The Battle of Ball's Bluff, October 21, 1861

On October 21, 1861, Col. Edward Dickinson Baker (right) became the only sitting U.S. senator to die in battle, leading his troops at the Battle of Ball's Bluff in Virginia. Six months earlier, the Secretary of War authorized him to organize an infantry regiment to be taken as part of the quota from California. Baker organized the California Brigade (mostly from the Philadelphia area) and served as its colonel. Shortly afterward, he received command of a brigade in General Charles Pomeroy Stone's division, guarding Potomac River fords north of Washington. Baker's death was dramatized in "Death of Col. Baker," a steel engraving (left) by H. Wright Smith after drawing by F.O.C. Darley, copyrighted by Hurlbut Williams & Co. (Photos from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Col. Baker is buried in San Francisco National Cemetery in California, where I took this photo of his tombstone. The back of the tombstone describes him as "eminent San Francisco lawyer" and "United States senator from Oregon." Baker and Abraham Lincoln became friends when both lived in Illinois, and Lincoln thought so much of the friendship and the man that he named his second son Edward Baker Lincoln.  Col. Baker and his family lived in San Francisco from 1851 to 1860, when they moved to Oregon so he could become a Republican senator from the state. His son and namesake, who escorted his father's body to Washington, DC, after Ball's Bluff, died while in serving in the Army in Vancouver, Washington.