Early Life and Career
Born in Annapolis, Maryland, 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. 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.
Davis was a man of scholarly tastes, an orator of unusual ability and great eloquence, tireless and fearless in fighting political battles, but impulsive to the verge of rashness, impractical, tactless and autocratic. 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.
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