Episode Details

Edward D. Baker was born in London in 1811 to poor Quaker parents who moved to Philadelphia in 1816, where he worked as a boy operating a loom. The family tried the utopian community at New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825, then settled in Illinois near St. Louis, where Baker hauled goods by cart until Governor Ninian Edwards opened his law library to him. Admitted to the bar in 1830, he preached for the Disciples of Christ and, from 1835 in Springfield, became one of Abraham Lincoln's closest friends; Lincoln named his second son Edward Baker Lincoln. Baker took the 1844 Whig congressional nomination under a rotation arrangement, won the seat, then resigned in December 1846 to fight in Mexico, taking command at Cerro Gordo after General James Shields was wounded.

A Panama railroad venture left him seriously ill, and he moved to Gold Rush San Francisco, where he was called the Gray Eagle and won a hung jury for gambler Charles Cora before the Committee of Vigilance lynched Cora. In 1860 he moved to Salem, Oregon, and was elected to the Senate alongside James Nesmith after pro-slavery state senators hid in a barn to break the quorum. He answered Judah Benjamin's defense of secession with a three hour speech and introduced Lincoln at the 1861 inauguration. Raising the California Regiment, he was killed on October 21, 1861, at Ball's Bluff, the only sitting senator to die in battle, and Lincoln wept in the street at the news.

• In 1844, after Joseph Smith's murder, he crossed the Mississippi alone and brought back fleeing mob leaders.
• His law partner Isaac Wistar said Baker kept his legal papers in his hat and lost his fees at faro.
• Oregon's Joseph Lane refused to introduce him to the Senate, breaking tradition.
• The day before he died he told Mary Todd Lincoln that her flowers and his memory would wither together.
• Outrage over his death led Congress to create the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.