Edward Dickinson Baker - California Politician

California Politician

After Baker did not get a Cabinet position under President Zachary Taylor, he moved to San Francisco in 1852. He operated a successful law practice, despite what some described as sloppy business practices and inattention to detail, characterizations that had plagued him earlier: as a legislator, he was said to pay little attention to mundane details. Baker met Isaac J. Wistar, sixteen years Baker’s junior and from a prominent Philadelphia family. He said Baker did not keep records and relied on his memory and a bundle of papers he carried around in his hat. Baker disdained preparing for legal cases and thought it was more effective to speak extemporaneously to a jury. Baker received substantial fees but spent the money as fast as it came in, Wistar said, and some of those expenditures paid faro debts. The two formed a successful partnership at Montgomery and Jackson Streets.

California had been admitted to the United States in 1850 as a free state, but by the later part of the 1850s, the state was being pulled in different directions over the issue of slavery, and Baker became a leader in the movement to keep California in the Union. In 1855, he ran for a seat in the state senate as a Whig on the Free Soil Party party ticket but lost because the Whig party had collapsed.

It was in those days that Baker picked up the name “Gray Eagle” because of his gray hair (though he was balding). He was just under six feet tall. Baker became involved in a notorious criminal case in 1855 that threatened his legal and political future. He was criticized for defending Charles Cora, a gambler accused of killing a United States marshal. The jury failed to reach a verdict, and Cora was lynched by a vigilante mob. The experience led Baker to become active in the Law and Order Party, which opposed actions of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, which took the law into its own hands. Because of the committee’s criticism of his actions, Baker temporarily left the city and spent some time in the Sacramento area.