California Historical Society Quarterly/Volume 22/Afterword on Colonel Edward Dickinson Baker
Afterword on Colonel Edward Dickinson Baker
By Milton H. Shutes
IN this Quarterly for December 1938 there is a biographical sketch of Colonel E. D. Baker which emphasizes his long, close friendship with Abraham Lincoln. It concludes with the following sentence:
Within a mounded circle, under a table in inscribed marble, on the crest of Laurel Hill Cemetery, once christened Lone Mountain, and dedicated to the hope of immortality by Colonel Baker himself, lies the dust of the Gray Eagle, the singularly gifted orator and devoted Unionist of the Pacific Coast.
Since that paragraph was written the lure of real-estate values has effaced Lone Mountain (Laurel Hill) Cemetery. For over eighty years the body of Colonel Baker lay in the topmost grave of its highest hill, under an inscribed marble table in the center of a grass-carpeted mound twenty-five feet in diameter which was upheld by a three-foot retaining wall of rock—a beautiful and dignified setting overlooking the city. All this, erected in 1861, by public subscription, is now scattered.
On May 21, 1940, in the presence of a few members of the Colonel E. D. Baker Camp, Sons of Civil War Veterans, the rusted iron casket was removed from its small brick tomb. It was transferred to a new, officers' section in the National Cemetery in San Francisco's Presidio and buried on a sloping hillside near the Golden Gate. The remains of Mary Lee Baker again lie anonymously by those of her husband. Marking the site there now stands, in honorable but poignant contrast to the original monument, a regulation-size head-stone, two feet high, inscribed: "Edward Dickinson Baker, Sr., California, Colonel U. S. Army, October 21, 1861." Next to it stands an identical stone marked: "Edward Dickinson Baker, Jr., Illinois, Major U. S. Army, January 15, 1883."
Major Edward D. Baker, Jr., whose remains were transferred on the same date from Laurel Hill Cemetery, is identified by a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to A. G. Curtin, Governor of Pennsylvania, on May 26, 1862:
The bearer of this, Edward D. Baker, is the son of my very dear friend Col. Baker, who fell at Balls Bluff. He thinks you might be induced to make him a field officer in the Pennsylvania Regiment. Disclaiming all wish to interfere in a matter so purely belonging to you and your state, I still say I would be much pleased, if he could be obliged.[1]
A street in San Francisco, a fort inside its harbor, and a town and county in Oregon were named for Colonel Baker. Editorials, petitions, and projects for a statue appeared in San Francisco newspapers almost until 1900. Tombstones and monuments are of the earth's changing surface; whatever is worth remembering of Colonel Baker is secure in the history of California and in the immortal story of Abraham Lincoln.
- ↑ Gilbert A. Tracy, ed., Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917), p. 208.