History along the Way: Stories beyond the Texas Roadside Markers

Chapter 18. The Three Graves of Judge Baylor

286 the three Graves of Judge Baylor Few early figures in Texas history could match the depth of public service that marked the life of Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor. He was at various times in his life a lawyer, soldier, politician, jurist, preacher, and teacher. Born in 1793 to a successful merchant family in Lincoln County, Kentucky, in the center of the state, Baylor spent his formative years in Paris, Bourbon County, where he attended private schools. At the age of nineteen, during the struggle that became known as the War of 1812, he enlisted in the state militia and was among the troops who essentially fought their way into Fort Meigs, in northern Ohio, to relieve the besieged American forces. The actions of the Kentuckians helped turn the tide, causing the British eventually to cease their barricading action against the fort. When his enlistment ended, Baylor rejoined as a private and saw action in the US invasion of southern Canada.1 Returning to Kentucky after the war, Baylor studied law in the Lexington office of his distinguished uncle, Jesse Bledsoe, who saw service in both the US Senate and the Kentucky House of Representatives . Baylor passed the bar exam and opened his own office while in his early twenties, but in short order he, too, entered politics , first as a state representative in 1819. While the political field would come to define the early part of his career, his first venture proved to be short-lived. He resigned the position after only one yearand moved south to Alabama.The reason for his abrupt departure , like many of his actions through the years, remains clouded in conjecture. Stories persist that it had something to do with the tragic death of his fiancée in a riding accident, or maybe with an unrequited courtship, but there are few details to substantiate either situation. Baylor kept no diary and wrote only occasionally 18 tHe tHree Graves oF JudGe BayLor 287 about his early life, most commonly through letters to family and friends. Regardless of his reason for leaving his beloved home state, evidently never to return, he embarked on a path that kept him moving fartherawayover the next two decades. He also never married . By the early 1820s Baylor practiced law in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he eventually reentered politics, again as a state representative . Once again he served only one term, but soon he won election to the US Congress, serving in the House of Representatives as a Jacksonian Democrat. As national politics became embroiled in emerging issues of states’ rights, Baylor’s support of Jackson perhaps worked against him back home, and in 1831 he faced defeat in his bid for reelection. He returned to his law practice in Tuscaloosa but was soon on the move again, first to Cahaba (Cahawba), the original state capital of Alabama, then to Selma, and eventually on farther south to Mobile. From there he again answered the call for military service, participating in the Creek Indian War in 1836.2 While in Alabama in the late 1830s, Baylor made two important decisions that dramatically altered the course of his life and unexpectedly placed him on a path that would redefine the last part of his career as well as his historical legacy. It is difficult to say which decision he faced first, and in a way they may have been intertwined from the beginning. Regardless, the decisions he made both came about in 1839.That summer he had the opportunity to attend revival services at a Baptist church in Talladega, where his cousin, the Reverend Thomas Chilton, preached. Also a lawyer and former politician, as well as a close colleague of David Crockett, Chilton enjoyed additional success as a minister. Baylor, viewed by various historians as a deist, Unitarian, atheist, infidel, or agnostic in his early years, nevertheless converted to Christianity while attending the revival, and soon afterward the Talladega Baptist Church sponsored his ordination as a preacher.3 Still evidentlydealing with the wanderlust that had marked the first part of his life, Baylor felt called to seek new opportunities in a place called the Republic of Texas. Like his conversion, it was not an easy decision for him to make, and his letters reveal he had thought about moving to Texas for years, even though he realized that by doing so he might never 288 CHapter 18 return home. As he wrote...