Male

January 14, 1780

April 21, 1844

New Haven, CT

Philadelphia, PA
Allegheny County, PA
OH

Sally Ellicott Baldwin (June 1805)
Mariana Norton Baldwin (May 1802)

Henry Baldwin was the son of Michael Baldwin and Theodora Wolcott Baldwin. After his parents' death in 1787 he resided with his half-brother, politician and first president of the University of Georgia, Abraham Baldwin. Henry attended the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven in 1793 and then graduated from Yale College in 1797 at the age of eighteen. He attended the Litchfield Law School following his studies at Yale and then went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he studied law for several months with the Honorable Alexander J. Dallas. He was admitted to the Philadelphia bar on March 6, 1798.

In 1799, Baldwin started for Ohio to join his brother Michael and stopped in Pittsburgh, which in that year was a city with a population of 1500. Baldwin married Mariana Norton in May of ...1802. She was his third cousin and the daughter of Nathaniel Norton of Bloomfield, New York. She died only one month after their only son was born. After his first wife's death, Baldwin married Sally Ellicott of Lancaster, Pennsylvania on June 11, 1805. She was the daughter of Major Andrew and Sally Brown Ellicott, and survived Baldwin with an adopted daughter.

Baldwin was admitted to the Allegheny County Bar on April 30, 1801 and was reported to have a practice that extended into all the counties west of the Allegheny River and into some parts of Ohio. His law partners were Tarleton Bates of Virginia and Walter Forwards, and they were known as the "Great Triumvirate of Early Pittsburgh". Together they bought the Republican newspaper The Tree of Liberty.

Baldwin also had mill interests in Pennsylvania and Ohio, especially the iron rolling and woolen mills. Furthermore, Baldwin had a flourishing political career. In 1816/1817, he was elected as a Democrat to Congress from Pennsylvania and drafted the tariff of 1820. He wanted a protective tariff for goods produced within the United States, and earned a reputation within Congress as an "economic nationalist". In addition, Baldwin was one of the only eighteen men from non-slave states who voted for the Missouri Compromise. He opposed the passage of an anti-slavery proviso in the Missouri Compromise, for he hoped that by doing so he would gain the support of the Southerners for his 1820 bill to raise tariffs. However, the Southerners in Congress did not rally behind his bill, and it lost in the Senate by one vote.

In 1822, Baldwin resigned from Congress due to poor health and was ill for the next two years. Nevertheless, Baldwin returned that same year to his legal practice. Baldwin had an extensive law library and was involved in many important cases. In 1828, he supported Andrew Jackson for president, and was disappointed when he did not receive the promised post of Secretary of the Treasury. However, in 1829, Baldwin was instead offered a place on the Supreme Court upon the death of Justice Bushrod Washington.

On January 4, 1830, President Jackson nominated Baldwin to the United States Supreme Court, and two days later his nomination was confirmed by the Senate. Baldwin held his position as a Justice of the Supreme Court until his death in 1844. Notably, Baldwin often challenged the views of the Constitution held by Chief Justice Marshall and Justice Story. In the term of 1831, he dissented seven times, whenever he believed the court to be encroaching on state powers. Baldwin was also involved in several important cases during his time on the Supreme Court. One case was U.S. v. Arrendono in 1832 which established the principle that land claims resting on acts of foreign governments had to be presumed valid unless the U.S. could prove otherwise. In addition, in the case of Holmes v. Jennison in 1840, he upheld the right of a state to surrender fugitives to a foreign country even though this interfered with the power of the federal government in foreign affairs. He also stood against President Jackson during his attack on the Bank of the U.S. Baldwin had upheld the legality of the actions of the bank, while the Secretary of the Treasury Roger Taney and President Jackson had opposed the rechartering of the bank. In 1833, he was confined to a hospital and missed the first court term of that year. Baldwin wrote over forty majority opinions while on the Supreme Court, but as time passed fewer of these opinions were clear expositions of constitutional doctrine. He increasingly withdrew into paranoid isolation and dissented with little comprehensible reason.

Baldwin received his second honorary law degree from Jefferson College in Pennsylvania in 1843, but for the last four years of his life, Baldwin was reported to have a violent temper, and while there were doubts about his sanity there was no attempt made to remove him from the bench. By 1844 he was deeply in debt, and he died on April 21, 1844 in Philadelphia from a stroke he had suffered a week earlier.
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1797

Attended Hopkins Grammar School in 1794, and Graduated from Yale College in 1797.

Lawyer; Business; Political Office

Phildelphia, PA on March 6, 1798, and in Alleghany County, PA on April 30, 1801

He studied law for several months with Hon. Alexander J. Dallas in Philadelphia, PA.

Republican

U.S. Representative (PA) 1817-1822
Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court 1830-1844

Chariman of the Committee on Domestic Manufacturers from 1819-1822.

Catalogue of the Litchfield Law School (Hartford, CT: Press of Case, Tiffany, and Company, 1849), 3.; "Moothall Society Record Books." Litchfield Law School Collection, Series 1, Subseries 3, Litchfield Historical Society.

Baldwin, Thomas Tilson, Ed. The Green Bag. An Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers, Vol. 15. Boston: The Boston Book Company, 1903;

Carson, Hampton L. History of the Supreme Court of the United States, Vol. I. Philadelphia: P.W. Ziegler and Company, 1902.;

Baldwin, Charles Candee. Baldwin Genealogy from 1500 to 1881, Vol. I. Leader Printing Company, 1881.;

Dexter, Franklin Bowditch. Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of College History, Vol. 5. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911.;

Friedman, Leon and Fred L. Israel. The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions, Vol. 1. NY: Chelsea House in association with Bowker, 19