Neither the profound sense of reaching forward into the unknown nor the bitterness of unbridled passion attaches to the career of Judge David Davis of Illinois; yet this man’s life, too, is worth examining, even in the context set by the examination of the lives of Secretary Stimson and Senator Sumner. For Judge Davis had a great deal to do with the purely political decision that made Abraham Lincoln President, and this was possibly the most momentous choice the electorate ever made. Like all political decisions, it did not just happen. An expression of the popular will, it was nevertheless managed; behind the scenes, someone was pulling the strings. Judge Davis was the man who pulled most of the strings.

Born in eastern Maryland in 1815, Davis went to the Illinois country as a young man to make his way as a lawyer. The growing frontier territory was a good place for a bright, energetic, and careful young man who wanted to get on in the world, and Davis got on. He had neither the sense of dedication that marked Stimson nor the blind desire to lead mankind to righteousness that characterized Sumner; he was just a good man who planned to do his best, hoping to become a useful and successful citizen. Like the others, he found what he was looking for, and a fine study of his life is at hand in Willard King’s Lincoln’s Manager, David Davis . (It has been a good season for biographies.)

The first thing Davis found was Lincoln himself. Like other lawyers in that time and place, Davis “rode the circuit,” going from one county town to another to try cases before the itinerant circuit judges, and he was also active in Whig politics; in both realms he found Lincoln a good friend and a good man to work with. They must have made an odd pair—Lincoln, so long and slim, and the compact Davis whose weight quickly rose to a solid three hundred pounds—but they established an intimacy. Eighteen years before the famous Debates the two men made common cause against another circuit-rider, Stephen A. Douglas, in the Harrison-Van Buren election.

Their friendship was dampened for a time, when Lincoln refused to help Davis get a judgeship that Davis wanted, but the trouble was presently smoothed over. Davis won another judgeship before long, in 1849 he supported Lincoln’s unsuccessful (and seemingly inexplicable) desire to win appointment as Federal Land Office commissioner in Chicago, and a year later the two were as intimate as ever. Renewed comradeship on the circuit helped pull them back together; so, too, did the growth of Free Soil sentiment in the West, which found the two men standing together more and more against slavery, against Douglas, and against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and all that went with it. By 1860, when Lincoln was an avowed candidate for the Presidency, and a Chicago politician advised