Henry Winter Davis (August 16, 1817 – December 30, 1865) was a United States Representative from the 4th and 3rd congressional districts of Maryland, well known as one of the Radical Republicans during the Civil War.

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.

[4] 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.

Defeated that year for reelection to Congress, in the winter of 1860 and 1861―between the secession of some Southern states and the beginning of the Civil War with the assault on Fort Sumter―Davis was involved in compromise measures.

In 1864, unwilling to leave the delicate questions concerning the French intervention in Mexico entirely in the hands of President Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward, Davis brought in a report very hostile to France, which was adopted by the House but not by the Senate.

On February 15, 1864, he reported from committee a bill (known as the Wade–Davis Bill, after Davis and Senator Benjamin Wade) which would place the process of Reconstruction under the control of Congress, and stipulated that the Confederate states, as a condition of being re-admitted to the Union, would disfranchise all important civil and military officers of the Confederacy, abolish slavery, and repudiate all debts incurred by or with the sanction of the Confederate government.

He was one of the radical leaders who preferred John C. Frémont to Lincoln in the 1864 election, but subsequently withdrew his opposition and supported the President for re-election.

[4] On Election Night, 1864, during a discussion, Lincoln said: "It has seemed to me recently that Winter Davis was growing more sensible to his own true interests and has ceased wasting his time by attacking me.