Well known in his own time as a lawyer and jurist, Joseph Glover Baldwin is best remembered today as the author of satirical and realistic tales and sketches about the boom times of the Mississippi-Alabama frontier, the area that had been on the southwestern border of the United States until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 added more territory. Many of these tales and sketches were collected by Baldwin and published as The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853). For this book alone, he is often discussed by historians and critics as a leading humorist of the Old Southwest.

Born in Friendly Grove Factory, Virginia, Baldwin was the son of Joseph Clarke and Eliza Cook Baldwin, both of whose ancestors had settled in Milford, Connecticut, early in the seventeenth century. Joseph Clarke Baldwin moved from Connecticut to Winchester, Virginia, early in the nineteenth century to enter business for himself. In...