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About Rep. Robert E. M. Baylor (J-AL)
Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor
U.S. Representative & Co-founded of Baylor University, 1845
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Emmett_Bledsoe_Baylor
- https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7784647/robert-emmett_bledsoe-b...
- https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/baylor-robert-emmett-bl...
- https://diversity.web.baylor.edu/history/baylor
Baylor was a Kentucky native who later moved to Alabama and then Texas. Baylor was also the nephew of Kentucky Senator Jesse Bledsoe.
Baylor served in the military during the War of 1812. After the war he studied and then practiced law in Kentucky. He was briefly a member of the Kentucky House of Representatives from 1819 to 1820 before he resigned and moved to Alabama.
In Alabama he practiced law, studied theology, was licensed to preach, and was ordained to the Baptist ministry. In 1824 he was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives. Baylor was elected as a Jacksonian to the Twenty-first Congress (March 4, 1829 – March 3, 1831) from Alabama's 2nd congressional district and was an unsuccessful candidate for election in 1830 to the Twenty-second Congress.
In 1839, Baylor moved to Texas where he co-founded Baylor University in 1845 with the Reverend William Tryon and Reverend James Huckins--the first Baptist missionary to Texas. He was elected judge of the district and supreme courts of the Republic of Texas and was a member of the convention that framed the State constitution of Texas in 1845. Baylor was a district judge for twenty-five years. Despite his prominence, Baylor County, Texas is not named after him; rather, it is named after his nephew Henry Weidner Baylor.
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ROBERT EMMETT BLEDSOE Baylor (1793–1873). R.E.B. Baylor, lawyer, college founder, and Baptist leader, was born in Lincoln County, Kentucky, on May 10, 1793, the son of Walker and Jane Baylor (Bledsoe). His father had been a captain in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, in a company of dragoons that often assisted George Washington. Baylor received his formal education at a country school and at academies around Paris, Kentucky. After service in the War of 1812 he studied law in the office of his uncle, Judge Jesse Bledsoe, and was elected in 1819 to the Kentucky legislature. Around 1820 he moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he practiced law. In 1824–25 he served in the Alabama legislature. He was elected a representative from Alabama to the Twenty-first Congress of the United States in 1829 and was defeated in the election of 1831. In 1833 he moved to Dallas County, Alabama. Baylor raised a few volunteers and served as a lieutenant colonel against the Creek Indians in Alabama in 1836.
He was converted in 1839 during a Baptist revival meeting conducted by his cousin Thomas Chilton at Talladega, Alabama. The same year he was ordained a Baptist minister and, at the age of forty-six, went to Texas. He settled near La Grange in Fayette County and organized a school. He assisted in the organization of the Union Baptist Association in 1840 and the Texas Baptist Education Society around 1841. With two other Baptist ministers, Z. N. Morrell and Thomas W. Cox,qqv he served under Edward Burleson at the battle of Plum Creek in 1840.
On January 7, 1841, Baylor was elected judge of the Third Judicial District of the Congress of the Republic of Texas and consequently became an associate justice of the Supreme Court, an office he held until the end of the republic. He was a delegate from Fayette County to the Convention of 1845 and served on three committees: Annexation, Judiciary, and General Provisions of the Constitution. He helped to write the first state constitution and favored free public schools, homestead exemptions, annual elections, and the exclusion of clergy from the legislature. He opposed the veto power for the governor. In 1846 the first Texas state governor, J. P. Henderson, appointed Baylor judge of the state's Third Judicial District. Baylor served in that capacity until 1863.
With William M. Tryon and J. G. Thomas, Baylor prepared the petition that led to the establishment of Baylor University in 1845. He may have donated the first $1,000 to the university; he served as a member of the board of trustees and taught law intermittently, without pay. While traveling through his judicial districts on horseback to enforce the law, he held court by day and preached in the evenings. He presided at the first district court held in Waco and perhaps delivered the first sermon ever preached in that city, at the hotel owned by Shapley P. Ross. Baylor became a Mason in 1825; he served as chaplain of the Grand Lodge of Texas Masons in 1843, 1845, and 1847. In 1853 he assisted in the organization of a lodge at Gay Hill in Washington County, his home until his death. Baylor never married. He died on December 30, 1873, and was buried, as he had requested, on the campus of Baylor University at Independence. His remains were reinterred in 1917 on the campus of Baylor Female College (now the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor).
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
R. E. B. Baylor Papers, Texas Collection, Baylor University. James Milton Carroll, A History of Texas Baptists (Dallas: Baptist Standard, 1923). Dictionary of American Biography. L. R. Elliott, ed., Centennial Story of Texas Baptists (Dallas: Baptist General Convention of Texas, 1936). Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists (4 vols., Nashville: Broadman, 1958–82).
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Robert Emmett Bledsoe (R.E.B.) Baylor (1793-1874) was a lawyer and politician who represented Alabama for one term in the U.S. Congress. He is much better known as the principal founder of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and as a member of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Texas from 1841 to 1846. He was influential in moving Texas from an independent republic to statehood.
Baylor was born on May 10, 1793, in Lincoln County, Kentucky, to Walker and Jane (Bledsoe) Baylor; he was one of six children. For most of his young life, he was regaled with stories of his father's exploits as a member of the 3rd Light Dragoons and, later, as a member of Gen. George Washington's staff during the American Revolution. A promising student, he attended school in Paris, Kentucky, and was admitted to the state bar in 1812. When war erupted between the United States and Great Britain that same year, Baylor decided to follow in his father's footsteps by joining the Kentucky militia, serving in the Ohio Territory and present-day Canada during the War of 1812.
With the cessation of hostilities in 1814, Baylor returned to Kentucky, where he studied law under his uncle and local magistrate Judge Jesse Bledsoe. He soon built his own successful law practice and was elected to the Kentucky legislature in 1819, winning the same seat that his brother George had held the previous year. He resigned his position in 1820, however, and moved to the newly created state of Alabama, joining a frenzy of in-migration known as "Alabama Fever." He settled in Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County, and built another successful practice. In 1824, he reentered politics and was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives and won reelection the following year.
Though he lost his bid for reelection in 1827, Baylor was elected just one year later to represent Alabama's Second Congressional District in the Twenty-First Congress as a Jacksonian Democrat. In Washington, D.C., he befriended Tennessee representative Davy Crockett, Kentucky statesman Henry Clay, Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, then-vice president John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Kentucky representative Thomas Chilton. His association with Crockett, Chilton, and Clay in particular harmed his political career, as they were known as staunch opponents of Pres. Andrew Jackson, who was popular in Alabama. As a result, voters in Alabama rebuffed his bids for reelection in 1830, 1835, and 1837. While living in Dallas County in 1836, he raised a regiment of Alabama volunteers to fight against Creek Indians during the Second Creek War. Following his electoral defeat in 1837, Baylor moved to Mobile, Mobile County, where he became a prominent local attorney, filing claims on the behalf of citizens against failing banks during the Panic of 1837.
In 1839, Baylor moved to Talladega, Talladega County, where he lived with his cousin Thomas Chilton, a Baptist minister. After attending one of Chilton's revival meetings in 1839, Baylor, who was an agnostic with some interest in Christianity, converted fully to the faith and was soon ordained as a Baptist minister. That same year, he moved to Gay Hill, Texas, where he organized a local school and several small churches. Involved in a number of religious organizations, he helped organize the Union Baptist Association in 1840 and the Texas Baptist Education Society in 1841. On January 7, 1841, he was elected judge of the Third Judicial District of the congress of the Republic of Texas and by virtue of his district judgeship was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the Republic until its demise in 1846.
In 1844, Baylor and the Texas Baptist Education Society began work to establish a Baptist-affiliated university in Texas. Along with fellow Baptists William M. Tryon and J. G. Thomas, Baylor petitioned the Congress of the Republic of Texas for the creation of the new university in the town of Independence. Before the final vote of Congress on the issue, it was decided that the new university would be named after Baylor. On February 1, 1845, Anson Jones, the president of the republic, signed the act that officially chartered Baylor University. Baylor was made a charter trustee of the new institution and would eventually become a professor of law.
As the Republic of Texas moved towards statehood in the summer of 1845, a convention was called to develop a state constitution; one of the admission requirements for joining the United States. Baylor served on the Annexation, Judiciary, and General Provisions committees of the convention and used his positions to push for free public schools and homestead exemptions that protected homeowners from forced sales to pay off creditors in the case of financial hardship. In 1846, the state's first governor, James Pinckney Henderson, appointed Baylor as judge of the Third Judicial District, and he served until 1863. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the female department of Baylor University (which taught female students exclusively) separated and became known as the Baylor Female College (now the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor). Baylor was a trustee of both institutions and in this capacity shaped the educational system in Texas for decades to come.
Baylor died on January 6, 1874, in Gay Hill, Texas. At his request, his body was interred on the campus of Baylor. In 1886, the university merged with nearby Waco University and relocated to its present home in Waco, Texas. In 1917, Baylor's remains were disinterred and moved to the grounds of the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor.
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Rep. Robert E. M. Baylor (J-AL)'s Timeline
| 1793 |
May 10, 1793
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Lincoln, Clay County, Kentucky, United States
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| 1872 |
January 6, 1872
Age 78
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Washington, Washington County, Texas, United States
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| ???? |
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor Campus, Belton, Bell County, Texas, United States
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