Centennial Crisis- the Disputed Election of 1876 by William H Rehnquist

Author:William H Rehnquist
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307425218
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

moving to St. Louis. But his law practice in the circuit courts began growing, and in 1844 he was elected as a Whig to the state legislature.

At about the same time, Davis and his partner, Wells Colton, represented an insolvent Bloomington merchant named James Allin. Colton went to Philadelphia with an offer to pay off all of Allin’s creditors at the rate of 25 cents on the dollar, $1,000 in cash, and the balance by conveyance of 1,900 acres of vacant land near Bloomington. The creditors didn’t want the land, but accepted the compromise on the condition that Davis and Colton take the land and execute a two-year promissory note for $1,700 to them. The partners easily repaid the note within two years, acquiring the land for less than $1 per acre. This transaction was the foundation of Davis’ wealth, made by getting land cheaply in a growing state. Davis acquired other land by purchasing tax titles where owners had failed to pay their property tax.

He was a delegate to the state constitutional convention in 1847. That convention revised the geographical configuration of the state’s judiciary. When this revision took place, Davis ran as a candidate for judge in the newly configured Eighth District and won handily. He would remain in that position until Lincoln appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1862. He and Lincoln had become great friends.

With the completion of his circuit the judge had traversed an area, he informed Sarah’s [his wife’s] father, almost as large as the whole State of Connecticut. Travel had been rigorous, living usually miserable, but despite his complaints, he thoroughly enjoyed it. Most of his joy came from his relations with his companions, particularly Lincoln, the only lawyer except the state’s attorney who traveled the entire circuit with him. Their close friendship soon became well known throughout the circuit.12

Davis warmly supported Lincoln in his losing senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. Then both he and Lincoln began looking to the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. The Republican convention convened in the Wigwam in Chicago in May 1860. Davis went to the city several days ahead of time and discovered that all of the candidates except Lincoln—William H. Seward of New York, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Edward Bates of Missouri, and Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania—had established headquarters. He rented two rooms in the Tremont Hotel at his own expense and became Lincoln’s de facto manager.

Seward, by virtue of his seniority, was the preconvention favorite. Twenty years earlier he had served two terms as Governor of New York, the most populous state in the union. He had gone on to represent that state in the Senate from 1848 until the present. But many of the party faithful thought he was too close to the abolitionist wing of the party to be elected. The Indiana and Pennsylvania delegations were firmly opposed to him. If he became the candidate, they said, the party could not carry their own state elections, which were held in October rather than November.

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