Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates

How a traditionalist became part of Lincoln’s volatile team of rivals

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.

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.