Roger Sherman Baldwin (1793–1863), attorney and public official, was a native of New Haven, Connecticut. There he attended the Hopkins School before graduating from Yale College (later Yale University) in 1811. Baldwin next studied law, first with his father and then under Tapping Reeve and James Gould in Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1814 he was admitted to the bar and commenced a long legal career in New Haven. An opponent of slavery, Baldwin successfully defended a fugitive slave who had escaped from the service of Henry Clay. He played a leading role in freeing Africans brought to America on the ship Amistad in litigation beginning in Connecticut in 1839 and concluding, assisted by John Quincy Adams, at the United States Supreme Court in 1841. Baldwin served in the Connecticut Senate, 1837–38, and in the Connecticut House of Representatives, 1841–42. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1843 but won the next two elections as the Whig candidate, serving until 1846. The following year Baldwin was appointed to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate. In 1848 he was elected to complete that senate term, which ended in 1851, but he lost a bid for reelection. Baldwin helped organize the Republican Party in Connecticut, served as a presidential elector for Abraham Lincoln, and attended an 1861 peace conference in Washington, D.C. He died in New Haven (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, repr. 1968, 20 vols. in 10 description ends ; William Draper Lewis, ed., Great American Lawyers [1907–09], 3:493–527; Dexter, Yale Biographies description begins Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, 1885–1912, 6 vols. description ends , 6:369–73; The Litchfield Law School, 1784–1833 [1900], 14; New Haven Daily Palladium, 19 Feb. 1863).