Mankind, which in 1845 he had dictated while in a trance to his “scribe,” William Fishbough. He lectured with little success and returned to writing (or “dictating”) books, publishing about thirty in all, including The Great Harmonia (1850–1861), an “encyclopaedia” in six volumes; The Philosophy of Special Providences (1850), which with its evident rehash of old arguments against special providences and miracles would seem to show that Davis’s inspiration was literary; The Magic Staff: an Autobiography (1857), which was supplemented by Arabula: or the Divine Guest, Containing a New Collection of New Gospels (1867), the gospels being those “according to” St Confucius, St John (G. Whittier), St Gabriel (Derzhavin), St Octavius (Frothingham), St Gerrit (Smith), St Emma (Hardinge), St Ralph (W. Emerson), St Selden (J. Finney), St Theodore (Parker), &c.; and A Stellar Key to the Summer Land (1868) and Views of Our Heavenly Home (1878), each with illustrative diagrams. Davis was much influenced by Swedenborg and by the Shakers, who reprinted his panegyric of Ann Lee in an official Sketch of Shakers and Shakerism (1884).
DAVIS, CHARLES HOWARD (1857– ), American landscape painter, was born at East Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 2nd of February 1857. A pupil of the schools of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he was sent to Paris in 1880. Having studied at the Academy Julian under Lefebvre and Boulanger, he went to Barbizon and painted much in the forest of Fontainebleau under the traditions of the “men of thirty.” He became a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1906, and received many awards, including a silver medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1889. He is represented by important works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington; the Pennsylvania Academy, Philadelphia, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
DAVIS, CUSHMAN KELLOGG (1838–1900), American political leader and lawyer, was born in Henderson, New York, on the 16th of June 1838. He was taken by his parents to Wisconsin Territory in the year of his birth, and was educated at Carroll College, Waukesha, Wisconsin, and at the university of Michigan, from which he graduated in 1857. After studying law in the office of Alexander W. Randall, he was admitted to the bar in 1860. During the Civil War, as a first lieutenant of Federal volunteers, he served in the western campaigns of 1862 and 1863, and in 1864 was an aide to General Willis A. Gorman (1814–1876). Resigning his commission (1864) on account of ill-health, he soon settled in St Paul, Minnesota, where he practised law in partnership with General Gorman, and soon became prominent both at the bar and, as a Republican, in politics. He served in the state House of Representatives in 1867, 1868–1873 was United States district attorney for Minnesota. In 1874–1876 he was governor of the state, and from 1887 until his death was a member of the United States Senate. In the Senate he was one of the acknowledged leaders of his party, an able and frequent speaker and a committee worker of great industry. In March 1897 he became chairman of the committee on foreign relations at a time when its work was peculiarly influential in shaping American foreign policy. His extensive knowledge of international law, and his tact and diplomacy, enabled him to render services of the utmost importance in connexion with the Spanish-American War, and he was one of the peace commissioners who negotiated and signed the treaty of Paris by which the war was terminated. He died at St Paul on the 27th of November 1900. Few public men in the United States since the Civil War have combined skill in diplomacy, constructive statesmanship, talent for political organization, oratorical ability and broad culture to such a degree as Senator Davis. In addition to various speeches and public addresses, he published an essay entitled The Law of Shakespeare (1899).
DAVIS, HENRY WILLIAM BANKS (1833– ), English painter, received his art training in the Royal Academy schools, where he was awarded two silver medals. He was elected an associate of the Academy in 1873, and academician in 1877. He made a considerable reputation as an accomplished painter of quiet pastoral subjects and carefully elaborated landscapes with cattle. His pictures, “Returning to the Fold” (1880), and “Approaching Night” (1899), bought for the Chantrey Fund Collection, are now in the National Gallery of British Art (Tate Gallery).
DAVIS, HENRY WINTER (1817–1865), American political leader, was born at Annapolis, Maryland, on the 16th of August 1817. His father, Rev Henry Lyon Davis (1775–1836), was a prominent Protestant Episcopal clergyman of Maryland, and for some years president of St John’s College at Annapolis. The son graduated at Kenyon College, 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. Early becoming imbued with strong anti-slavery views, though by inheritance he was himself a slave holder, he began political life as a Whig, but when the Whig party disintegrated, he became an “American” or “Know-Nothing,” and as such served in the national House of Representatives from 1855 to 1861. By his independent course in Congress he won the respect and esteem of all political groups. In the contest over the speakership at the opening of the Thirty-Sixth Congress (1859) he voted with the Republicans, thereby incurring a vote of censure from the Maryland legislature, which called upon him to resign. In 1860, not being quite ready to ally himself wholly with the Republican party, he declined to be a candidate for the Republican nomination for the vice-presidency, and supported the Bell and Everett ticket. He was himself defeated in this year for re-election to Congress. In the winter of 1860–1861 he was active on behalf of compromise measures. Finally, after President Lincoln’s election, he became a Republican, and as such was re-elected in 1862 to the national House of Representatives, in which he at once became one of the most radical and aggressive members, his views commanding especial attention owing to his being one of the few representatives from a slave state. From December 1863 to March 1865 he was chairman of the committee on foreign affairs; as such, in 1864, he was unwilling to leave the delicate questions concerning the French occupation of Mexico entirely in the hands of the president and his secretary of state, and brought in a report very hostile to France, which was adopted in the House, but fortunately, as it proved later, was not adopted by the Senate. With other radical Republicans Davis was a bitter opponent of Lincoln’s plan for the reconstruction of the Southern States, and on the 15th of February 1864 he reported from committee a bill placing the process of reconstruction under the control of Congress, and stipulating that the Confederate States, before resuming their former status in the Union, must disfranchise all important civil and military officers of the Confederacy, abolish slavery, and repudiate all debts incurred by or with the sanction of the Confederate government. In his speech supporting this measure Davis declared that until Congress should “recognize a government established under its auspices, there is no government in the rebel states save the authority of Congress.” The bill—the first formal expression by Congress with regard to Reconstruction—did not pass both Houses until the closing hours of the session, and failed to receive the approval of the president, who on the 8th of July issued a proclamation defining his position. Soon afterwards, on the 5th of August 1864, Davis joined Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, who had piloted the bill through the Senate, in issuing the so-called “Wade-Davis Manifesto,” which violently denounced President Lincoln for encroaching on the domain of Congress and insinuated that the presidential policy would leave slavery unimpaired in the reconstructed states. In a debate in Congress some months later he declared, “When I came into Congress ten years ago this was a government of law. I have lived to see it a government of personal will.” He was one of the radical leaders who preferred Frémont to Lincoln in 1864, but subsequently withdrew his opposition and supported the President for re-election. He early favoured the enlistment of negroes, and in July 1865 publicly advocated the extension of the suffrage to them. He was not a candidate for re-election to Congress in 1864, and died in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 30th of December 1865. Davis was a man of scholarly tastes, an orator of unusual ability and
