Abraham Baldwin

Abraham Baldwin (November 22, 1754 – March 4, 1807) was an American minister, Patriot, politician, and Founding Father. Born and raised in Connecticut, he was a 1772 graduate of Yale College. After the Revolutionary War, Baldwin became a lawyer. He moved to the U.S. state of Georgia in the mid-1780s and founded the University of Georgia.Abraham Baldwin was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati of the State of Connecticut (and Georgia).

Abraham Baldwin was born in 1754 in Guilford in the Connecticut Colony into a large family, the son of Lucy (Dudley) and Michael Baldwin, a blacksmith, and descended from Elder John Strong (colonist). His half-brother, Henry Baldwin, was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. After attending Guilford Grammar School, Abraham Baldwin attended Yale College in nearby New Haven, Connecticut, where he was a member of the Linonian Society. He graduated in 1772.

Three years later after theological study, he was licensed as a Congregationalist minister. He also served as a tutor at the college. He held that position until 1779. During the American Revolutionary War, he served as a chaplain in the Connecticut Contingent of the Continental Army. He did not see combat while with the Continental troops.

Two years later at the conclusion of the war, Baldwin declined an offer from Yale's new president, Ezra Stiles, to become Professor of Divinity. Instead, he turned to the study of law and in 1783 was admitted to the Connecticut bar.

Encouraged by his former commanding officer General Nathanael Greene, who had acquired the plantation at Mulberry Grove where Eli Whitney would later invent the cotton gin, Baldwin moved to Georgia. He was recruited by fellow Yale alumnus Governor Lyman Hall, another transplanted New Englander,to develop a state education plan. Baldwin was named the first president of the University of Georgia and became active in politics to build support for the University, which had not yet enrolled its first student. He was soon appointed as a delegate to the Confederation Congress and then to the Constitutional Convention; in September 1787 he was one of the state’s two signatories to the U.S. Constitution.

Abraham Baldwin remained president of the University of Georgia during its initial development phase until 1800.During this period, he also worked with the legislature on the college charter.

In 1801, Franklin College, UGA's initial college, opened to students. Josiah Meigs was hired to succeed Baldwin as first acting president and oversee the inaugural class of students. The first buildings of the college were architecturally modeled on Baldwin's and Meigs's alma mater of Yale where they both had taught. (Later the university sports team adopted as its mascot, the bulldog, also in tribute to Baldwin and Meigs, as it is the mascot of Yale.)

Baldwin was elected to the Georgia Assembly, where he became very active, working to develop support for the college. He was able to mediate between the rougher frontiersmen, perhaps because of his childhood as the son of a blacksmith, and the aristocratic planter elite who dominated the coastal Lowcountry. He became one of the most prominent legislators, pushing significant measures such as the education bill through the sometimes split Georgia Assembly.

He was elected as representative to the U.S. Congress in 1788. The Georgia legislature elected him as U.S. Senator in 1799 (this was the practice until popular election in 1913.) He served as President pro tempore of the United States Senate from December 1801 to December 1802. He was re-elected and served in office until his death.

On March 4, 1807, at age 52, Baldwin died while serving as a U.S. senator from Georgia. Later that month the Savannah Republican and Savannah Evening Ledger reprinted an obituary that had first been published in a Washington, D.C., newspaper: "He originated the plan of The University of Georgia, drew up the charter, and with infinite labor and patience, in vanquishing all sorts of prejudices and removing every obstruction, he persuaded the assembly to adopt it."

His remains are interred at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC.

• The United States Postal Service made a 7¢ Great Americans series postage stamp in his honor;
• Places and institutions were named for him, including:
  • Baldwin County in Alabama and Georgia;
  • Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia;
  • Abraham Baldwin Middle School in Guilford, Connecticut;
  • Baldwin streets in Madison, Wisconsin and Athens, Georgia;
• The University of Georgia erected a statue of Baldwin on the historic North Campus quad in his honor as its founding father.