Baldwin, Henry (1780–1844)

• Author: R. Kent Newmyer
• Pages: 156-157

Page 156

Henry Baldwin of Pittsburgh was appointed to the Supreme Court on January 4, 1830, by ANDREW JACKSON. After graduating from Yale College in 1797, he studied law with ALEXANDER J. DALLAS and began his practice in Pittsburgh where he joined the bar in 1801. Law spilled over naturally into politics for Baldwin, and from 1816 to 1822 he served in Congress, where he gained a reputation as an economic nationalist. He also defended Andrew Jackson from charges of misconduct in Spanish Florida and later supported him for President?efforts that won him a seat on the Supreme Court.

Though an unknown judicial quantity, Baldwin was acceptable to the still-dominant JOSEPH STORY-JOHN MARSHALL wing of the Court because of his reputation as a "sound" man and talented lawyer?and because he was not JOHN BANNISTER GIBSON, whom conservatives feared would get the appointment. Baldwin's supporters were soon disappointed, then shocked. Almost immediately the new Justice was out of phase with the Court's nationalism and at odds with several of its members, especially Story, whose scholarly, didactic style Baldwin found offensive and threatening. After serving less than a year on the Court, he wanted off. Worse still, his collapse in 1833 (which caused him to miss that term of the Court) signaled the onset of a mental condition that progressively incapacitated him. Occasionally he rose to the level of his early promise, as for example in United States v. Arredondo (1832) where the principle was established that land claims resting on acts of foreign governments (which in the Spanish and Mexican cessions amounted to millions of acres) were presumed valid unless the United States could prove otherwise. Another solid effort was Holmes v. Jennison (1840) where he upheld the right of a state to surrender fugitives to a foreign country even though such a power cut into the policymaking authority of the national government in FOREIGN AFFAIRS. His circuit efforts were also well received at first and deservedly so, judging from such opinions as McGill v. Brown (1833) where he handled a complicated question of charitable bequests with considerable sophistication.

Baldwin's constitutional philosophy, so far as it can be detected, was set forth in his General View of the Origin and Nature of the Constitution and Government of the United States, a rambling, unconvincing treatise published in 1837 (mainly, it would seem, to rescue him from pressing...