BALDWIN, HENRY (1780–1844)

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 debts). Baldwin presumed to stake out a middle constitutional ground for himself between extreme states ' rights constitutional doctrine and the broad nationalism of Marshall and Story which he explicitly condemned as unfounded and usurpatory. He took particular pains to refute the thesis in Story's Commentaries on the Constitution (1833) that sovereignty devolved on the whole people after 1776. Baldwin's final position on the matter appeared to be little more than a reductionist version of john c. calhoun's theories.

The states' rights theory set forth in General View was consistent with Baldwin's Jennison opinion and his preference for state police power as stated in the slavery case of groves v. slaughter (1841). On the other hand, in McCracken v. Hayward (1844), he did not hesitate to strike down an Illinois stay law that impaired contractual rights. His unpublished opinion in bank of augusta v. earle (1839) took the extremely nationalist position that a foreign corporation's right to do business in a state was protected by the privileges and immunities clause of Article IV, section 2, of the Constitution.

To say where Baldwin really stood is difficult. He wrote less than forty majority opinions during his fourteen years on the Court. Of those, few were important and fewer still were coherent expositions of constitutional doctrine. He withdrew more and more into paranoiac isolation, carping at his colleagues, criticizing reporter Richard Peters, and pondering his rapidly deteriorating financial situation. He dissented more and more (thirty-some times counting unwritten dissents) and with less and less purpose. That a number of his separate opinions were delivered too late to be included in the reports suggests that his impact in the Court's conference was peripheral at best. His effectiveness on the circuit declined, too, if one credits the growing complaints of district judge Joseph Hopkinson who sat with him in Pennsylvania. Baldwin died in 1844, deeply in debt, without friends and with no prospect of being remembered favorably. Illness had taken a heavy toll. His influence on American law was negligible and his presence on the Supreme Court was probably counterproductive.

R. Kent Newmyer
(1986)

Bibliography

Baldwin, Henry 1837 A General View of the Origin and Nature of the Constitution and Government of the United States.… Philadelphia: John C. Clark.

Gatell, Frank O. 1969 Henry Baldwin. In Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel (eds.), The Justices of the United States Supreme Court, 1789–1969, Vol. 1, pages 571–598. New York: Chelsea House.