Henry Winter Davis
Henry Winter Davis (August 16, 1817 – December 30, 1865) was a United States Representative from the 4th and 3rd congressional districts of Maryland, well known as one of the Radical Republicans during the Civil War. He was the driving force behind the abolition of slavery in Maryland in 1864,[1] and it was largely because of him that Maryland did not secede.[2]
Henry Winter Davis
August 16, 1817
Annapolis, Maryland, U.S.
December 30, 1865 (aged 48)
Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
Whig (before 1855)
Know Nothing (1855–61)
Republican (1861–65)
Unconditional Union (1863–65)
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Early life and career[edit]
Henry Winter Davis was born in Annapolis, Maryland on August 16, 1817. His father, the Reverend Henry Lyon Davis (1775–1836), was a prominent Maryland Episcopal clergyman, and was for some years president of St John's College at Annapolis.[3] The son graduated at Kenyon College at Gambier, Ohio in 1837, and from the law department of the University of Virginia in 1841, and began the practice of law in Alexandria, Virginia, but in 1850 removed to Baltimore, Maryland, where he won a high position at the bar.[4]
He wrote an elaborate political work entitled The War of Ormuzd and Ahriman in the Nineteenth Century (1853), in which he described the American Republic and the Russian Empire as the ultimate opponents in the struggles of humanity; it also dismissed the Southern contention that slavery was a divine institution.[5]