Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates
Autor Mark A. Neelsen Limba Engleză Paperback – 6 noi 2024
Edward Bates, a founding father of Missouri and leader of the Missouri Whig Party, served as Abraham Lincoln’s attorney general during the American Civil War. The first full biography of Bates in nearly sixty years, Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor reveals a striking portrait of this complex figure in Lincoln’s cabinet.
Author Mark A. Neels begins with Bates’s youth in Virginia and follows him through his political and judicial career, his candidacy as a Republican presidential nominee in 1860, and his appointment to Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet as attorney general. Bates became an essential advisor to the president on key legal, military, and political matters from emancipation to civil liberties and equal rights, and his official opinion on Habeas Corpus would have a permanent effect on presidential authority and separation of powers. When Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, Bates found himself at odds with the president and the radical anti-slavery members of the cabinet. But more than simply highlighting the conflict within Lincoln’s administration, Bates’s example lays bare the strong philosophical divisions within the Republican Party during the Civil War era. These divisions were present at the party’s inception, crystallized during the war, and ultimately sparked a political realignment during Reconstruction. Bates was at the center of this divide for most of its existence, and in some cases assisted in its promulgation.
Bates, a fierce opponent of radical Republicanism, embodies the conflict among Republicans over issues of slavery and citizenship. In both judicial and elective office, he was compelled by a sense of duty to defy the populism of President Andrew Jackson and Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and, later, the proslavery forces that threatened to tear the nation apart. Though he had owned slaves, Bates represented at least one enslaved woman’s suit for freedom, released from bondage the people he had enslaved, and aided Lincoln in his efforts to end slavery nationwide. Bates’s opinion on citizenship as attorney general helped pave the way for equal rights. His opinions were not always popular with either his colleagues or the greater populace, but Bates remained true to his conservative principles—a set of values shared by a large swath of Lincoln’s Republican Party—which positioned him as a leading opponent of radical Republicanism during the Reconstruction Era.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780809339495
ISBN-10: 0809339498
Pagini: 270
Ilustrații: 17
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
ISBN-10: 0809339498
Pagini: 270
Ilustrații: 17
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: Southern Illinois University Press
Colecția Southern Illinois University Press
Notă biografică
Mark A. Neels was the recipient of the 2017 Hay-Nicolay Dissertation Prize. He holds a doctorate in history from Southern Illinois University and currently teaches history in St. Louis, Missouri.
Extras
INTRODUCTION
In July 1864, residents of Washington, D.C., assembled at the White House for the unveiling of artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s newest work: The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln. The painting was monumental. Measuring nine feet tall by fifteen feet wide, it received general praise for its depiction of a watershed moment in American history. On second glance, however, it becomes clear that the artist captured something else as well. Through his careful placement of key figures, Carpenter touched upon the fragmentary nature of the administration—a phenomenon he witnessed firsthand during his six months in residence at the White House.
Lincoln sits in the foreground, left of center—a position that speaks to his place in history as the “Great Emancipator.” Flanking him on his right and left, respectively, sit Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Secretary of State William Seward. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, meanwhile, stands behind Lincoln with arms crossed. The placement of these men emphasizes their importance in carrying out the policy of emancipation. Perhaps the most telling, though, is the position of the rest of the cabinet. Right of center sits Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, and behind him stands Interior Secretary Caleb Smith and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. The three men are separated from Lincoln and the aforementioned trio by the cabinet table, which serves as a literal representation of the ideological barrier existing between them. Lastly, at the far right, away from everyone else and nearly enveloped by shadows, sits Attorney General Edward Bates with arms crossed—a mirror image of Chase, but bearing an expression of disappointment and resignation.
Why does Bates seem so unenthusiastic about Lincoln’s crowning achievement? Did he possess a certain philosophical conviction missing among Lincoln’s other advisors? This book sets out to answer these questions by examining Bates’s life and, particularly, his role as a conservative advisor to Abraham Lincoln. In the end, more than simply highlighting the conflict within Lincoln’s administration, Bates’s example lays bare the strong philosophical divisions within the Republican Party during the Civil War era. These divisions were present at the party’s founding, crystallized during the war, and ultimately sparked a political realignment during Reconstruction. Bates was at the center of this divide for most of its existence, and in some cases he assisted in its promulgation. This is his story.
This study joins a seventy-year-long conversation around the role of ideology in American politics. At midcentury, Richard Hofstadter believed that American political parties, the politicians who represented them, and the people who supported them possessed no discernable ideological differences from one another. T. Harry Williams concurred, arguing that politicians in the Civil War era self-identified as conservative or radical not on ideological grounds but out of opposition to the agenda of the other party. Lee Benson took only a marginally different approach, noting that no ideology existed in the antebellum period, but also arguing that voters and politicians nurtured allegiances to political parties by harkening to voters’ ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious characteristics.
During the centennial of the Civil War and the bicentennial of American independence, historians began reevaluating these earlier arguments. Bernard Bailyn found that seventeenth-century ideas about power and liberty influenced Americans’ understanding of the relationship between government and the governed during the Revolution. Lance Banning observed that, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Jeffersonians brought these revolutionary ideals of nonpartisanship and virtuous government into the political mainstream. And Joel H. Silbey and Jean Baker extended these arguments to include the Democrats of the antebellum and Civil War years, with Silbey arguing that Democrats possessed ideas and values that they refused to compromise even at the sake of electoral defeat while Baker traced the origins of those ideals to the populist persuasions of the Jacksonian era. Eric Foner, Michael F. Holt, and Daniel Walker Howe applied these methods to the Whigs and Republicans, observing that a person’s residency North or South naturally created differences of opinion about the principle of republicanism that, in turn, led Americans, on the eve of war, to envision themselves as living within separate nations.
The discourse over political ideology in American history has not let up in the last thirty years. In the 1980s, William Gienapp’s pivotal study of the antebellum Republicans synthesized much of the work of earlier historians. For instance, he agreed with Foner and Holt that Republicans possessed a collective faith in classical republicanism, but he also echoed the midcentury scholars in observing that Republican leadership possessed a clear set of sectional values and strongly condemned the failure of the older political parties to provide solutions to major problems facing the nation. Lawrence Kohl made similar conclusions about the Jacksonian era, rejecting the notion that politics in this time was banal and finding that, as Americans built a new social order, political parties were integral to sorting out the ideals upon which that society would be built. In contrast, Aaron Astor, Joshua Lynn, and Adam I. P. Smith have each recently argued that the high-minded republican ideals to which antebellum conservatives clung were “imagined,” thus failing them as they confronted the pressures of unfolding events. In the absence of a true set of ideals, conservatives in the border states were instead driven by opposition to wartime extremism and a desire to maintain the racial hierarchy of the antebellum period.
At times, particularly early in his life, Edward Bates’s political affiliation was guided more by reaction than principle. His father and brothers were Jeffersonian; therefore, he was too. By the Jacksonian era, however, Bates had developed a distinct political philosophy. As Joyce Appleby has observed, Bates’s generation, born between 1776 and 1800, was forced by the destruction of their parents’ world to build their own society anew. They were free to imagine what the new United States might become. In doing so, they relied on their peers, as opposed to their parents, as role models. In a sense, the separation from Great Britain—the irrevocable break from the past—made this generation feel that America was a blank slate. They could hold on to the values of the past, or they could discard them altogether. Whichever way members of this generation went determined the radicalism and conservatism of the mid-nineteenth century. By the time Bates’s generation grew into their middle and sunset years, they had successfully built a society that valued limited government, a free-enterprise economy supported by fervent Christian ideals of hard work, and a caste system that allowed slavery to thrive alongside white economic prosperity. The establishment of these core values, however, left the next generation little room to exercise its own intellectual autonomy, and when that generation attempted to plot its own course, it was met with resistance from the older one. Indeed, a link exists between Bates’s Whiggishness and the Burkean conservatism of eighteenth-century England in that both placed a premium on the maintenance of established political and social traditions, with only gradual change over time. These were strong values that he possessed the rest of his life and that drove him to battle what he perceived as the corruption of wartime Democrats and the radicalism of postwar Republicans.
This book also joins a growing field of Lincoln studies that analyzes Lincoln’s presidency through the eyes of his contemporaries. In 1936, J. G. Randall famously asked in the American Historical Review, “Is the Lincoln Myth Exhausted?” The response from the Lincoln community has been an emphatic “No.” For almost twenty years now—since the publication of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals as well as the commemorations of the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War—there has been a plethora of new works on Lincoln’s cabinet secretaries. This is by no means a new phenomenon. The first biographies of Seward, Chase, and Stanton were published within years of their deaths. The early decades of the twentieth century also saw new biographies of these men, but the first truly scholarly examinations appeared in the leadup to the Civil War centennial. Burton Hendrick’s Lincoln’s War Cabinet, David Donald’s Lincoln’s Herndon, and Fletcher Pratt’s Stanton paved the way for Benjamin Thomas and Harold Hyman’s magisterial Stanton, Glyndon Van Deusen’s William Henry Seward, and Marvin Cain’s Lincoln’s Attorney General—to this date, the only extant full-length biography of Edward Bates. John Niven gave Gideon Welles his own scholarly treatment in the 1970s, and new works on Salmon Chase by Niven and Frederick Blue were published in the mid-eighties and nineties.
Since the Lincoln bicentennial, there have been a slew of new biographies on Lincoln contemporaries such as Mary Lincoln, Robert Todd Lincoln, Frank Blair Jr., William Pitt Fessenden, and Edward Everett. New examinations of the cabinet secretaries have also appeared, including Walter Stahr’s biographies of Seward, Stanton, and Chase, as well as Paul Kahan’s life of Simon Cameron and William Marvel’s recent life of Edwin Stanton. Even Lincoln’s personal secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, have been the subject of at least two books in the past decade. These studies benefitted from an explosion of scholarship on the Civil War era since the sesquicentennial, as well as an abundance of newly available primary source material through digitization projects at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Yet there is still work to be done. There has not been a new biography of Gideon Welles for the better part of fifty years, and this book humbly attempts to rectify a similar gap in scholarship on Bates.
[end of excerpt]
In July 1864, residents of Washington, D.C., assembled at the White House for the unveiling of artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s newest work: The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln. The painting was monumental. Measuring nine feet tall by fifteen feet wide, it received general praise for its depiction of a watershed moment in American history. On second glance, however, it becomes clear that the artist captured something else as well. Through his careful placement of key figures, Carpenter touched upon the fragmentary nature of the administration—a phenomenon he witnessed firsthand during his six months in residence at the White House.
Lincoln sits in the foreground, left of center—a position that speaks to his place in history as the “Great Emancipator.” Flanking him on his right and left, respectively, sit Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Secretary of State William Seward. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, meanwhile, stands behind Lincoln with arms crossed. The placement of these men emphasizes their importance in carrying out the policy of emancipation. Perhaps the most telling, though, is the position of the rest of the cabinet. Right of center sits Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, and behind him stands Interior Secretary Caleb Smith and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. The three men are separated from Lincoln and the aforementioned trio by the cabinet table, which serves as a literal representation of the ideological barrier existing between them. Lastly, at the far right, away from everyone else and nearly enveloped by shadows, sits Attorney General Edward Bates with arms crossed—a mirror image of Chase, but bearing an expression of disappointment and resignation.
Why does Bates seem so unenthusiastic about Lincoln’s crowning achievement? Did he possess a certain philosophical conviction missing among Lincoln’s other advisors? This book sets out to answer these questions by examining Bates’s life and, particularly, his role as a conservative advisor to Abraham Lincoln. In the end, more than simply highlighting the conflict within Lincoln’s administration, Bates’s example lays bare the strong philosophical divisions within the Republican Party during the Civil War era. These divisions were present at the party’s founding, crystallized during the war, and ultimately sparked a political realignment during Reconstruction. Bates was at the center of this divide for most of its existence, and in some cases he assisted in its promulgation. This is his story.
This study joins a seventy-year-long conversation around the role of ideology in American politics. At midcentury, Richard Hofstadter believed that American political parties, the politicians who represented them, and the people who supported them possessed no discernable ideological differences from one another. T. Harry Williams concurred, arguing that politicians in the Civil War era self-identified as conservative or radical not on ideological grounds but out of opposition to the agenda of the other party. Lee Benson took only a marginally different approach, noting that no ideology existed in the antebellum period, but also arguing that voters and politicians nurtured allegiances to political parties by harkening to voters’ ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious characteristics.
During the centennial of the Civil War and the bicentennial of American independence, historians began reevaluating these earlier arguments. Bernard Bailyn found that seventeenth-century ideas about power and liberty influenced Americans’ understanding of the relationship between government and the governed during the Revolution. Lance Banning observed that, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Jeffersonians brought these revolutionary ideals of nonpartisanship and virtuous government into the political mainstream. And Joel H. Silbey and Jean Baker extended these arguments to include the Democrats of the antebellum and Civil War years, with Silbey arguing that Democrats possessed ideas and values that they refused to compromise even at the sake of electoral defeat while Baker traced the origins of those ideals to the populist persuasions of the Jacksonian era. Eric Foner, Michael F. Holt, and Daniel Walker Howe applied these methods to the Whigs and Republicans, observing that a person’s residency North or South naturally created differences of opinion about the principle of republicanism that, in turn, led Americans, on the eve of war, to envision themselves as living within separate nations.
The discourse over political ideology in American history has not let up in the last thirty years. In the 1980s, William Gienapp’s pivotal study of the antebellum Republicans synthesized much of the work of earlier historians. For instance, he agreed with Foner and Holt that Republicans possessed a collective faith in classical republicanism, but he also echoed the midcentury scholars in observing that Republican leadership possessed a clear set of sectional values and strongly condemned the failure of the older political parties to provide solutions to major problems facing the nation. Lawrence Kohl made similar conclusions about the Jacksonian era, rejecting the notion that politics in this time was banal and finding that, as Americans built a new social order, political parties were integral to sorting out the ideals upon which that society would be built. In contrast, Aaron Astor, Joshua Lynn, and Adam I. P. Smith have each recently argued that the high-minded republican ideals to which antebellum conservatives clung were “imagined,” thus failing them as they confronted the pressures of unfolding events. In the absence of a true set of ideals, conservatives in the border states were instead driven by opposition to wartime extremism and a desire to maintain the racial hierarchy of the antebellum period.
At times, particularly early in his life, Edward Bates’s political affiliation was guided more by reaction than principle. His father and brothers were Jeffersonian; therefore, he was too. By the Jacksonian era, however, Bates had developed a distinct political philosophy. As Joyce Appleby has observed, Bates’s generation, born between 1776 and 1800, was forced by the destruction of their parents’ world to build their own society anew. They were free to imagine what the new United States might become. In doing so, they relied on their peers, as opposed to their parents, as role models. In a sense, the separation from Great Britain—the irrevocable break from the past—made this generation feel that America was a blank slate. They could hold on to the values of the past, or they could discard them altogether. Whichever way members of this generation went determined the radicalism and conservatism of the mid-nineteenth century. By the time Bates’s generation grew into their middle and sunset years, they had successfully built a society that valued limited government, a free-enterprise economy supported by fervent Christian ideals of hard work, and a caste system that allowed slavery to thrive alongside white economic prosperity. The establishment of these core values, however, left the next generation little room to exercise its own intellectual autonomy, and when that generation attempted to plot its own course, it was met with resistance from the older one. Indeed, a link exists between Bates’s Whiggishness and the Burkean conservatism of eighteenth-century England in that both placed a premium on the maintenance of established political and social traditions, with only gradual change over time. These were strong values that he possessed the rest of his life and that drove him to battle what he perceived as the corruption of wartime Democrats and the radicalism of postwar Republicans.
This book also joins a growing field of Lincoln studies that analyzes Lincoln’s presidency through the eyes of his contemporaries. In 1936, J. G. Randall famously asked in the American Historical Review, “Is the Lincoln Myth Exhausted?” The response from the Lincoln community has been an emphatic “No.” For almost twenty years now—since the publication of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals as well as the commemorations of the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War—there has been a plethora of new works on Lincoln’s cabinet secretaries. This is by no means a new phenomenon. The first biographies of Seward, Chase, and Stanton were published within years of their deaths. The early decades of the twentieth century also saw new biographies of these men, but the first truly scholarly examinations appeared in the leadup to the Civil War centennial. Burton Hendrick’s Lincoln’s War Cabinet, David Donald’s Lincoln’s Herndon, and Fletcher Pratt’s Stanton paved the way for Benjamin Thomas and Harold Hyman’s magisterial Stanton, Glyndon Van Deusen’s William Henry Seward, and Marvin Cain’s Lincoln’s Attorney General—to this date, the only extant full-length biography of Edward Bates. John Niven gave Gideon Welles his own scholarly treatment in the 1970s, and new works on Salmon Chase by Niven and Frederick Blue were published in the mid-eighties and nineties.
Since the Lincoln bicentennial, there have been a slew of new biographies on Lincoln contemporaries such as Mary Lincoln, Robert Todd Lincoln, Frank Blair Jr., William Pitt Fessenden, and Edward Everett. New examinations of the cabinet secretaries have also appeared, including Walter Stahr’s biographies of Seward, Stanton, and Chase, as well as Paul Kahan’s life of Simon Cameron and William Marvel’s recent life of Edwin Stanton. Even Lincoln’s personal secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, have been the subject of at least two books in the past decade. These studies benefitted from an explosion of scholarship on the Civil War era since the sesquicentennial, as well as an abundance of newly available primary source material through digitization projects at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Yet there is still work to be done. There has not been a new biography of Gideon Welles for the better part of fifty years, and this book humbly attempts to rectify a similar gap in scholarship on Bates.
[end of excerpt]
Cuprins
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Style
Introduction
Bates Family Trees
1. Son of Virginia, Father of Missouri
2. Congressman
3. Party Leader
4. Conservative Reformer
5. Winter of Discontent
6. Candidate
7. The Union Dissolved; The Union Defended
8. Constitutional Scruples
9. Waging War
10. Best and Worst of Times
11. Radicalism Ascendent
12. Final Battles
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
A Note on Style
Introduction
Bates Family Trees
1. Son of Virginia, Father of Missouri
2. Congressman
3. Party Leader
4. Conservative Reformer
5. Winter of Discontent
6. Candidate
7. The Union Dissolved; The Union Defended
8. Constitutional Scruples
9. Waging War
10. Best and Worst of Times
11. Radicalism Ascendent
12. Final Battles
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Recenzii
“A solidly researched and eminently readable biography that both chronicles Edward Bates’s life and offers compelling insights about American political life during the American Civil War.”—Paul Kahan, author of Amiable Scoundrel: Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s Scandalous Secretary of War
“Lincoln’s cabinet received a fine group portrait in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, which has been ably supplemented by recent biographies of William Henry Seward, Edwin M. Stanton, Salmon P. Chase, and Simon Cameron, but not Attorney General Edwards Bates—until now. Joining those fine works is Mark A. Neels’sca life of that eminent Missouri jurist, whose advice Lincoln valued and whose opinions—particularly one establishing citizenship rights for African Americans—proved highly influential. This is a welcome addition to the literature of Lincoln and the Civil War.”—Michael Burlingame, author of Abraham Lincoln: A Life
“Edward Bates long has needed a modern biography, and Mark Neels has provided it. Lincoln’s attorney general has been a peripheral figure in many examinations of Civil War politics and the cabinet. Neels makes a strong case for Bates’s importance as a leader of conservatism and role in the events of his time, and presents a life in full. Anyone who reads this will come away with a fine grasp of Bates’s life and times.”—Michael S. Green, author of Lincoln and Native Americans
“This is a long-needed biography of the attorney general of the United States under President Abraham Lincoln. Neels takes us inside the cabinet to show the divisions within the Republican Party and sheds light on the thinking of a leading conservative within the party that led the country through the crisis of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In addition to filling the biographical void, the book also illustrates how conflicts within the party were often generational as well as ideological.”—A. James Fuller, author of Oliver P. Morton and the Politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction
“Lincoln’s cabinet received a fine group portrait in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, which has been ably supplemented by recent biographies of William Henry Seward, Edwin M. Stanton, Salmon P. Chase, and Simon Cameron, but not Attorney General Edwards Bates—until now. Joining those fine works is Mark A. Neels’sca life of that eminent Missouri jurist, whose advice Lincoln valued and whose opinions—particularly one establishing citizenship rights for African Americans—proved highly influential. This is a welcome addition to the literature of Lincoln and the Civil War.”—Michael Burlingame, author of Abraham Lincoln: A Life
“Edward Bates long has needed a modern biography, and Mark Neels has provided it. Lincoln’s attorney general has been a peripheral figure in many examinations of Civil War politics and the cabinet. Neels makes a strong case for Bates’s importance as a leader of conservatism and role in the events of his time, and presents a life in full. Anyone who reads this will come away with a fine grasp of Bates’s life and times.”—Michael S. Green, author of Lincoln and Native Americans
“This is a long-needed biography of the attorney general of the United States under President Abraham Lincoln. Neels takes us inside the cabinet to show the divisions within the Republican Party and sheds light on the thinking of a leading conservative within the party that led the country through the crisis of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In addition to filling the biographical void, the book also illustrates how conflicts within the party were often generational as well as ideological.”—A. James Fuller, author of Oliver P. Morton and the Politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction
Descriere
Edward Bates (1793–1869), a founding father of Missouri and leader of the Missouri Whig Party, served as Abraham Lincoln’s attorney general during the American Civil War. In this first full biography of Bates in nearly sixty years, author Mark Neels’s scholarship joins a lively discourse over political ideology throughout American history.