John Chandler Bancroft Davis, commonly known as Bancroft Davis (December 22, 1822-December 27, 1907) was an American lawyer and diplomat. He was also the ninth reporter of decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, serving from 1883 to 1902.
Davis was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the son of John Davis, a Whig governor of Massachusetts, and was the older brother of congressman Horace Davis. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1847. In 1849, Davis became secretary of the American embassy in London and later its chargé d'affaires. He practiced law in New York City and was the correspondent for The Times in London. Because of ill health, he retired from the law in 1862, but in 1868 he was elected to the New York State Assembly. In 1874, he was appointed as the U.S. Minister to Germany, serving in that position until 1877.
Under President Ulysses S. Grant, he was Assistant Secretary of State in 1869-71 and again in 1873-74, after being secretary of the commission which concluded the Treaty of Washington in 1871 which produced the settling the Alabama claims. He was the United States at the Geneva Court of Arbitration which met at Geneva December 15, 1871. The American case was prepared by him.International_Encyclopedia" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_International_Encyclopedia He died in _Washington, DC. In 1886, a Supreme Court decision (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company) led to a corporation becoming a "person" with protection under both the first and fourteenth amendments. Chief Justice Morrison Waite wrote at the time, “We avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision.” Bancroft Davis reporting stands as: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Prior to 1886, the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment defined human rights, and individuals - representing themselves and their own opinions - were free to say and do what they wanted. Corporations, being artificial creations of the states, didn't have rights, but instead had privileges. The state in which a corporation was incorporated determined those privileges and how they could be used. And the same, of course, was true for other forms of "legally enacted game playing" such as unions, churches, unincorporated businesses, partnerships, and even governments, all of which have only privileges.
But with the stroke of his pen, Court Reporter Davis moved corporations out of that "privileges" category - leaving behind all the others (unions, governments, and small unincorporated businesses still don't have "rights") - and moved them into the "rights" category with humans, citing the 14th Amendment which was passed at the end of the Civil War to grant the human right of equal protection under the law to newly-freed slaves.
On December 3, 1888, President Grover Cleveland delivered his annual address to Congress. Apparently the President had taken notice of the Santa Clara County Supreme Court headnote, its politics, and its consequences, for he said in his speech to the nation, delivered before a joint session of Congress: "As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.
