The American congressman Henry Winter Davis (1817-1865) was a leading advocate of Radical Republican policies during the Civil War and a violent opponent of President Lincoln's more conservative course.

Henry Winter Davis was born Aug. 16, 1817, in Annapolis, Md. He attended Kenyon College, studied law at the University of Virginia, and in 1840 established practice in Alexandria, Va. In 1850 he moved to Baltimore, where he became active in Whig politics, absorbing much of the strong nationalist perspective of that party.

Alarmed by the influx of Catholic immigrants in the early 1850s, Davis joined the Whigs and Democrats in the nativist Know-Nothing movement. He was elected to Congress three times as a Know-Nothing between 1855 and 1859. In 1860, as the Know-Nothing movement declined, Davis cooperated with the Republican party in Congress but maintained a measure of political independence by supporting the former Whig John Bell, the Constitutional Union candidate, for president. Davis was...