Roger Sherman Baldwin
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Roger Sherman Baldwin (January 4, 1793–February 19, 1863) was an American lawyer involved in the Amistad case, who later became governor of Connecticut.
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Early life
Baldwin was the son of Simeon Baldwin, a lawyer, judge, congressman, and mayor of New Haven and Rebecca Sherman. Baldwin was a direct descendant of the Puritan settlers of Connecticut and the Founding Fathers of the nation. His father's family was among the original New Haven colonists, and his mother was the daughter of Roger Sherman, the Connecticut statesman who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. As well as being the father of Connecticut Governor Simeon Eben Baldwin, grandfather of New York Supreme Court Justice Edward Baldwin Whitney, and the great-grandfather of the much famed Princeton University professor Hassler Whitney.
After studying at the Hopkins School in New Haven, Baldwin entered Yale, graduating with honors in 1811. He began legal studies in his father's law office but completed them at the renowned Litchfield Law School. He was admitted to the bar in New Haven in 1814, and, at a time when most New Haven lawyers had offices in their homes, he opened an office in the heart of the city. For nearly half a century he worked alone, never joining a legal partnership. His mastery of the principles of law, elegant diction, and meticulous command of the English language quickly brought him respect and a large practice. He became known for his profound regard for justice as the purpose of law. In 1820 he married Emily Pitkin Perkins; they had nine children.
Political career
Baldwin began a political career, which evolved alongside his legal profession, with election to the New Haven Common Council in 1826 and then to the Board of Aldermen in 1828. Indicating his dislike of slavery, which he inherited from his father and grandfather, and a concern for the welfare of the black population, Baldwin, in one of his earliest cases, secured the release of a fugitive slave who had escaped from the service of Henry Clay. A former Federalist, Baldwin accepted the principles of the newly organized Whig party. He served in the Connecticut Senate, 1837-1838, and was chosen president pro tempore in his second term. He became a trustee of Yale College in 1838, and he was a member of the Connecticut state's house of representatives, 1840-1841.
During these years, Baldwin distinguished himself as a lawyer for the defendants in the famous "Amistad" case, carrying the case through the district and circuit courts of Connecticut and to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Spanish ship Amistad, carrying Africans kidnapped on the West Coast of Africa, was taken into New London harbor by a U.S. revenue cutter. The stolen men, who had taken possession of the ship and attempted to sail back to their native land, were placed in a New Haven jail for safekeeping. Spain demanded their return, and President Martin Van Buren, anxious to avoid an international incident and ever cautious to shore up his political position in the South, seemed ready to comply. Baldwin, concerned for the Africans, became counsel for them. When the case reached the US Supreme Court, he was associated in their defense with former president John Quincy Adams. Baldwin, with "one of the most illustrious arguments ever offered" to that Court (Dutton, p. 12), secured a verdict for the Africans, and they were returned to their native land, not to the Spanish. Baldwin addressed the humanitarian and legal aspects of the case (the Africans, being stolen, were not bound by our treaties with Spain) and also the consideration of our character as a nation "established for the promotion of JUSTICE, which was founded on the great principles of the Revolution" (Dutton, p. 13). Adams, in his Memoirs, commented on Baldwin's "sound and eloquent . . . argument," his use of "cautious terms, to avoid exciting Southern passions and prejudices" (Adams, pp. 429-30). Indeed, Justice Joseph Story noted that Baldwin's argument in the case was given greater weight than the argument of Adams.
Governor of Connecticut
In 1843 Baldwin was the Whig candidate for governor of his state, but the Democrats took that election. A year later Baldwin won the governorship, and in 1845 he was reelected. In carefully worded messages to the legislature, he suggested reforms relating to prison labor, corporation law, temperance, and education. Except for reestablishing state supervision over public schools, the legislature gave these suggestions little consideration. Local issues were neglected as controversy over the annexation of Texas and the presidential election of 1844 intensified. Governor Baldwin also urged the legislature to act favorably on black suffrage and to pass a law restraining citizens of the state from assisting in the capture of fugitive slaves, but Connecticut was not yet ready to take these positions. "The generally arid character of Whig accomplishment" in the Connecticut legislature did have one notable exception: property qualifications for voting were abolished (Morse, p. 323). The governor did not seek reelection in 1846 but returned to his law practice.
United States Senator
In November 1847 he received an executive appointment to the U.S. Senate to fill a vacancy caused by the death of Connecticut senator Jabez Huntington. When the legislature convened the following year, it elected Baldwin to complete that term. Baldwin joined senators already distinguished as debators on controversial measures relating to new territories and the extension of slavery. He had argued in Connecticut against the annexation of Texas, and as he entered the Senate, the consequent war with Mexico was in progress. He saw that war as an excuse for extending slavery and introduced resolutions opposing slavery in any new territory. Senator Baldwin also addressed the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. His impressive speech against that law was "generally conceded to be the ablest argument in opposition to the measure delivered in the Senate" (Norton, p. 198).
Baldwin also articulated the concern shared by many as to the propriety of congressional involvement in foreign affairs. After the French monarchy was overthrown in February 1848, a resolution before the Senate tendered congratulations to the French people for establishing a republican form of government and requested that the US minister in Paris present these congratulations to the government of France. Baldwin, acutely analyzing the situation in France, pointed out that the government was not yet "in the hands of those who have been elected by the people" but still consolidated "in the hands of a Parisian regency" (Annals of America, vol. 7, p. 425). The senator went on to express doubts that the Congress should instigate instructions to an American minister; this, he felt, belonged in the first instance to the executive.
Baldwin was not returned to the U.S. Senate in 1851. His concept of the duty of a representative in a legislative body was to vote on his own judgment, "enlightened by the deliberations of this body" (S. E. Baldwin, p. 521). He would make no pledges and bow to no instructions. This displeased party leaders in Connecticut and cost him a second term. He then resumed a busy law practice and became active in the formation of the Republican party. In 1860 he was a member of the electoral college of Connecticut, which cast the state's vote for Abraham Lincoln. His last service to his country was as a delegate, in February 1861, to the Washington Peace Conference, which unsuccessfully tried to reconcile the slavery issue. Two years later, tall and erect, respected and still active in his profession, he died in New Haven, and was interred at Grove Street Cemetery.
Bibliography
The Roger Sherman Baldwin Papers are at Yale University. His remarks in the Senate are in the Congressional Globe, 1847-1851, but his Senate speech on "The Executive Prerogative in Foreign Policy" is more easily found in The Annals of America, vol. 7 (1968). Baldwin appears in Connecticut Reports every year from 1816 to 1863. Simeon Eben Baldwin wrote the lengthy article on his father in Great American Lawyers, ed. William D. Lewis (1908), which includes citations of state and federal documents. Samuel W. S. Dutton, An Address at the Funeral of Hon. Roger Sherman Baldwin (1863), by the pastor of North Church in New Haven, is an essential source.
A eulogy and discussion of Baldwin's life, it is also a consideration of him as a lawyer and statesman, and it contains the texts of Baldwin's resolutions before the Senate on the extension of slavery and the minority report he wrote for the Washington Peace Conference. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, vol. 10, ed. Charles Francis Adams (1876), contains interesting comments on the "Amistad" case; see also "Argument of Roger S. Baldwin, of New Haven before the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Case of The United States, Appellants, v. Cinque, and Others, Africans of the 'Armistad'," in The African Slave Trade and American Courts, vol. 1, ed. Paul Finkelman (1988). Frederick C. Norton, The Governors of Connecticut: Biographies of the Chief Executives of the Commonwealth That Gave to the World the First Written Constitution Known to History (1905), summarizes Baldwin's life and career. Jarvis M. Morse, A Neglected Period of Connecticut's History, 1818-1850 (1933), describes a small, early nineteenth-century state, homogeneously populated and reluctant to make the reforms suggested by Baldwin. The New Haven Journal and Courier, 21 Feb. 1863, published resolutions of tribute passed by the New Haven bar along with insightful remarks from some of its members. An obituary by then governor Henry Baldwin Harrison is in Connecticut Reports 30 (1863): 611.
Ĝˡ==Notes==
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