Simeon Eben Baldwin

Education

The son of jurist, Connecticut governor and U.S. Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin and Emily Pitkin Perkins, Baldwin was born and lived for much of his life in New Haven, Connecticut, and was one of nine children. Among his ancestors were the initial five governors of the Connecticut Colony. Another ancestor was Roger Sherman, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. His father had served from 1844 to 1846 as the governor of Connecticut.

As a boy he attended the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, Connecticut. Active in all its alumni work, he was, more specifically, for many years president of its board of trustees; in 1910, on the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the school, he delivered a discourse on its history; when shortly before his death it became necessary to house the school in new quarters, he was one of the largest, if not the largest, of the individual donors whose contributions made possible a set of modern buildings for what he was fond of referring to as the fourth oldest institution of learning in the United States.

From the Hopkins Grammar School he went to Yale College, from which he was graduated with the class of 1861. There is scant information as to his four years at college. During that period he kept a diary from which he read extracts on the fifty-fifth reunion of his class, but this diary is not at present available. That the studious traits which he later manifested were not altogether lacking at this time may be inferred from the fact that he was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Skull & Bones. Such records as we have do not indicate that there was anything unusual about this young student who had among his classroom contemporaries the poet Edward Rowland Sill, and two others who like himself were later to have much to do with the life of the university, his friends Tracy Peck and Franklin Bowditch Dexter.

Early years

For the two years following his graduation from college he studied law at Yale, at Harvard, and in his father's office. In 1863 he was admitted to the bar and began the practice of law. His seventeen years of service as an associate justice and chief justice of the supreme court of Connecticute state and his four years as governor in the latter part of his life, may have obscured for his later contemporaries the fact that he was also a successful lawyer. In the practice of the law he won distinction both in his own state and outside, and with it the financial emoluments that usually accompany success at the bar. He was keenly alive to the practical side of the lawyer's work and never lost his zest for it. Till almost the very end of his life he maintained a law office, which he visited daily as long as his health would permit, and kept adding to his law library. As late as 1919 his book The Young Man and the Law revealed him still at heart a lawyer. In 1878, he was one of the founders of the American Bar Association and served as president of the American Bar Association from 1890 to 1891.

During the middle portion of his life he was actively engaged in teaching law. Here also he showed ability. One who studied law under him and like him became chief justice of the supreme court of errors of Connecticut says that his old pupils regard his work as a teacher "as more distinctive and weightier in influence upon human life than any other portion of his work. Probably in his day not a half dozen teachers of the law in our country could be placed in his class" (American Bar Association Journal, February 1927, p. 74).

From 1897 to 1910, Baldwin was a member of the Connecticut State Supreme Court, where he presided as chief justice from 1907 to 1910.

For twelve years (1907–1919) he was the director of the American Bar Association's Comparative Law Bureau (as well as its Annual Bulletin's editor for general jurisprudence).

To the same effect may be interpreted the action of the Association of American Law Schools, which in 1902 elected him its president. In 1869 he was appointed as a professor of law to the faculty of the Yale Law School, then in a moribund condition. His active participation in the affairs of that school was to continue for just fifty years, for it was not until 1919 that he retired as professor emeritus. The revival of the law school was largely his work. He increased the size of the faculty, instituted new courses, developed graduate work, and for a long time carried much of the financial responsibility for the school's existence (Yale Law Journal, March 1927, p. 680). It was characteristic of him that when shortly before his retirement the method of teaching was changed to the so-called "case system," to which Judge Baldwin, like most of his contemporaries, objected, he never for an instant changed his attitude of loyalty to the school, which some years later was to be most generously remembered in his will.

Political life

Even more diversified than his activities in local affairs was his participation in those that concerned the state as a whole. Never a politician, and to the end of his days allowing such honors and offices as came to him to come unsought and unfought for, he nevertheless early became identified with the political life of his state. Starting as a Republican, he was nominated for state senator from the fourth district in 1867, but was not elected. In 1884 he was one of the "independents" who refused to support James G. Blaine, and was chosen president of the Republican organization in Connecticut.

The greatest of his political honors came to him when he was an old man. Automatically retired from the position of chief justice of the supreme court, February 5, 1910, because he had reached the age limit of seventy years, he that year was nominated for governor on the Democratic ticket and was elected the governor of Connecticut.

In June 1912, at the Democratic National Convention he received twenty votes for the presidential nomination. In November of the same year he was elected the governor of Connecticut, nominally strongly Republican, for a second term of two years. Both the Corrupt Practices Act and a civil service law instituting a merit system for state employees were enacted during his administration, along with numerous laws affecting working conditions.

He was Democratic candidate for United States senator from Connecticut for the term beginning March 4, 1915. Caught in a Republican landslide and defeated by incumbent Senator Frank B. Brandegee, he nevertheless ran ahead of his party ticket by several thousand votes.

It was inevitable that the high regard in which he was held as a lawyer should lead to his being named on various state commissions of reform. In 1872, less than a decade after he began to practice law, the Connecticut legislature elected him one of a commission of five that made the Revision of 1875, the General Statutes of the State of Connecticut. In the same year he was a member of a state commission appointed to revise the education laws. Six years later he was named by the governor of Connecticut acting under a resolution of the state legislature one of a commission of five to inquire into the feasibility of simplifying legal procedure. This commission drew up a set of rules and forms which were approved and adopted by the court as the basis of pleading in civil cases.

Personal life

He was the son of Roger Sherman Baldwin, brotherin-law of Dwight Foster (1828–1884), uncle of Edward Baldwin Whitney, grandson of Simeon Baldwin, and the great-grandson of Roger Sherman.

On 19 October 1865 he married Susan Mears Winchester, daughter of Edmund Winchester and Harriet Mears. Simeon and Susan had three children: Florence, Roger and Helen. In 1873, Susan was admitted to a mental health institution after developing a mental disorder subsequent to the demise of their daughter Florence in 1872. Her sister Charlotte assisted in the upbringing of the two remaining children, Roger and Helen, and oversaw the household.

He died January 30, 1927, in New Haven.