● ● ●  the railroad would pass. Hill, who by this time had sold the Patriot, now started a rival paper known as Hill’s New-Hampshire Patriot to fight the Radicals on behalf of the railroads. The bitterness of the ensuing factional struggle was reflected in the villainous invective and slander which accompanied it.¹⁰¹ When Hill attacked young Baker with intemperate animosity, Mary Baker had an early lesson in the ways and means of character defamation.

Of course, Hill finally won. The day of the railroads had come, and despite a last-minute attempt by Baker to repeal all laws granting to corporations the right to take land without the owners’ consent, the line was completed and the first passenger train rolled into Concord on September 6, 1842, one year after Albert Baker’s death.

Before that untimely event, however, the young man had rolled up a creditable legislative record and had become a leading figure in Democratic state politics. On at least one issue he was highly conservative, and that was the question of slavery, which was coming increasingly and painfully to the fore.

Back in 1820, the year of the Missouri Compromise, the New Hampshire Legislature almost unanimously passed a resolution that the “existence of slavery within the United States is a great moral as well as political evil, the toleration of which can be justified by necessity alone, and the further extension ought to be prevented.”¹⁰² But since then various factors, including Nat Turner’s slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, the firebrand tactics of the northern abolitionists, and commercial self-interest, had turned the tide of feeling toward a more sympathetic view of the white South. Both Mark and Albert Baker looked on the abolitionists as disrupters of the Union, and in this respect at least  ● ● ●