Edward Bates

Edward Bates (September 4, 1793 – March 25, 1869) was an American lawyer, politician, and judge who represented Missouri in the United States House of Representatives and served as Attorney General of the United States under President Abraham Lincoln. A member of the influential Bates family, he was the first U.S. Cabinet appointee from a state west of the Mississippi River. Over a long public career, he became a leading Whig in Missouri, later aligned with the American and Republican parties, and played a significant though often constrained role in the Lincoln administration during the Civil War.

Bates was born on September 4, 1793, in Goochland County, Virginia, into a large family of modest means but growing regional prominence. In his youth he received a basic education and, like many young men of his generation, was shaped by the aftermath of the American Revolution and the early national period. As a young man he moved west, first to Kentucky and then farther west to the Missouri Territory, part of the broader migration of Virginians seeking opportunity on the frontier. By the late 1810s he had settled in St. Louis, then a rapidly developing river town, where he read law and was admitted to the bar, establishing a legal practice that quickly made him one of the leading attorneys in the region.

Bates’s legal and political careers advanced together as Missouri moved toward statehood. In 1820 he was appointed the first attorney general of the new state of Missouri, marking his emergence as a key legal figure in the trans-Mississippi West. He also entered elective politics, serving in the Missouri House of Representatives and later in the Missouri Senate over the next several decades. In national politics he was elected as a representative from Missouri to the United States House of Representatives, serving a single term, and became a prominent member of the Whig Party, which attracted many of the state’s commercial and professional elites. In his private practice he handled a wide range of civil and criminal matters and gained particular note for representing Lucy Delaney in a successful freedom suit, an important case in which an enslaved woman sued for and won her liberty in the Missouri courts.

With the collapse of the Whig Party in the early 1850s, Bates, like many former Whigs, searched for a new political home. He briefly joined the American Party (Know-Nothings), reflecting his nativist and conservative inclinations, before gravitating toward the emerging Republican Party as the sectional crisis deepened. By 1860 he had become one of the four principal contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, drawing support especially from conservatives and former Whigs. Influential editor Horace Greeley initially backed Bates’s candidacy but later shifted his support to Abraham Lincoln, who ultimately secured the nomination and the presidency. Although disappointed, Bates remained an important figure within the party’s conservative wing.

After Lincoln’s election, Bates was appointed Attorney General of the United States in 1861, at the outset of the American Civil War, and he held that office until 1864. At age 68, he was the oldest of Lincoln’s high-level appointees and the first Cabinet member drawn from a state west of the Mississippi River. His office operated in a very different institutional environment from that of later attorneys general: there was no Department of Justice until 1870, and Bates oversaw only a small staff of about six. His primary responsibilities were to issue formal legal opinions at the request of the president and Cabinet and to handle occasional cases before the Supreme Court. He had no supervisory authority over U.S. attorneys around the country, while other departments, such as the Interior and Treasury, controlled much of the federal court and claims work. In a Cabinet filled with experienced lawyers, his colleagues seldom sought his formal opinions, and Lincoln did not give him special assignments or rely on him in making Supreme Court appointments, limiting his practical influence.

Despite these constraints, Bates played a role in shaping several important legal and constitutional questions during the war. He supported and helped implement some of the administration’s early war measures, including the arbitrary arrest of suspected southern sympathizers and seditious northerners, reflecting his strong Unionism and willingness to endorse broad executive authority in wartime. One of his most significant legal opinions concerned Black citizenship. In 1862, after customs officials detained a ship sailing out of New Jersey because its African American captain was presumed ineligible to be a U.S. citizen under the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, Bates issued an opinion, published in mid-December, recognizing free African Americans as citizens of the United States. This view directly contradicted Dred Scott v. Sandford. When former Speaker Robert Charles Winthrop pressed him for clarification, Bates affirmed that citizenship rights were the same regardless of race and that state laws restricting the migration and settlement of free Blacks were unconstitutional. At the same time, however, Bates did not support full civil and political equality for Blacks and opposed some of the more radical measures of the emerging antislavery program.

As Lincoln’s policies evolved toward open emancipation and the enlistment of Black soldiers, Bates increasingly found himself at odds with the administration’s direction and with the Radical Republicans. He disagreed with Lincoln over the Emancipation Proclamation and the recruitment of African Americans into the Union Army, positions that contributed to his growing marginalization within the Cabinet. His tenure as attorney general thus drew mixed reviews: he was important in carrying out some of the administration’s earlier war policies but became less central as the war and the administration’s goals became more radical. In 1864, when Chief Justice Roger B. Taney died, Bates hoped to be named to the Supreme Court, but Lincoln instead nominated Salmon P. Chase as Chief Justice. Feeling passed over and in declining health from late 1863, Bates resigned from the Cabinet later in 1864 and was succeeded as attorney general by James Speed, a Kentucky lawyer aligned with the Radical wing of the party.

After leaving national office, Bates returned to Missouri and resumed his role as a leading conservative voice in state politics, though he did not seek elective office again. He became deeply involved in the struggle over the Missouri constitution of 1865, particularly objecting to the stringent “ironclad oath” required as proof of loyalty and to the temporary disfranchisement of former rebel sympathizers. While he opposed slavery’s continuation, he strongly criticized what he regarded as punitive and destabilizing measures in the proposed constitution. Bates wrote seven essays arguing against its adoption, but the constitution was ratified and took effect. It abolished slavery in Missouri, doing so three weeks before the United States Congress proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery nationwide. In his later years he largely retired from active politics, though he continued to comment on public affairs in local newspapers and remained a respected elder statesman in St. Louis.

Edward Bates died in St. Louis, Missouri, on March 25, 1869. He was buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery, where his grave marks the resting place of one of the most prominent legal and political figures of Missouri’s early statehood and of a key, if often cautious, participant in the constitutional struggles of the Civil War era.