John Denison Baldwin (September 28, 1809 – July 8, 1883) was an American politician, Congregationalist minister, newspaper editor, and popular anthropological writer.

A "close friend" of both Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson,[3] Senators from Massachusetts, Baldwin served for three terms in the House, promoting full equal rights for black Americans in the wake of the Civil War.

The elder, John Stanton Baldwin, served as a captain in the Fifty-first Massachusetts Regiment in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Baldwin's anthropological writing posited the origins of human civilization as arising among an Arabian or Northeast African people, the Cushites, in pre-historic times.

[5] He did, however, still subscribe to the idea that these "Mound Builders" were not the same as the American Indian inhabitants of the region at that time, who he believed were a separate race originating in Asia.