(b. New Haven, Conn., 14 Jan. 1780; d. Philadelphia, Pa., 21 Apr. 1844; interred Greendale Cemetery, Meadville, Pa.), associate justice, 1830–1844. Born of aristocratic stock, Baldwin received an LL.D. degree from Yale University in 1797. Thereafter, he studied in Philadelphia with Alexander J. Dallas. Having gained admission to the bar, Baldwin set out for Ohio, but he settled in Pittsburgh, where he quickly gained social and political prominence. Throughout western Pennsylvania he became known for his intelligence, indefatigability, and ribald sense of humor.
After the death of his first wife, he married Sally Ellicott, and they established a second home in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, from which he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1816. Reared as a Federalist, Baldwin was often at odds with rural Jeffersonian Republican party regulars. Ill health forced Baldwin's resignation in 1822, but six years later, he energetically supported Andrew Jackson's presidential candidacy.
With the death of Justice Bushrod Washington in 1829, Jackson nominated Baldwin to the Supreme Court, passing over Pennsylvania Chief Justice John Bannister Gibson and Horace Binney of Philadelphia. Baldwin was confirmed with only two dissenting votes.
Baldwin's views on major constitutional issues were generally consistent over his fourteen‐year tenure. He supported unobstructed interstate commerce, sought to preserve states' rights, and regarded slaves as private property. When federal power was pitted against state sovereignty, Baldwin argued against expansion of the former. The vehemence of this position first appeared in a dissent in Ex parte Crane (1831), in which he objected to the extension of federal court jurisdiction to issue writs of mandamus.
In constitutional interpretation, Baldwin was a moderate, eschewing the extremes of autonomous state sovereignty and expanded federal supremacy. Baldwin in 1837 published an extended pamphlet, A General View of the Origin and Nature of the Constitution and Government of the United States …, in which he presented a “full explanation of what may be deemed my peculiar views of the constitution” (p. 1). He placed himself in a middle category between the extremes, writing that he belonged among those “willing to take the Constitution … as it is, and to expound it by the accepted rules of interpretation” (p. 37). He believed that by exercising political sensitivity the Supreme Court could arbitrate disputes over which powers belonged to the federal government and which to the states. Baldwin's key votes between 1830 and 1844 reveal him as a moderate, pro‐Northern justice in cases dealing with the role of corporations, federal‐state relations, and slavery.
Baldwin's abrasive individualism ran counter to and helped to break down the consensual nature of the Marshall Court. In 1831, for example, he dissented seven times, violating a long‐standing norm of Court unanimity. Sociable and well liked early in his career, Baldwin grew increasingly eccentric and, on occasion, violent. He may have suffered from an obsessive‐compulsive syndrome, exacerbated in his final years by financial problems. He died, penniless, of paralysis in 1844.
— Robert G. Seddig
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