Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
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 given 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.”
“The immense assembly,” Bates noted in his diary, “seemed absolutely mesmerized—their bodies and hearts & minds subjected to my will, and answering to my every thought & sentiment with the speed and exactness of electricity. And when I ceased to speak there was one loud, long and spontaneous burst of sympathy & joyous gratification, the like of which I never expect to witness again.”
Bates acknowledged when he returned home that his vanity had been “flattered,” his “pride of character stimulated in a manner & a degree far beyond what I thought could ever reach me in this life-long retirement to which I have withdrawn.” The experience was “more full of public honor & private gratification than any passage of my life…those three days at Chicago have given me a fairer representation & a higher standing in the nation, than I could have hoped to attain by years of labor & anxiety in either house of Congress.”
With that single speech, Bates had become a prominent national figure, his name heralded in papers across the country as a leading prospect for high public office once the Whigs were returned to power. “The nation cannot afford to be deprived of so much integrity, talent, and patriotism,” Weed concluded at the end of a long, flattering piece calling on Bates to reenter political life.
While Bates initially basked in such acclaim, within weeks of the convention’s close, he convinced himself he no longer craved what he later called “the glittering bauble” of political success. Declining Weed’s appeal that he return to public life, he wrote the editor a pensive letter. Once, he revealed to Weed, he had entertained such “noble aspirations” to make his mind “the mind of other men.” But these desires were now gone, his “habits formed and stiffened to the standard of professional and domestic life.” Consequently, there was “no office in the gift of prince or people” that he would accept. His refusal, he explained, was “the natural result” of his social position, his domestic relations, and his responsibilities to his large family.
S
EWARD WAS NEXT
to enter public life, realizing after several uninspired years of practicing law that he “had no ambition for its honors.” Though resigned to his profession “with so much cheerfulness that [his] disinclination was never suspected,” he found himself perusing newspapers and magazines at every free moment, while scrutinizing his law books only when he needed them for a case. He was discovering, he said, that “politics was the important and engrossing business of the country.”
Fate provided an introduction to Thurlow Weed, the man who would secure his entry into the political world and facilitate his rise to prominence. Seward was on an excursion to Niagara Falls with Frances, her father, and his parents when the wheel of their stagecoach broke off, throwing the passengers into a swampy ravine. A tall, powerfully built man with deep-set blue eyes appeared and helped everyone to safety. He introduced himself as Thurlow Weed, editor of a Rochester newspaper, which “he printed chiefly with his own hand.” That encounter sparked a friendship that would shape the destinies of both men.
Four years Seward’s senior, Thurlow Weed could see at a glance that his new acquaintance was an educated young man belonging to the best society. Weed himself had grown up in poverty, his father frequently imprisoned for debt, his family forced to move from one upstate location to another. Apprenticed in a blacksmith’s shop at eight years old, with only a few years of formal schooling behind him, he had fought to educate himself. He had walked miles to borrow books, studying history and devouring newspapers by firelight. A classic example of a self-made man, he no sooner identified an obstacle to his progress than he worked with discipline to counteract it. Concerned that he lacked a native facility for remembering names and appointments, and believing that “a politician who sees a man once should remember him forever,” Weed consciously trained his memory. He spent fifteen minutes every night telling his wife, Catherine, everything that had happened to him that day, everyone he had met, the exact words spoken. The nightly mnemonics worked, for Weed soon became known as a man with a phenomenal recall. Gifted with abundant energy, shrewd intelligence, and a warm personality, he managed to carve out a brilliant career as printer, editor, writer, publisher, and, eventually, as powerful political boss, familiarly known as “the Dictator.”
Weed undoubtedly sensed in the younger Seward an instinct for power and a fascination with politics that matched his own. In an era when political parties were in flux, Weed and Seward gravitated toward the proponents of a new infrastructure for the country, by deepening waterways and creating a new network of roads and rails. Such measures, Seward believed, along with a national banking system and protective tariffs, would enable the nation to “strengthen its foundations, increase its numbers, develop its resources, and extend its dominion.” Eventually, those in favor of “the American system,” as it came to be called, coalesced behind Henry Clay’s Whig Party.