|
Home: >Browse
Listings >Authors >Davis,
Reuben
Reuben
Davis
Physician, lawyer, and
historian Reuben Davis was born on January 18, 1813, near Winchester,
Tennessee. The youngest of 12 children, he was son of the Rev. John
Davis, a Baptist minister, and Mary Easton, both of whom were Virginia
natives before moving to Tennessee around 1810 and then to Franklin
County, near Russellville in northern Alabama, which he later described
in his autobiography Recollections of Mississippi and Mississippians:
The land had been recently purchased from the
Indians, and many of them yet roamed the dense forests of that
section. I well remember how I hunted with these wild companions,
and was taught by them to use the bow and arrow. Even now I can
recall something of the emotion excited in my youthful breast
by the wild yells of a party of drunken savages passing near my
father’s house.
Reuben’s mother died in 1825 when Reuben
was only 12 years old and his father died 6 years later in 1831.
As a fifteen year old teenager Reuben moved to Monroe County, Mississippi,
to study medicine—rather than the law, which he felt was his
true calling—at the urging of his father, who believed that
“lawyers were wholly given up to the Devil even in this world,
and that it was impossible for any one of them ever to enter the
kingdom of heaven.” |
Reuben Davis studied
medicine under Dr. George Higgason, who was married to Reuben’s
sister, Lucy. After completing his medical training, Reuben Davis
returned to Alabama to practice his new profession. He still felt
that his true calling was the law and after several years as a physician
he began his study of the law under Judge Lipacomb. He received
his law license and returned in 1832, when he was 19 years old,
to Athens, Mississippi, in Monroe County. He thus began his long
and successful career as a criminal lawyer. He later moved to Aberdeen,
Mississippi, where he spent the remainder of his life.
In addition to being an extremely
successful lawyer, Davis also served as prosecuting attorney for
the sixth judicial district in Mississippi from 1835 to 1839, an
associate justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court in 1840, and
judge of the high court of appeals in Mississippi in 1842. During
the Mexican War (1846-1848), he served as colonel of the Second
Regiment of Mississippi Volunteers; he again served briefly in the
military during the Civil War as a major general in the Confederate
Army. Davis was also active in politics, serving as a member of
the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1855 to 1857, a Democrat
in the United States House of Representatives from 1857 to 1861,
and as a member of the Confederate Congress in 1861 until he resigned
in 1864. He ran unsuccessfully for the govenorship of Mississippi
in 1863. After the Civil War he returned to the practice of law.
In 1831, Davis married Mary Halbert,
a poet and a writer of some note. They had no children, and Mary
died in 1865. Davis’s second wife was Sally Virginia Garbor,
the niece of writer Joseph
G. Baldwin, a lawyer and author of The Flush Times of Alabama
and Mississippi. From this marriage three children were born:
Elizabeth, Reuben, Jr., and Stanley. After Sallys death in
1916, at her request her body lay in state on the grand piano in
their home, Sunset Hill, in Aberdeen, Mississippi.
Davis published his autobiography,
Recollections of Mississippi and Mississippians, in 1889;
the book has been an invaluable reference source for historians
ever since. The book is a testimony to Daviss skills as a
writer and as a man of superb intellect and keen insights. He was
acquainted with the leading political and social men of the state
and he provides intriguing sketches of their lives and paints charming
and informative scenes about Mississippi in the years before the
Civil War. In the book, Davis describes a time when the state was
newly settled with a vibrant and growing population, whose citizens
were young and prosperous and mostly immigrants from older states
and who were distinguished by their vigor and unbounded imaginations.
“From the year 1828 to 1855,”
Davis wrote, “life in Mississippi was full and rich, and varied
with much incident and many strong passions. In a new country, teeming
with wealth and full of adventurous spirits, there is no tameness,
no satiety. O friends of that day, what glorious times we had together!
What fierce combats we fought, and with what gay carouses we celebrated
the victory! The very recollection makes me grow young again”
(Recollections of Mississippi and Mississippians 103).
While on a trip promoting the book,
Reuben Davis died suddenly of apoplexy in Huntsville, Alabama, on
October 14, 1890. He was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Aberdeen,
Mississippi. Davis’s words
near the end of his book are a fitting tribute to his own final
prospective of the era in which he lived: “All this belongs
to the past now. The old homestead has fallen into other hands,
the old people sleep in their quiet graves, and their descendants
are scattered. The brave old days are like a dream of the night,
scarcely to be remembered in the realities of to-day” (Recollections
of Mississippi and Mississippians 274).
(Article first
posted April 2003)
—James
K. Harrison |
Related
Links & Info
![]()
|
Publications
Nonfiction:
- Speech of Hon. Reuben Davis, of Mississippi, on the State of
the Union; in the House of Representatives, December 22, 1858.
Washington: Congressional Globe Office, 1858.
- Speech of Hon. Reuben Davis, of Mississippi: On the Bill Making
Appropriations for the Army, Delivered in the House of Representatives,
February 17, 1859. Washington: Congressional Globe Office, 1859.
- Recollections of Mississippi and Mississippians. Boston
and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co. 1890. Revised edition with a
new introduction by William D. McCain, preface and an expanded index
by Laura D. S. Harrell. Hattiesburg: University and College Press of
Mississippi, 1972.
Bibliography:
Articles and Interviews:
Internet Resources
Add
Information to this page
Mississippi Writers
Page Links
About This Site | New Book Info |
News & Events |
Literary Landmarks |
Mississippi Literary History |
Mississippi Publishing |
Other Features |
Other Web Resources
WRITER LISTINGS:
by author |
by title |
by place |
by year |
by genre
SEARCH THE MISSISSIPPI WRITERS PAGE
Ole
Miss Links
UM Home Page |
English Department |
Center for the Study of Southern Culture |
The University of Mississippi Foundation
This page has been accessed
6416 times. About
this page counter.
Last Revised on
Monday, November 9, 2015, at 04:35:03 PM CST
.
Send comments to mwp@olemiss.edu
Web Design by John B. Padgett.
Copyright ©
2015
The University of Mississippi English Department. |