Question

Character sketch of Robert Baldwin.

Answer 1

Answer:

Robert Baldwin's grandfather, also Robert Baldwin ("Robert the emigrant") moved to Upper Canada from Ireland in 1799. His father was William Warren Baldwin (April 25, 1775 – January 8, 1844).

The Baldwin family was a prominent one. Robert Baldwin counted among his cousins such influential Upper Canadians as the Anglican bishop Maurice Scollard Baldwin, Toronto mayor Robert Baldwin Sullivan and the Irish-Catholic leader Connell James Baldwin. The Russell-Willcocks-Baldwin family formed an elite "compact" much like the infamous "Family Compact" led by John Beverley Robinson against whom they fought.[2]

Robert Baldwin, Esquire, Barrister, of York (now Toronto) married his cousin Augusta Elizabeth Sullivan, daughter of Daniel Sullivan, on May 3, 1827. The couple had four children, two sons and two daughters. Augusta Elizabeth died January 11, 1836. Robert Baldwin died December 9, 1858.[3]

Robert Baldwin is the grandfather of Frederick Walker Baldwin, a Canadian aviation pioneer and partner of the famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Robert Baldwin is also the grandfather of Robert Baldwin Ross, a French born journalist and art critic and literary executor of Oscar Wilde.

Political principles

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Alfred Laliberté's Robert Baldwin sculpture in front of Parliament Building (Quebec)

First principles

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Baldwin’s political principles must be viewed in the context of the eighteenth century British “Country Party,” a loose coalition of Parliamentarians whose influence was also felt in the American Revolution and subsequent Jacksonian politics. The Country party embodied a civic humanism that drew on ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of citizenship, and the value of selfless political participation for the public good; those selfish few who placed their personal private interests before the public good threatened the moral commitment of all citizens to political participation. The civic humanism of the Country party rejected the commercial ideology of the royal "Court” party. The Country party had a republican emphasis that sought to preserve the power of a democratic parliament from the encroachments of the crown during the vast expansion of state administration, public credit, and the financial and commercial revolutions in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries. It was similar to American conceptions of “civic republicanism” as they developed after the revolution among Jacksonian Democrats, as well as in the Chartist movement in Britain in the late 1830s.