In 1839, Baylor moved to La Grange, Texas. He quickly made a name for himself in Texas law as judge of the Third Judicial District of the Congress of the Republic of Texas, and was appointed to the Supreme Court of the Republic of Texas as an associate justice in 1841, a position he would hold until the annexation of Texas in 1845. After Texas attained statehood, Baylor was appointed by Governor J. P. Henderson as judge over the Third Judicial District of the new state, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1863. He lived the remainder of his life in Gay Hill, Texas. Baylor was one of the first officers of the Texas Baptist Educational Society and, in 1844, along with Reverend William Tryon and Reverend James Huckins, sent a petition to the Congress of the Republic of Texas asking the nation to charter a Baptist university. In response to this petition, The Republic of Texas produced an Act of Congress that was signed on February 1, 1845, by Anson Jones, providing the charter that yielded Baylor University and, later, the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. In the 1850's, Baylor was an influential leader in the Xenophobic and White Nativist Texas Know Nothing Party and was named the Texas Know Nothing Party's "Grand President." During the Civil War, Baylor supported the Confederacy and the grounds of Baylor University, then in Independence, were used as a training and staging ground for the Confederate Army. Baylor's nephew, John R. Baylor, was a prominent leader in the Confederacy serving as both a governor and later as a member of the Confederate Congress. Consistent with the law of Texas at the time, in his role as a judge he once punished an abolitionist harboring an escaped slave. Another man was punished for not returning a borrowed slave promptly. In 1854, Judge Baylor sentenced a slave to hang for arson. In 1856, he ordered the execution of yet another slave. In 1857, he levied a heavy fine on a white person who bought some bacon from a slave. And in 1862, as the Civil War raged, he ordered the execution of a slave for “intent to rape a white female.”
Personal life
Baylor was a Mason from 1825 until his death. He never married and had no children, although he was close to his nephew John Baylor. Like many of his time, Baylor believed slavery was a God-ordained reality. He initially owned two slaves to work his small farm and, according to tax records, by 1860 he owned at least 20 slaves valued at more than $18,000. He died on January 6, 1874, and was buried in Independence, Texas, on the original site of Baylor University. In 1917, his remains were exhumed and transferred to the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas.
