ca. 1811=1864.

Joseph G. Baldwin was born in Virginia but early removed to Sumter County, Alabama, and was a jurist and writer of much influence and popularity in that State. He removed later to California, where in 1857 he became judge of the Supreme Court and in 1863 Chief-Justice of the State. His writings are mainly clever and humorous sketches of the bar and of the communities in which he practised. He said the “flush times” of Alabama did not compare in any degree with those of California which he described in an article to the “Southern Literary Messenger.” His “Party Leaders” are able papers on Jefferson, Hamilton, Jackson, Clay, and John Randolph.

WORKS.

Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi.
Party Leaders.
Humorous Legal Sketches.

VIRGINIANS IN A NEW COUNTRY.

(From Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi, published in “Southern Literary Messenger.”)

The disposition to be proud and vain of one’s country, and to boast of it, is a natural feeling; but, with a Virginian, it is a passion. It inheres in him even as the flavor of a York river oyster in that bivalve, and no distance of deportation, and no trimmings of a gracious prosperity, and no pickling in the sharp acids of adversity, can destroy it. It is a part of the Virginia character—just as the flavor is a distinctive part of the oyster—“which cannot, save by annihilating, die.” It is no use talking about it—the thing may be right, or wrong;—like Falstaff’s victims at Gadshill, it is past praying for: it is a sort of cocoa grass that has got into the soil, and has so matted over it, and so fibred through it, as to have become a part of it; at least there is no telling which is the grass and which the soil; and certainly it is useless labor to try to root it out. You may destroy the soil, but you can’t root out the grass.

Patriotism with the Virginian is a noun personal. It is the Virginian himself and something over. He loves Virginia per se and propter se: he loves her for herself and for himself—because she is Virginia, and—everything else beside. He loves to talk about her: out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. It makes no odds where he goes, he carries Virginia with him; not in the entirety always—but the little spot he comes from is Virginia—as Swedenborg says the smallest part of the brain is an abridgment of all of it. “Coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt,” was made for a Virginian. He never gets acclimated elsewhere; he never loses citizenship to the old Home. The right of expatriation is a pure abstraction to him. He may breathe in Alabama, but he lives in Virginia. His treasure is there and his heart also. If he looks at the Delta of the Mississippi, it reminds him of James River “low grounds;” if he sees the vast prairies of Texas, it is a memorial of the meadows of the Valley. Richmond is the centre of attraction, the dÉpÔt of all that is grand, great, good, and glorious. “It is the Kentucky of a place,” which the preacher described Heaven to be to the Kentucky congregation.

Those who came many years ago from the borough towns, especially from the vicinity of Williamsburg, exceed, in attachment to their birthplace, if possible, the ÉmigrÉs from the metropolis. It is refreshing in these coster monger times, to hear them speak of it;—they remember it when the old burg was the seat of fashion, taste, refinement, hospitality, wealth, wit, and all social graces: when genius threw its spell over the public assemblages and illumined the halls of justice, and when beauty brightened the social hour with her unmatched and matchless brilliancy.