Edward D. Baker
Edward Dickinson Baker was an American politician, lawyer, and US army officer. In his political career, Baker served in the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois and later as a U.S. senator from Oregon. He was also known as an orator and poet. A long-time close friend of the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, Baker served as U.S. Army colonel during both the Mexican–American War and the American Civil War. Baker was killed in the Battle of Ball's Bluff while leading a Union Army regiment, becoming the only sitting U.S. senator ever to be killed in a military engagement.
Early life and education
Born in London in 1811 to school teacher Edward Baker and Lucy Dickinson Baker, poor but educated Quakers, the boy Edward Baker and his family left England and emigrated to the United States in 1816, arriving in Philadelphia, where Baker's father established a school. Ned, as he was called, attended his father's school before quitting to apprentice as a loom operator in a weaving factory. In 1825, the family left Philadelphia and traveled to New Harmony, Indiana, a utopian community on the Ohio River led by Robert Owen and sought to follow communitarian ideals.The family left New Harmony in 1826 and moved to Belleville in Illinois Territory, a town near St. Louis. Baker and his father bought a horse and cart and started a drayage business that young Ned operated in St. Louis. Baker met Governor Ninian Edwards, who allowed Baker access to his private law library. Later he moved to Carrollton, Illinois, where he was admitted to the bar in 1830.
Marriage
On April 27, 1831, Baker married Mary Ann Foss; they would have 3 sons and 2 daughters together.Illinois lawyer
Shortly after his marriage, Baker affiliated with the Disciples of Christ and engaged in part-time preaching, which as a by-product served to spread awareness of his skill in public oratory, an activity that eventually made him famous. A year after his marriage, Baker participated in the Black Hawk War but did not engage in hostilities. Around 1835, he became acquainted with Abraham Lincoln and soon became involved in local politics, being elected to the Illinois House of Representatives on July 1, 1837, and serving on the Illinois Senate from 1840 to 1844. In 1844, while living in Springfield, he defeated Lincoln for the nomination for the 7th U.S. congressional seat and was elected as a Whig. Baker and Lincoln became fast friends, an association which lent credibility to a claim that Baker baptized Lincoln. However, this claim is denied as apocryphal by later leaders of the Restoration Movement with which Baker's church of Christ was associated. The two remained close friends, however, with Lincoln naming one of his sons Edward Baker Lincoln, affectionately called "Eddie." Lincoln and Baker occasionally competed in Fives, a form of handball.In September 1844, Baker exhibited impetuous bravado in an incident arising out of the murder of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, by a mob in a jail near Nauvoo, Illinois. As a colonel in the local militia, Baker was part of a group pursuing the mob leaders, who had fled across the Mississippi River into Missouri. Rather than wait for others to join him, Baker crossed the river and apprehended the fugitives.
Baker served in Congress from March 4, 1845, until his resignation on December 24, 1846, to take effect on January 15, 1847. He resigned in a dispute over the legality of his serving in Congress and the army. The controversy arose from Article I, Section 6, of the U.S. Constitution, the so-called Incompatibility Clause, which prohibits an "officer of the United States" serving in either house of Congress.
During the Mexican–American War, Baker briefly dropped out of politics and was commissioned as a colonel of the Fourth Regiment of the Illinois Volunteer Infantry, on July 4, 1846. In the Battle of Cerro Gordo, the regiment was assigned to General James Shields's Illinois brigade in General David E. Twiggs's division. When Shields was badly wounded in an artillery barrage, Baker boldly led the brigade against the entrenched artillery battery, resulting in the capture of the guns. General Winfield Scott later said, "The brigade so gallantly led by General Shields, and, after his fall, by Colonel Baker, deserves high commendation for its fine behavior and success." Soon after Cerro Gordo, the enlistment period ended for men of the 4th Illinois and they returned to New Orleans and were discharged on May 25. Baker returned to Springfield in 1848, but, rather than run against Lincoln again for nomination to Congress, Baker moved to Galena, where he was nominated and elected as a Whig to the 31st Congress. He was not a candidate for renomination in 1850.
In July 1850, he proposed to the Panama Railroad Company that he recruit men to help build the railroad. Baker agreed to pay their expenses from St. Louis and in New Granada, and the company would send them on to San Francisco by May 1. He became ill in Istmo with a tropical disease and had to return to the U.S.
Military service
Commissioned on July 4, 1846, as Colonel of the Fourth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, he participated with his regiment in the Siege of Vera Cruz and also commanded one of the brigades involved in the Battle of Cerro Gordo. He continued to serve with his regiment until he was honorably mustered out on May 29, 1847. After his honorable discharge, he engaged in a 14-year break from military service, during which he served in the Thirty-first U.S. Congress from 1849 to 1851, relocated to San Francisco, where he practiced law and, in 1860, relocated to Oregon, where he was elected as a Republican to the United States Senate to fill a vacancy in the term beginning March 4, 1859.In response to President Abraham Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers to help defend the nation's capital following the fall of Fort Sumter to Confederate forces in mid-April 1861, he raised a regiment at the dawn of the American Civil War, recruiting soldiers from New York City and Philadelphia. Offered a commission as brigadier-general of volunteers on May 17, 1861, he declined the honor, opting instead to serve as the colonel of the Seventy-first Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry and major-general of volunteers 1861; however, his tenure was short-lived. On October 21, 1861, he was killed in the Battle of Ball's Bluff, Virginia. His remains were subsequently returned to California, and laid to rest at the San Francisco National Cemetery.
California politician
After Baker did not get a Cabinet position under President Zachary Taylor, he moved to San Francisco in 1852. He operated a successful law practice, despite what some described as sloppy business practices and inattention to detail, characterizations that had plagued him earlier: as a legislator, he was said to pay little attention to mundane details. Baker met Isaac J. Wistar, sixteen years Baker's junior and from a prominent Philadelphia family. He said Baker did not keep records and relied on his memory and a bundle of papers he carried around in his hat. Baker disdained preparing for legal cases and thought it was more effective to speak extemporaneously to a jury. Baker received substantial fees but spent the money as fast as it came in, Wistar said, and some of those expenditures paid faro debts. The two formed a successful partnership at Montgomery and Jackson Streets.California had been admitted to the United States in 1850 as a free state, but by the later part of the 1850s, the state was being pulled in different directions over the issue of slavery, and Baker became a leader in the movement to keep California in the Union. In 1855, he ran for a seat in the state senate as a Whig on the Free Soil Party party ticket but lost because the Whig party had collapsed.
It was in those days that Baker adopted the name "Gray Eagle" from a poem by John Neal because of his gray hair. He was just under six feet tall. Baker became involved in a notorious criminal case in 1855 that threatened his legal and political future. He took up a job offered by Belle Cora who hired and paid Baker to defend her husband, Charles Cora, a well-known gambler accused of killing a United States marshal. The jury failed to reach a verdict, and then Cora was tried and lynched by a vigilante mob. The experience led Baker to become active in the Law and Order Party, which opposed actions of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, which took the law into its own hands. Because of the committee's criticism of his actions, Baker temporarily left the city and spent some time in the Sacramento area.
In September 1859, after the Broderick–Terry duel, Baker spoke at David C. Broderick's funeral.
Oregon politician
Frustrated by his failure to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1859, Baker looked to greener political pastures to the north. Oregon held special interest for people who had once lived in Illinois, including men he had known in Springfield. He had become interested in Oregon politics in 1857, when Dr. Anson Henry, a friend from Springfield who had moved to Oregon, told Baker he could win the Senate election there. After statehood was achieved on February 14, 1859, Oregon Republicans asked Baker to come to their state to run for the Senate and counter the Democratic strength there.By the end of February 1860, the Baker family had moved into a house in Salem on what is now the campus of Willamette University. Baker opened a law office and started campaigning for Republicans around the state. In Salem on July 4, he acknowledged the rumbles of secession threats and proclaimed his willingness to die for his country: "If it be reserved for me to lay my unworthy life upon the altar of my country in defending it from internal assailants, I declare here today that I aspire to no higher glory than that the sun of my life may go down beneath the shadow of freedom's temple and baptize the emblem of the nation's greatness, the Stars and Stripes, that float so proudly before us today, in my heart's warmest blood."
The Oregon Legislative Assembly met in Salem in September 1860 to elect two men to the Senate. In an effort to keep Baker from receiving the required majority of 26 votes, six pro-slavery senators left the meeting and hid in a barn to prevent a quorum. They were brought back, and the legislators reached a compromise on October 7 and elected James Nesmith, a Douglas Democrat, and Baker. The Douglas Democrats supported Baker because of his sincerity and support of popular sovereignty.