This inner circle did not remain united for long, for tensions developed between Senators Barton and Benton. Barton’s followers were primarily merchants and landowners, while Benton gradually aligned himself with the agrarian disciples of Jacksonian democracy. A tragic duel made the split irrevocable. In the course of his legal practice, Bates’s partner, Joshua Barton, found proof of corruption in the office of Benton’s friend and ally, Missouri’s land surveyor-general, William Rector. Rector challenged Barton to a duel in which Barton was killed. Bates was devastated by the loss of his friend. He and David Barton went public with Joshua Barton’s indictment implicating Benton as well as Rector. They demanded an investigation from U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, Chase’s mentor and friend. The investigation sustained most of the charges and resulted in President Monroe’s dismissal of Rector. The affair came to an end, but the rift between Barton and Benton never healed.
Proponents of Barton, including Bates, eventually coalesced into the Whig Party, while the Bentonites became Democrats. The Whigs favored public support for internal improvements designed to foster business in a new market economy. Their progressive agenda included protective tariffs, and a national banking system to develop and strengthen the resources of the country. The Democrats, with their base of power in the agrarian South, resisted these measures, appealing instead to the interests of the common man against the bankers, the lawyers, and the merchants.
Despite his immersion in the whirlpool of Missouri politics, an event occurred in 1823 that altered Bates’s life and forever shifted his focus—he fell in love with and married Julia Coalter. Thereafter, home and family domesticity eclipsed politics as the signal pleasure of his life. His first child, named Joshua Barton Bates in honor of his slain partner, was born in 1824. Over the next twenty-five years, sixteen more children were born.
When Julia was young, family friend John Darby recalled, she was “a most beautiful woman.” She came from a distinguished South Carolina family that settled in Missouri when she was a child. Her father was a wealthy man, having invested successfully in land. The husband of one of her sisters became governor of South Carolina. Another sister was married to the chancellor of the state of Missouri. A third sister married Hamilton Rowan Gamble, who served as a justice on Missouri’s supreme court and wrote a dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case. Despite these connections, Julia had little interest in politics. Her attentions were fully focused on her family. Her surviving letters, unlike those of Frances Seward, said nothing about the issues of the day, concentrating instead on her children’s activities, their eating habits, their games, their broken bones. Her entire being, Darby observed, “was calculated to impart happiness around the domestic circle.”
She succeeded in this beyond ordinary measure, providing Edward with what their friends uniformly described as an ideal home life. The enticements of public office gradually diminished in his contented eyes. When he sought and won a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1826, three years after his marriage, his pleasure in the victory was dimmed by the necessity of leaving home and hearth. Even short absences from Julia proved painful for him. “I have never found it so difficult to keep up my spirits,” he confessed to her at one point when she had gone to visit friends for several days. “Indeed, ever since you left me, I have felt a painful consciousness of being alone. At court I can do well enough, but when I come home, to bed or board, I feel so utterly solitary, that I can enjoy neither eating nor sleeping. I mention these things not because it is either proper or becoming to feel them, but because they are novel to me. I never before had such a restless, dissatisfied, indefinable feeling; and never wish to have it again.”
Disquiet returned a hundredfold when he departed on the lonely journey to take up his congressional seat in Washington, leaving his pregnant wife and small son at home. Writing from various taverns and boardinghouses along the way, he confessed that he was in “something of a melancholy and melting mood.” There was a “magic” in her loveliness, which left him “like a schoolboy lover” in the absence of his “dear Julia.” Now, after only a few weeks away, he was moved to cry, “a plague upon the vanity of petty ambition! Were I great enough to sway the destinies of the nation, the meed of ambition might be worth the sacrifice which it requires; but a mere seat in Congress as a subaltern member, is a contemptible price for the happiness which we enjoy with each other. It was always your opinion, & now I feel it to be true.”
His spirits revived somewhat when he settled into a comfortable Washington boardinghouse and took his seat in Congress alongside David Crockett, James Polk, and Henry Clay. Though Bates seldom went out to parties, preferring to spend his nights reading and writing to his wife, he was thrilled, he told Julia, to spend a private evening with Henry Clay. “That man grows upon me more and more, every time I see him,” he wrote. “There is an intuitive perception about him, that seems to see & understand at a glance, and a winning fascination in his manners that will suffer none to be his enemies who associate with him.”
The main issues that confronted Bates during his congressional term concerned the disposition of western lands, internal improvements, and the tariff. On each of these issues, Senators Benton and Barton were antagonists. Benton had introduced a bill under which the federal government would make its lands available to settlers at a price so low that it was almost free. Cheap land, he argued, would bridle the rampant speculation that profited the few over the many. Barton countered with the claim that such cheap land would depress the entire Western economy. Bates sided with Barton, voting against the popular bill.
During the dispute over public lands, Bates published a pamphlet denouncing Benton that so angered “Old Bullion,” as he was known, that the two men did not speak for nearly a quarter of a century. “My piece is burning into his reputation,” Bates told Julia, “like aquafortis upon iron—the mark can never be effaced.” Beyond his open quarrel with Benton, Bates got along well with his colleagues. His natural warmth and easy manner created respect and affection. Night sessions he found particularly amusing and intriguing, despite the “roaring disorder” of people “hawking, coughing, thumping with their canes & kicking about spit boxes.” The hall, suffused with candlelight from members’ desks, and from the massive chandelier suspended from the domed ceiling, “exhibit[ed] a most magnificent appearance.”
Nonetheless, these few moments of pleasure could not compensate for missing the birth of his first daughter, Nancy. “As yet I only know that she is,” he lamented, “I long to know how she is—what she is—who she is like…whether she has black eyes or gray—a long nose or a pug—a wide mouth or a narrow one—and above all, whether she has a pretty foot,” for without a pretty foot, like her mother’s, he predicted, she could never make “a fine woman.”
“Oh! How I long to see & press you to my bosom,” he told Julia, “if it were but for a moment. Sometimes, I almost realize the vision—I see you with such vivid and impassioned precision, that the very form developing is in my eye.” In letter after letter, the physical immediacy of their relationship becomes clear. Responding to Julia’s admission of her own downcast spirits, he wrote: “O, that I could kiss the tear from that cheek whose cheerful brightness is my sunshine.”
Still, public life enticed him, and at the behest of his friends and supporters, Bates agreed to run for a second term. Despite his great personal popularity, he lost his bid for reelection in the wake of the great Jacksonian landslide that gave Benton and the Democrats complete control of Missouri politics. During the last days of his term, the usually soft-spoken Bates got into a heated argument with Congressman George McDuffie of South Carolina on the floor of the House. McDuffie ridiculed him personally, and Bates impulsively challenged the South Carolinian to a duel. Fortunately, McDuffie declined, agreeing to apologize for his offensive language. Years later, reflecting on the Southern “Code” of dueling, Bates’s friend Charles Gibson maintained that as wicked as the code was, the vulgar public behavior following
the demise of the practice was worse still. “The code preserved a dignity, justice and decorum that have since been lost,” he argued, “to the great detriment of the professions, the public and the government. The present generation will think me barbarous but I believe that some lives lost in protecting the tone of the bar and the press, on which the Republic itself so largely depends, are well spent.”
As the thirty-six-year-old Bates packed up his documents and books to return home, he assured Julia that he was genuinely relieved to have lost. While he loved his friends “as much as any man,” he wrote, “for happiness I look alone to the bosom of my own family.” Not a day passed, he happily reported, that he did not “divide and subdivide” his time by making plans for their future. He meant first of all “to take & maintain a station in the front rank” of his profession, so that he could provide for his family all the “various little comforts & amusements we have often talked over & wished we possessed.”
Months and years slipped by, and Bates remained true to his word. Though he served two terms in the state legislature, where he was regarded as “the ablest and most eloquent member of that body,” he decided in 1835 to devote his full attention to his flourishing law practice, rather than run for reelection. Throughout the prime of his life, therefore, Bates found his chief gratification in home and family.
His charming diary, faithfully recorded for more than three decades, provides a vivid testament to his domestic preoccupations. While ruminations upon ambition, success, and power are ubiquitous in Chase’s introspective diary, Bates focused on the details of everyday life, the comings and goings of his children, the progress of his garden, and the social events in his beloved St. Louis. His interest in history, he once observed, lay less in the usual records of wars and dynasties than in the more neglected areas of domestic laws, morals, and social manners.
The smallest details of his children’s lives fascinated him. When Ben, his fourteenth child, was born, he noted the “curious fact” that the child had a birthmark on the right side of his belly resembling a frog. Attempting to explain “one of the Mysteries in which God has shrouded nature,” he recalled that a few weeks before the child was born, while his wife lay on the bed reading, she was unpleasantly startled by the sudden appearance of a tree frog. At the time, “she was lying on her left side, with her right hand resting on her body above the hip,” Bates noted, “and in the corresponding part of the child’s body is the distinct mark of the frog.”
Faith in the powers of God irradiates the pages of his diary. His son Julian, a “bad stammerer from his childhood”—the family had begun to fear that “he was incurable”—miraculously began one day to speak without the slightest hesitation. “A new faculty,” Bates recorded, “is given to one who seemed to have been cut off from one of the chief blessings of humanity.” In return for this restoration to speech, Bates hoped that his son would eventually “qualify himself to preach the Gospel,” for he had “never seen in any youth a more devoted piety.” Sadly, the “miracle” did not last long; within six months Julian was stuttering again.
On rare occasions when his wife left to visit relatives, Bates mourned her absence from the home where she was both “Mistress & Queen.” He reminded himself that he must not “begrudge her the short respite” from the innumerable tasks of caring for a large family. Giving birth to seventeen children in thirty-two years, Julia was pregnant throughout nearly all her childbearing years. Savoring the warmth of his family circle, Bates felt the loss of each child who grew up and moved away. “This day,” he noted in 1851, “my son Barton, with his family—wife and one child—moved into his new house…. He has lived with us ever since his marriage in March 1849. This is a serious diminution of our household, being worried that, as our children are fast growing up, & will soon scatter about, in search of their own futures, we may soon expect to have but a little family in a large house.”
The diaries Bates kept also reveal a deep commitment to his home city of St. Louis. Every year, on April 29, he marked the anniversary of his first arrival in the town. As the years passed, he witnessed “mighty changes in population, locomotion, commerce and the arts,” which made St. Louis the jewel of the great Mississippi Valley and would, he predicted, eventually make it “the ruling city of the continent.” His entries proudly record the first gas illumination of the streets, the transmission of the first telegraph between St. Louis and the eastern cities, and the first day that a railroad train moved west of the Mississippi.
Bates witnessed a great fire in 1849 that reduced the commercial section of the city to rubble and endured a cholera epidemic that same year that killed more than a hundred each day, hearses rolling through the muddy streets from morning till night. In one week alone, he recorded, the total deaths numbered nearly a thousand. His own family pulled through “in perfect health,” in part, he believed, because they rejected the general opinion of avoiding fruits and vegetables. He agonized over the medical ignorance about the origin of the disease or its remedy. “No two of them agree with each other, and no one agrees with himself two weeks at a time.” As the epidemic worsened, scores of families left the city in fear of contagion, but Bates refused to do so. To a friend who had offered sanctuary on his plantation outside of the city, he explained: “I am one of the oldest of the American inhabitants, have a good share of public respect & confidence, and consequently, some influence with the people. I hold it to be a sacred duty, that admits of no compromise, to stand my ground and be ready to do & to bear my part…. I should be ashamed to leave St. Louis under existing circumstances…. It would be an abandonment of a known duty.”
Beyond commentary on his family and his city, Bates filled the pages of his diary with observations of the changing seasons, the progress of his flowers, and the phases of the moon. He celebrated the first crocus each year, his elm trees shedding seed, oaks in full tassel, tulips in their prime. So vivid are his descriptions of his garden that the reader can almost hear the rustling leaves of fall, or “the frogs…croaking, in full chorus” that filled the spring nights. With an acute eye he observed that plants change color with age. Meticulously noting variation and difference, he never felt that he was repeating the same patterns of activity year after year. He was a contented man.
However, he never fully abandoned his interest in politics. His passion for the development of the West led him to a major role in the River and Harbor Convention called in the late 1840s to protest President Polk’s veto of the Whig-sponsored internal improvements bill. The assembly is said to have been “the largest Convention ever gathered in the United States prior to the Civil War.” More than 5,000 accredited delegates and countless other spectators joined Chicago’s 16,000 inhabitants, filling every conceivable room in every hotel, boardinghouse, and private dwelling. Desperate visitors to the overcrowded city even sought places to sleep aboard boats in Chicago’s harbor.
Former and future governors, congressmen, and senators were there, including Tom Corwin from Ohio, Thurlow Weed and New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley from New York, and Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, who was chosen to serve as secretary of the convention. New York was also represented by Democrat David Dudley Field, designated to present Polk’s arguments against federal appropriations for internal improvements in the states. Also in attendance, Greeley wrote, was “Hon. Abraham Lincoln, a tall specimen of an Illinoian, just elected to Congress from the only Whig District in the State.” It was Lincoln’s first mention in a paper of national repute.
“No one who saw [Lincoln] can forget his personal appearance at that time,” one delegate recalled years later. “Tall, angular and awkward, he had on a short-waisted, thin swallow-tail coat, a short vest of same material, thin pantaloons, scarcely coming down to his ankles, a straw hat and a pair of brogans with woolen socks.”
On the first day, Edward Bates was chosen president of the convention, much to his “deep astonishment,” given the presence of so many eminent delegates. “If notice had been give
n me of any intention to nominate me for the presidency of the Convention, I should have shrunk from it with dread & repressed the attempt,” Bates confided to his diary. He was apprehensive that party politics would render the convention unsuccessful and that he would then bear the brunt of responsibility for its failure. Yet so skillfully and impartially did he conduct the proceedings and so eloquently did he make the case for internal improvements and development of the inland waterways that he “leaped at one bound into national prominence.” On a much smaller scale, Lincoln impressed the audience with his clever rebuttal of the arguments against public support for internal improvements advanced by Democrat Field.
At the close of the convention, Bates delivered the final speech. No complete record of this speech was made, for once Bates began speaking, the reporters, Weed confessed, were “too intent and absorbed as listeners, to think of Reporting.” “No account that can now be given will do it justice,” Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune the following week. In clear, compelling language, Bates described the country poised at a dangerous crossroad “between sectional disruption and unbounded prosperity.” He called on the various regions of the nation to speak in “voices of moderation and compromise, for only by statesmanlike concession could problems of slavery and territorial acquisition be solved so the nation could move on to material greatness.” While he was speaking, Weed reported, “he was interrupted continually by cheer upon cheer; and at its close, the air rung with shout after shout, from the thousands in attendance.” Overwhelmed by the reaction, Bates considered the speech “the crowning act” of his life, received as he “never knew a speech received before.”
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