Garret Davis was born on September 10, 1801 in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, United States. He was the son of Jeremiah Davis and his wife, a Miss Garret before marriage, who were both natives of Maryland. His father, though a blacksmith, was a leader in his community, serving for a time in the Kentucky legislature. Garret’s brother, Amos, was a member of Congress from 1833 until his death in 1835.
After attending the common schools, Garret studied Latin, Greek, and history without help.
Davis was early led to an interest in law through his services as a deputy in the office of the clerk of the circuit court, first in Mount Sterling and then in Paris, to which town his family had moved.
Admitted to the bar in the latter place in 1823, he there began the practise of his profession. Elected to the legislature in 1833, he served three consecutive terms in this body (1833 - 35).
As political disputations were pleasing to him and he desired to continue in the service of his state, he ran for Congress and was elected. Here he served four consecutive terms (1839 - 47), representing for the last six years Henry Clay’s noted Ashland district, to which Bourbon County had been transferred from the Maysville district. He refused to break a promise not to run again for Congress in 1847 and declined the nomination for the lieutenantgovernorship the next year. Elected to the state constitutional convention in 1849 he participated with great zeal in its debates, but quit the sessions and returned home when his fight against the elective judiciary failed and, in common with the Whigs, opposed the new constitution. Following the trend of a growing opposition to Roman Catholics, he made a bitter speech against them in the convention and shortly went over to the Know-Nothing party. In 1855 he declined the nomination for the governorship, and the following year the Know-Nothing nomination for the presidency. The approach of the Civil War awakened him to great activity. When most Kentuckians were undecided in their course of action he came out for unswerving and complete adherence to the Union.
In April 1861 he talked with Lincoln about Kentucky affairs, and in May supervised the distribution of Federal rifles to Kentucky Unionists throughout the central and eastern parts of the state.
As a reward he was elected in December to the United States Senate to the seat vacated by John C. Breckinridge. But it took only three years of war to work a complete revolution in him.
He was reelected in 1867 by the Democrats, whom he had by this time solidly embraced.
He successfully lived down his war record and died highly respected by his fellow Kentuckians, whose sympathies were now strongly Southern.
Davis introduced a set of resolutions so astonishingly critical of Lincoln’s war policy that he himself escaped expulsion only by explaining them away, and he ever afterward fought with all his powers of oratory and sarcasm against the war party and the radical reconstructionists.
Davis was regarded as an effective debater and a learned man. He developed a large estate and became a close student of agriculture.
Davis was married in 1825 to a daughter of Robert Trimble, later a justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Three years after her death in 1843, he married the widow of Thomas Elliott, a lawyer of Paris, Kentucky.
