Joseph G. Baldwin

Joseph Glover Baldwin (January 21, 1815 – September 29, 1864) was an American attorney and humor writer who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of California from October 2, 1858, to January 2, 1864. Biography Born in Winchester, Virginia, Baldwin was educated in Stanton, Virginia. He displayed precocious talents; while still a teenager he worked as a Deputy Court Clerk and a newspaper editor. He read law in the office of his uncle, Judge Briscoe G. Baldwin, to become a lawyer and was admitted to the bar by age 19. In 1836, Joseph Baldwin moved to DeKalb County, Alabama, thereafter moving to Gainesville, Alabama in 1838. There, he practiced law with his brother, Cornelius C. Baldwin, and with J. Bliss. Another brother, Oliver P. Baldwin, was a lawyer, newspaper editor, and speaker in Cleveland and later Richmond, Virginia. Gainesville was in Sumter County, which had a sizeable and growing population profiting from a booming economy and from enslaved labor farming the rich soil; the people Baldwin associated with were "men of the first rank in the legal profession, of high attainments in scholarship, of genuine literary taste and culture, and of fun-loving spirits and mirth-provoking propensities"—these were the "flush times" he would describe in his first book. In 1843, Baldwin was elected as a Whig to the Alabama House of Representatives. In August 1849, he was defeated by Democrat Samuel Williams Inge in a bid for the United States Congress by only 400 votes. In 1850, Baldwin moved to Livingston, Alabama, where he continued to practice and to write. He published a book of humorous stories, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (1853), and a collection of sketches of US politicians, Party Leaders (1855). In 1853, Baldwin moved to Mobile, and in 1854 to California, where he served as counsel on a number of important cases. In 1858, following the death of Chief Justice Hugh Murray, Baldwin was nominated by the Democratic Party, as well as endorsed by the Lecompton Democrat convention, and elected by the people to serve out the remainder of Murray's term on the California Supreme Court from October 2, 1858, until January 2, 1862. Chief Justice Stephen Johnson Field praised Baldwin's opinion in Hart v. Burnett (1860), concerning pueblo land grants, as a model of scholarly learning.