ward Hill Lamon.
McKoski’s analysis of the Chicago convention in 1860 is one of the best readers will find anywhere in print. He correctly notes that Republicans, in only their second presidential election, comprised a “a confederated, not a consolidated, party.” (62) By exploring the convention from the perspective of Judge Davis, the author shows the relative importance of the state delegations and the competing factions. He also paints a dramatic picture of an “unheralded country judge” working to topple New York political “boss” Thurlow Weed, whose candidate William H. Seward was the presumptive favorite for the nomination. (3) Davis succeeded through mobilizing a “second-choice strategy” after Seward’s candidacy failed to reach the majority threshold—an approach that included sounding out important party agents for cabinet postings should Lincoln secure the White House.
Interestingly, McKoski also finds that Davis’s strict views on constitutional law produced remarkably impartial decisions from the bench after Lincoln appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1862. He had “fixed opinions” and little patience for corruption. (174) In several cases, most notably Ex parte Milligan, Davis expressed reservations about expanding executive power at the expense of judicial authority. Lambdin P. Milligan, a resident of Indiana, had been arrested in October 1864 for subversive activity. Milligan was tried by a military court, found guilty of aiding the Confederacy, and sentenced to death. Milligan’s lawyers appealed the decision, including in their arguments the contention that military tribunals lacked civil authority when the local civil courts remained open and in operation. Despite his loathing for the Copperhead menace, Davis sided with Milligan. “No doctrine,” he insisted, “involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its [i.e., the Constitution’s] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.” (192) McKoski wisely notes that Davis also feared making Milligan a martyr to the Democratic cause, but his larger point about the judge’s impartiality stands.
McKoski’s book is not a conventional biography. He offers a brief sketch of Davis’s life at the outset but then offers sections on specific aspects of his political and judicial career. The author’s source base includes a cache of the judge’s family papers in the Lincoln Presidential Library as well as extensive contemporary newspaper coverage of key events such as the 1860 convention. He employs this material to contextualize Davis within the wider dynamics of the Republican Party and the constitutional debate over war powers, which the judge approached “free from personal, political, and social views.” (2)
If the book has one minor shortcoming, it is that McKoski hints at Davis’s role as “campaign manager” for Lincoln’s 1864 reelection bid but fails to elaborate with any detail. (11) To the extent that the convention or general election required it that year, how did Davis contribute his political acumen to Lincoln’s strategy in such a contentious campaign?
This volume will delight students of Lincoln and the Civil War by shifting the spotlight from the leader in the White House to the man who put him there. Highly recommended.
Zachery A. Fry is the author of A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac (UNC Press, 2020). He teaches military history at the US Army Command and General Staff College. The opinions in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the Army, the Department of War, or the federal government.
