Name George Smith Role Politician | Died 1879 | |
George Baldwin Smith (May 22, 1823 – September 18, 1879) was an American politician and lawyer.
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Legal and political career
Smith was admitted to the federal bar in to Southport, Wisconsin Territory (present-day (Kenosha, Wisconsin) in 1843. In 1845, he moved to the territorial capital of Madison, where he was appointed district attorney for Dane County in January 1846. He served in this role until 1852. He was elected to represent Dane County at the 1846 Wisconsin Constitutional Convention.
Smith was elected Attorney General of Wisconsin in 1853, serving from 1854 to 1856; he declined a re-nomination in 1855. After leaving office, his name was drawn into the scandal involving the fraudulent re-election of William A. Barstow in 1855.
He then served as mayor of Madison from 1858 to 1861. He represented the city in the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1859, 1864, and 1869. The Democratic Party selected him as their candidate to run for his district's congressional seat in 1864 and 1872, but he failed to win both times. Smith was also the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Senate in 1869, losing to Matthew H. Carpenter.
In 1876 he helped to supervise the canvass of electoral votes in Louisiana in the heavily-disputed 1876 presidential election. He was re-elected as mayor of Madison in 1877, serving from 1878 to his death in 1879.
Personal life and education
Smith was born in Parma Corners, New York to Reuben Smith and Betsy Page Smith; his mother died ten weeks after his birth. His family moved to Cleveland, Ohio in 1825, then to Medina, Ohio in 1827. Smith studied law with attorneys in Medina and Cleveland before moving with his father to Wisconsin in 1843.
Smith married Eugene Weed in 1844. They had five children, two of whom survived to adulthood: James and Anna.