Joseph Glover Baldwin

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Joseph Glover Baldwin (born February 21, 1815 in Winchester , Virginia , † September 30, 1864 in San Francisco , California ) was an American writer , politician and lawyer . He was best known for his humorous books about the Old Southwest in the period before the American Civil War . His work, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi , a series of amusing skits caricaturing life on the Southwest Frontier, established Baldwin as an eminent writer and astute observer of the Antebellum South .

Life

Baldwin was born in Friendly Grove Factory , about a mile south of Winchester, as one of seven children to Joseph Clarke and Eliza Cooke Baldwin. Baldwin lived with his family in various parts of Virginia, including Winchester and Staunton , where he received schooling and studied law with his uncle. At the age of 20, Baldwin moved to Lexington as a lawyer and later to Buchanan , where he worked as a newspaper editor . In 1836 he intended to go to Mississippi , but then opened a law firm in Gainesville , Alabama . In 1840 he married Sidney White, the daughter of a judge from Talladega , with whom he had seven children.

His political career began in 1843 when he entered the Alabama House of Representatives for the Whigs . After a term, he returned to his office, but continued to support the Whig Party. After the unsuccessful attempt to enter the US Congress , he went to Livingston in 1849 and opened another legal partnership there . Here he also began to work as a writer and published the humor book The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi in 1853 and in 1854 with Party Leaders a political story about the United States. In the summer of 1854 Baldwin moved to California, where he was employed as a lawyer in San Francisco. After the fall of the Whig Party, Baldwin became a Democrat and was elected as a judge to the Supreme Court of California in 1858 , where he served until 1862. He then tried to write again, but due to his early death from tetanus , his newly started work Flush Times of California could not be completed.

literature

  • Eugene Current-Garcia: Joseph Glover Baldwin: Humorist or Moralist? In: Alabama Review 5 (April 1952), pp. 122-141.
  • Merritt W. Moseley Jr .: Joseph Glover Baldwin, 1815–1864. In: Fifty Southern Writers Before 1900 , edited by Robert Bain and Joseph M. Flora, Greenwood Press, New York 1987, pp. 29-37.
  • Adam L. Tate: Joseph Glover Baldwin and 'The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi' . In: Encyclopedia of Alabama . 2013.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Adam L. Tate: Joseph Glover Baldwin and 'The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi' . In: Encyclopedia of Alabama . 2013. Retrieved May 8, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Baldwin, Joseph Glover
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer, politician, and lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1815
PLACE OF BIRTH near Winchester , Virginia
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 1864
Place of death San Francisco , California