Friday’s A Closer Look is typically a judicial biography. This week we cover Justice Henry Baldwin, who served on the court from 1830 until 1844.
Justice Henry Baldwin caused trouble both early and late in his life. At Yale, he “found the lectures droll and misbehaved frequently,” while on the Supreme Court he grew so erratic that his colleague Justice Joseph Story deemed him “partially deranged at all times.” (This is not to mention his near-death duel or unprecedented number of dissents while on the often-unanimous Marshall court.)
Baldwin was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in January 1780. One of his half-brothers signed the Constitution and later represented Georgia in the House for the first through fifth Congresses and in the Senate during the sixth through ninth. Baldwin graduated from Yale in 1797, although one of his classmates described him as a “lightheaded boy, who neither aimed at, nor attained to, much distinction as a scholar,” before attending Litchfield Law School. He then clerked for Alexander Dallas, the Supreme Court’s first unofficial reporter of decisions. (The court was then located in Philadelphia.)
In 1799, Baldwin went to Pittsburgh (originally on his way to visit his brother), and there founded a law practice and came to co-own a newspaper. Reportedly spurred by politics, Baldwin fought a duel and almost died – according to Oyez, he was saved by a “silver dollar in his jacket pocket” that deflected the bullet. During the War of 1812, Baldwin sat on Pittsburgh’s Public Safety Council and by 1816, he had been dubbed “the Pride of Pittsburgh.” He then won a House seat for Pennsylvania, where he chaired the Committee on Manufactures and was a proponent of high tariffs (these protectionist views won him another nickname, “Father of the American System”). But Baldwin’s career was most aided by his defense of then-Gen. Andrew Jackson’s conduct in the Seminole War; Baldwin argued that the men Jackson had killed “were not our citizens, not bound by our laws, [and] not entitled to our protection.”
Baldwin then campaigned for Jackson in 1828 and expected to be made Secretary of the Treasury in return but did not receive the position. He refused the three foreign missions Jackson offered instead and wrote to an editor that he was valued about as much as “a candle-snuffer at a court-house,” or “a mere passing post, against which every puppy of the party raises his leg.” After Justice Bushrod Washington died in 1829, Jackson nominated Baldwin to the court. The Senate confirmed him 41-2 two days later, with both “no” votes cast by South Carolinians. (South Carolina was generally against Baldwin’s pro-tariff position.)
Baldwin fell out of love with the court in his very first year, telling Jackson he wanted to resign, but Jackson convinced him to stay. In 1831 alone, he dissented seven times, more than any other justice on the Marshall court. One of the seven was his “spirited dissent” in Ex parte Crane, where he argued that the Supreme Court did not have the power to issue writs ordering lower federal courts to take a specific action.
In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, which held that the court did not have jurisdiction to hear the case since the Cherokee Nation was a “domestic dependent nation[]” and as such could not sue Georgia, Baldwin also wrote separately, stating that “the judicial power cannot divest the States of rights of sovereignty,” a position that sided with Georgia and Jackson’s push for Indian removal. (That said, Baldwin wasn’t entirely in Jackson’s pocket; he repeatedly urged Attorney General Roger Taney to advise the president against vetoing the national bank’s rechartering bill.)
On slavery, Baldwin was the lone dissenter in United States v. The Amistad (where the court held that because a group of Africans had been illegally abducted, they were free and entitled to their liberty), and in 1841’s Groves v. Slaughter, he argued that the Constitution regarded slaves as property rather than persons.
In 1833, Baldwin was hospitalized for “incurable lunacy” and absent for that term. In May 1833, his colleague Story wrote to a circuit judge that “I am sure he cannot be sane.” Despite this, Baldwin returned the following year and served 11 more years on the court until his death in 1844. Upon returning, Baldwin apparently wrote a series of incoherent legal opinions, deliberately ignored grammar in his writing, and had violent outbursts. A court reporter also noted that five different people had called the justice “crazy” on the same day. Friends further reported financial issues (Baldwin had filed for bankruptcy early in his tenure) and that he appeared overworked.
Baldwin died in Philadelphia in April 1844, a week after suffering a stroke. He was reportedly so in debt that his friends had to collect money to bury him. According to Justia, he left “scant impact on the law,” although he has been credited with establishing written dissents as a court practice.