Lincoln's Attorney General: Edward Bates of Missouri (review)

BOOKREVIEWS75 Frank Blair's election to the Senate in 1871 and Horace Greeley's nomination the following year. Finally, Brown remains a rather shadowy figure whose personality and psyche seem to elude the author. Part of the difficulty probably stems from a paucity of personal correspondence at Professor Peterson's disposal, though she does not comment on the nature of her sources. Despite its limitations, Freedom and Franchise provides for the first time a reliable and useful record of the public life of an important nineteenth-century political leader. Dewey W. Grantham, Jr. Vanderbilt University Lincoln's Attorney General: Edward Bates of Missouri. By Marvin R. Cain. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1965. Pp. x, 361. $7.00.) The name of Edward Bates appears frequently in writings about Lincoln and northern politics during the Civil War; appears, in fact, almost as often as the name of Gideon Welles. Bates is not cited because he was a dominating figure in Lincoln's Cabinet or in the Republican party or because he had an original mind or a colorful personality. He was a figure of distinctly secondary importance, his mind was at the best only competent, and he was about as dull a man as can be imagined. He is mentioned in the books only because he kept a diary, and this document, although not as large or as waspish as Welles's diary, is a useful source, providing pictures of events in Lincoln's Cabinet and revealing the thinking of the most conservative segment of the Conservative Republican faction . In short, Bates's principal significance is that he is quotable. But he deserves notice as something other than a source. Bates was a representative Whig leader in a key border state, Missouri, and an early Republican luminary of sufficient reputation to be considered as one of the front-runners for the Republican nomination in 1860. He was, finally, and this is why he should be remembered, Attorney General in Lincoln's Cabinet, holding the position until near the end of the war. As the government 's chief legal officer in a civil conflict, he had to deal with all manner of vital and knotty legal problems; the blockade, prizes, confiscation , martial law, and others. But despite his obvious prominence, Bates has always been a shadowy figure. No biographer was impelled to describe his career and explain him as a man or a type. Now Marvin Cain has supplied us with the first biography of Bates. Based on extensive research, including several collections of Bates's papers, it is a competent book in the technical sense and tells us as much about Bates as one needs to know. It tells us, too, many useful things about Bates's department, its administrative set-up and functions, and about the wartime legal issues that Bates and his assistants had to handle. Thanks to Professor Cain, we have a clearer and fuller picture of these aspects of the war than before. But despite these merits, the book is disappointing. 76CIVIL WAR HISTORY It has to be added immediately that this is not the author's fault. The fault is in the subject, in Bates. Bates is not the material for a good biography. He was not an exciting or complex personality, and, worse, he was not a very significant figure in his only period of prominence, in the Civil War. Lincoln put him in the Cabinet and then seems to have ignored him. By Cain's own evidence, Bates was not close to Lincoln, did not influence important decisions, and did not always even control the disposition of legal matters. Still, Cain strives to invest Bates with meaning; Bates was a "transitional figure" between two Americas, the older, simpler America of the Jacksonian era, and the new, industrial age. But, as the author makes plain, Bates did not understand at all the new society that was coming into being and did not want to live in it. He would have done better to depict Bates as an example of the conservatism of the border states, a conservatism that could perceive little and hence could control nothing. T. Harry Williams Louisiana State University General William J...