Review - "Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates" by Mark Neels

[Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates by Mark A. Neels (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024). Softcover, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xi,194/266. ISBN:978-0-8093-3949-5. $27.95]

Born and raised in Virginia, Edward Bates (1793-1869) moved to Missouri as a young man and quickly became intimately associated with the political establishment and early growth of that western state. Bates's older brother, Frederick, was a prominent figure in St. Louis, and the younger Bates parlayed that advantageous association, along with a thriving legal practice, to gain social and political prominence in the city. His public offices included one term in the U.S. House of Representatives and election to both houses of the state legislature. When Missouri became a state in 1820, Bates was involved in creating its constitution. He was also the state's first attorney general.

Edward Bates was, like Lincoln, a Whig and strong admirer of Henry Clay, and he established himself as a leading figure of the party in Missouri. Bates consistently supported federal funding for internal improvements, was deeply skeptical of national territorial expansionism, and he positioned himself in opposition to Democratic Party giants such as President Andrew Jackson and, closer to home, Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Of course, he's best known as Lincoln's choice for the cabinet post of attorney general of the United States. Largely overshadowed by other Civil War-period cabinet figures such as William Seward, Edwin Stanton, Salmon Chase, and Gideon Welles, six decades have passed since the publication of the most recent full biography, Marvin R. Cain's Lincoln's Attorney General: Edward Bates of Missouri (1965). Providing a much-needed updated perspective on Bates's life and public career is Mark Neels's Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates.

As a leading citizen of St. Louis, one present to witness (and even help shape) that place's growth from frontier post to great city, Bates was a strong believer in the idea that the emerging West, symbolized by St. Louis, would act as a mediating force in resolving the increasingly troubling sectional conflict between North and South. However, the local unity he deemed necessary to that grand project's success did not emerge as anticipated, with the massive mid-century influx of immigrants (primarily Germans) into the city and state commonly resisting cultural assimilation and widely espousing political views more radical than those held by the majority of native-born Missourians.

During the nationwide search for a Republican presidential candidate capable of winning in 1860, Bates's position as an antislavery conservative who had defended slaves in freedom courts on multiple occasions and fully supported congressional oversight over territorial slave policy made him an attractive alternative to divisive frontrunner William Seward. An interesting historical question surrounding Bates's political career is why his 1860 candidacy, which was deemed strong before the convention, foundered so quickly (he ranked last among serious contenders during the first balloting and his support level plunged even further with each one that followed). In seeking to answer why Bates failed to gain traction, Neels offers two suggestions. First, German-American Republicans, strong in Bates's Missouri and a powerful bloc in other places, denounced him as a nativist, citing his support of American Party candidate Millard Fillmore in 1856. To German leaders, that dalliance with nativist figures, however brief, made Bates persona non grata regardless of his own expressed views opposed to nativism. The second factor was strategic in nature. Bates, although he had several influential supporters at the Chicago convention, failed to employ a dedicated campaign manager (someone who could, like David Davis did for Lincoln, creatively promote his boss and hustle votes). It is up to the reader to decide whether those factors offer sufficient explanation, but the analysis is sound.

Throughout his public life, Bates's conservative disposition left him deeply skeptical of the breadth and strength of executive power. As the author reminds us, both Bates and Lincoln condemned what they saw as President Polk conducting the Mexican War without proper congressional approval and oversight, but Bates, though troubled by the prospect, seemed to generally agree with Lincoln that the Civil War was an extraordinary event that required extraordinary measures. The reader gets the impression that that reluctant philosophical concession, combined with Bates's ironclad loyalty to the administration, led the attorney general to support executive action in imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus during the opening months of the war (at least until Congress could convene). Congress later approved Lincoln's course of action, but the matter was not settled until passage of the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863. Still, Bates, who witnessed widespread reliance upon military tribunals from the more radical factions of the government along with Lincoln's own willingness to exceed the powers granted him by the act, remained disturbed for the rest of the war by the federal government's continued application of what he saw as arbitrary powers

Unfortunately for historians, Bates's capitol hill entanglements with early-war habeas corpus legal matters left him little opportunity to document his own private thoughts and official views on what was going on in St. Louis and the rest of Missouri in 1861, a critical time that saw the initiation of general hostilities and the state's governor deposed and replaced with Bates's own son-in-law, Hamilton Gamble. Bates was predictably pleased with Gamble's appointment, and both conservatives, according to Neels, envisioned a strong state-led partnership with the federal government.

Although Bates as attorney general was uniquely positioned to offer Lincoln legal advice, it remains unclear the degree to which Lincoln was influenced by the Missourian's opinions, especially where they differed with the president's own. Indeed, many readers of the book will likely find themselves hungering for more details about the personal interactions between the two and the nature/extent of their friendship. Perhaps the source material on the topic is scarce. On matters related to the Confiscation Acts and other controversial war policies and legislation, Lincoln bypassed Bates's concerns (for example, his desire to have civilian courts adjudicate property seizures) and aligned himself fully with the more amenable legal philosophy of respected international law expert Francis Lieber. In regard to the Emancipation Proclamation, the cabinet conservatives—Bates, who had freed his own slaves a decade before, Blair, and Welles—each held doubts about some aspect of it on matters of expediency or practicality. For his part, Bates, who did not believe whites and blacks could peacefully coexist as equal citizens, urged that mandatory colonization be attached to it and treaties forged with foreign countries that agreed to accept freedpeople and respect their fundamental freedoms. Regardless of his personal views, Bates accepted the inevitable but, like he did earlier when opposing certain parts of the Confiscation Acts, still urged Lincoln to task civilian courts, not military officers acting on War Department orders, with oversight over ground-level emancipation. He failed in that after Lincoln repeatedly refused to force the issue with Stanton. According to Neels, what bothered Bates most was that Lincoln's proclamation went forward while still leaving completely unresolved matters of compensation, colonization, and citizenship. Regardless of the lack of wider resolution, the author maintains that Bates made an important incremental contribution to defining citizenship during the postwar period. As outlined in his opinion on the 1862 David Selsey case, Bates's official position was that people of color who were born free in the U.S. were citizens, though he did not believe that that designation should be automatically extended to recently emancipated slaves.

According to Neels, Bates considered his role as attorney general to be distinctly advisory rather than proactive, and, to his credit, he studiously avoided taking part in the types of personal schemes and intrigues that other cabinet secretaries engaged in during Lincoln's presidency. The one departure that Neels cites was Bates's direct correspondence with a newly appointed department commander in Missouri (Major General Edwin Sumner). Bypassing proper channels, Bates offered the general, who gratefully accepted it, personal advice in regard to navigating military-civilian cooperation in the strife-torn state. As those things go, that was a pretty benign intervention.

In the book, Neels frequently mentions how physically and mentally exhausted Bates was by his post's work requirements, and interested readers might wish that the author provided a bit more detailed information about the day to day duties and activities of the attorney general that led to such overwork. For example, Bates's involvement and legal opinion in regard to the Prize Cases (a momentous early-1863 Supreme Court decision assessing the constitutionality of Lincoln's blockade declaration and the blockade's compliance with international law) is summarized in only a few short paragraphs. On the other hand, there are a number of weighty occasions upon which Bates himself provides only limited assistance to future historians. As the author notes, Bates's diary is silent on several events of key historical importance, including the day of the Emancipation Proclamation's signing, leaving posterity to largely speculate on his personal views and motivations.

In early 1864, Bates suffered a stroke and his family urged him to resign and devote himself to recovery, but Bates, loyal to Lincoln to the end, was determined to hang on until the president's reelection. After that was achieved, Bates resigned and returned to Missouri, where, instead of enjoying quiet retirement, he felt compelled by his conservative principles to oppose the increasingly radical late-war political movement in the state. In a series of public letters, Bates earnestly campaigned against the radical legislative convention that, instead of amending the existing state constitution (which Bates played a major part in drafting), sought, in extralegal (even, as critics contended, revolutionary) fashion to discard the document completely and replace it with their own ideologically aligned one. Bates vehemently opposed the proposed constitution's most extreme and punitive articles, especially those related to voting rights and wholesale unseating of public and private offices. The moderate campaign failed and the radical constitution narrowly passed, but Bates, though he would not live to see its full fruits, would have been happy to see the most obnoxious parts of the constitution successfully challenged in the 1870s by a fresh conservative reform alliance (the Liberal Republicans).

In Lincoln's Conservative Advisor, Mark Neels submits a convincing examination of the conservative Whig political beliefs and standards that consistently guided the public career of Edward Bates. Indeed, Neels's study of Bates's Civil War-era public life serves as an excellent lens through which to gain insights into ideological tensions within the nascent Republican Party between its radical and more conservative elements. As outlined in the book, Bates's relationship with slavery was complicated and life-long, and Neels handles his subject's personal and political evolution from slaveholder to antislavery advocate with judicious humanity. Though Bates, when acting as attorney general, did not envision a near future with black equality, he is credited with defining citizenship in a way that smoothed the path toward it. Though it will likely not raise the public profile of Bates to rank alongside the more popular giants of Lincoln's war cabinet, Neels' study nevertheless restores Bates's historical stature as a founding father of sorts for both the state of Missouri itself and its branch of the Whig party. In the end, what emerges as Edward Bates's most enduring public legacy was his relentless championing of due process, one of American society's most cherished civil rights. While the relatively concise nature of Neels's full biography does not offer the kind of monumental reappraisal found in other recent tome-length biographies of Lincoln's cabinet secretaries, it is more than thorough enough to convincingly convey a renewed appreciation of Edward Bates and his own just due as a major nineteenth-century historical and political figure.