dward Bates, U.S. attorney general, was born in
Goochland County, Virginia, to Caroline Woodson Bates and Thomas Fleming Bates,
a merchant and planter. Young Edward was educated in Maryland by tutors and at a
private academy. He served as a sergeant in the War of 1812, using the same
musket that his father had used in the Revolutionary War. Honorably discharged
in late 1813, he joined his older brother Frederick in St. Louis, where he
studied law under the Missouri Territory’s most prestigious lawyer, Rufus
Easton. In 1816 he passed the bar exam and established a successful law
practice.
Bates’s rise in Missouri politics was rapid
before it stalled for several years. In 1820 he was elected as a delegate to the
state constitutional convention and was soon appointed as the state’s first
attorney general. Two years he won a seat in the state legislature, then in 1826
was elected as the state’s only U.S. representative. As the second party
system developed in the 1820s and 1830s, Bates’s nationalist views, including
an advocacy of federal monies for internal improvements, led him to side with
the National Republicans, then the Whigs. In Missouri, however, the Jacksonian
Democrats gained preeminence under Thomas Hart Benton, causing Bates to lose his
Congressional seat in the 1828 election. He resumed his law practice, but was
elected to the state senate in 1830, then to the state house in 1834. Missouri’s
Democratic majority still blocked greater political success for him. In 1850 he
turned down an offer to serve as secretary of war in the Whig administration of
President Millard Fillmore.
Like Abraham Lincoln and others, it was the
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that induced Bates to return to politics. He was not
an abolitionist; rather, he had endorsed voluntary manumission by slaveowners
and colonization of the freed slaves outside the United States. He was riled,
however, by the new federal statute’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise line
which had banned slavery north of 36° 30´ N. Since the Republican party struck
him as too radical, he cooperated with the American (Know-Nothing) party while
continuing to identify himself as a Whig, even after the party’s collapse. In
September 1856 he presided at the Whig party’s final national convention,
which endorsed the American party’s nomination of former-president Millard
Fillmore for president.
In early 1860 Bates found himself the
presidential favorite of conservative Republicans and, more unexpectedly, of
radical abolitionist Horace Greeley, who was simply trying to stop the
nomination of Senator William Henry Seward, the front-runner. Bates received 10
percent in the initial tally before Abraham Lincoln surged to capture the
nomination on the third ballot. After the election, Bates accepted an offer from
Lincoln to become U.S. attorney general. Bates wrote a legal defense of Lincoln’s
suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and successfully defended the
administration’s naval blockade before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Increasingly, though, the president and his
attorney general were at odds over policy, with Bates opposing Lincoln’s use
of martial law and military trials against civilians, the admission of West
Virginia as a state, and the employment of black troops, while only reluctantly
accepting the Emancipation Proclamation. The two men also took separate sides
concerning the tumultuous political situation in Missouri, with Bates favoring
the conservatives and Lincoln leaning toward the radicals. Bates suffered a mild
stroke in May 1864 and resigned later that year, effective December 1. He was
disappointed when Lincoln bypassed him to name Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase
to the vacant position of chief justice of the Supreme Court. Returning to
Missouri, Bates supported the lenient Reconstruction policies of President
Andrew Johnson.