My Good Friend

David Davis, Abraham Lincoln’s trusted friend, legal associate, and political manager, lived in a two-story frame house on the outskirts of Bloomington that closely resembled Lincoln’s Springfield home but stood at the center of a large farm with pastures, orchards, flower gardens planted by Davis’s wife Sarah, and rows of trees lining the drive to Jefferson Street. In 1870, Davis, who had been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Lincoln, moved the house to make way for an elegant Victorian mansion. Lincoln sometimes stayed at the Davis home during visits to Bloomington, including a memorable stay during his 1858 senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas, when McLean County Republicans prepared for his September 4 speech in the courthouse square and a procession marched to the Davis home to escort him to town. After Lincoln’s death, his twenty-one-year-old son Robert asked Davis to take charge of the murdered president’s affairs, and Davis managed the estate, secured Lincoln’s papers in a Bloomington bank vault, served as Tad Lincoln’s legal guardian, and advised Robert about his mother’s care. At Davis’s funeral in 1886, Robert Lincoln sat among the mourners in the mansion parlor, rode in the carriage procession to the grave, and later said that after his father’s death he had gone to Davis as to a second father.

Bloomington, Illinois · United States