● ● ● back in Hillsborough, where Franklin Pierce, now a senator, turned his law practice over to him before hurrying off to a special session of Congress summoned to meet the financial crisis.
The pattern of Albert Baker’s life for the few short years that remained was now established. Old Governor Pierce and his wife, both practically helpless, were put into his care by the young senator, who henceforth had to divide his time between Washington and Concord. The governor wrote Mark in 1838: “Sir your son the Lawyer I think is Doing well nothing is wanting but health . . . he is a young man of . . . correct habbits & gentlemanly Deportment a strict attendant of public worship when his health will admit.”99
But Albert Baker was more than that. His law practice increased rapidly, his name soon became known throughout the state as a young man of uncommon promise as well as correct “habbits,” and before long he was in the thick of politics. In March, 1839, he was elected to the state legislature and soon afterwards was on the Democratic State Committee.
It was now that he came into conflict with Isaac Hill, who had split with Jackson and was growing steadily more conservative. Class lines were drawing tighter under the impact of the depression and Van Buren’s stand on the banks. In a Fourth of July oration Albert Baker inveighed against money, privilege, oligarchy, bankers, monopoly, and corporations. He belonged to the Locofoco or “Radical” wing of the party, but in New Hampshire politics “Radical” meant something more like Populist—a radical determination to support the farmer’s rights.100 It was the farmers at Bow rather than the mill operatives at Sanbornton who had formed Baker’s picture of a class discriminated against by oligarchic legislation.
Earlier, on June 27, 1835, the day the Boston and Lowell Railroad opened, a corporation backed by Isaac Hill obtained a charter to build a railroad to Concord. As plans proceeded, Baker and his friends entered on a crusade to protect the rights of the farmers through whose land ● ● ●
99 Benjamin Pierce to Mark Baker, 5 April 1838, 1919.001.0036, LMC.
100 The view of conservative Whiggery was expressed in a Boston paper in 1834: “A farmer never looks as well, as when he has a hand upon the plough. With his HUGE PAW upon the statutes, what can he do? It is as proper for a blacksmith to attempt to repair watches, as a farmer, in general, to legislate.” [“Whigs versus Farmers,” Boston Morning Post, 30 July 1834, p. 2.]