Abraham Baldwin (November 22, 1754 – March 4, 1807) was an American minister, patriot, politician, and Founding Father who signed the United States Constitution.

[6] Two years later at the conclusion of the war, Baldwin declined an offer from Yale's new president, Ezra Stiles, to become Professor of Divinity.

[5] Encouraged by his former commanding officer General Nathanael Greene, who had acquired the plantation at Mulberry Grove where Eli Whitney would later invent the cotton gin, Baldwin moved to Georgia.

He was recruited by fellow Yale alumnus Governor Lyman Hall, another transplanted New Englander, to develop a state education plan.

Josiah Meigs was hired to succeed Baldwin as first acting president and oversee the inaugural class of students.

The first buildings of the college were architecturally modeled on Baldwin's and Meigs's alma mater of Yale where they both had taught.

He was able to mediate between the rougher frontiersmen, perhaps because of his childhood as the son of a blacksmith, and the aristocratic planter elite who dominated the coastal Lowcountry.

Later that month the Savannah Republican and Savannah Evening Ledger reprinted an obituary that had first been published in a Washington, D.C., newspaper: "He originated the plan of The University of Georgia, drew up the charter, and with infinite labor and patience, in vanquishing all sorts of prejudices and removing every obstruction, he persuaded the assembly to adopt it.