Book Review: Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates

Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates. By Mark E. Neels. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2024. Paperback, 255 pp. $27.95.

Reviewed by Greg Romaneck

In Mark Neels’ Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor, readers will encounter a man who ably served his home state and nation in a variety of posts while remaining a relative mystery to most people. Edward Bates was a successful lawyer, judge, politician, and attorney general for the United States. In each of these roles, Bates demonstrated certain character and professional traits that remained constant throughout his seventy-six years of life.

At his core a conservative man, Bates held true to a moral compass that emphasized consistency, an eye toward precedents, a firm belief in the U.S. Constitution, and a resistance to radical change. Bates also realized and accepted the reality that no single leader or political party held the keys to unlocking absolute truth. In Bates’ words, “The expectation of finding, any set of men, or any one man, with whom we can agree in all things is idle and extravagant. It is a hope against nature, and contrary to all experience. We have to decide not who is always in the right, but who is least often in the wrong.” (27)

It is this conservative and pragmatic man that Neels presents to his readers in a biography that opens doors to a relatively forgotten member of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime cabinet. As attorney general, Bates was involved in significant work when dealing with issues such as the Trent Affair, structuring the language that differentiated the closing of southern ports from a formal blockade, and the presidential right to limit the power of habeas corpus in wartime. In many ways, as Neels points out, Bates saw himself as more of an advisor to the president than a driving force of ego as men such as Edwin Stanton, William Seward, and Salmon Chase appeared to be. For this reason, Bates has faded into the background of historical writing about Lincoln and his “Team of Rivals.” However, as readers of this well-written and reflective biography will note, despite his background role in the cabinet, he did influence keynote strategies to at least some extent.

The Bates that Neels describes was also a man of sharp contradictions that pitted his intrinsic moral code against his actual behavior. For example, Bates was a man who, during the Civil War, opposed slavery on moral grounds, but was a wholehearted advocate for the colonization of freed people to other countries. Despite his opposition to slavery, Bates refused to support any radical abolitionist action and felt that it was beyond the responsibility of the Federal government to legislate emancipation.

Bates grew up in a Virginia family that owned several dozen enslaved people. In Missouri, where Bates lived most of his adult life, he was a slave owner who used corporal punishment and once sold a Black woman’s three children as a response to her attempting to escape.

Bates also opposed radical reconstruction and supported the restoration of civil and political rights to southerners that he felt were constitutionally owed to them. This stance undergirded the reissuance of voting rights to former Confederates and the beginning of white supremacist actions in the form of Black Codes, Jim Crow, and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. In a very real way, Neels presents Bates as a man who strongly held onto his conservative beliefs without really analyzing the long-term impact of their implementation.

Edward Bates served on Lincoln’s cabinet from 1861 until the president’s re-election in 1864. At that point, due to serious health issues, Bates resigned and moved back to his home in Missouri. A dedicated family man, Bates died on March 25, 1869. Bates’ passing was what people of that era referred to as a “good death” in that he expired at home while surrounded by his wife and children.

After years of service and loyalty to conservative causes, Bates might have expected more renown than he eventually achieved. As Neels notes in the conclusion of his fine biography, very few historians have taken the time to chronical Edward Bates’ life. In fact, Neels’ book is the first formal biography of Edward Bates since Marvin Cain’s Lincoln’s Attorney General, published in 1965 by The University of Missouri Press. Going back further in time, very little has ever been written solely about Edward Bates. This being the case, Mark Neels has provided readers a fresh retrospective perspective on a man who served in President Lincoln’s cabinet for three eventful years.

While not the most productive, colorful, or powerful member of Lincoln’s cabinet, Edward Bates did influence history while leading an important part of the president’s administrative team. Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor offers a clear-eyed look back at Attorney General Edward Bates and does so in ways that will be of value to both Civil War scholars and general readers.

Greg M. Romaneck is retired after working for 34 years as a professional educator and consultant. During those years he held positions such as special education teacher, assistant principal, elementary principal, adjunct professor, director of special education, student teaching supervisor, and associate superintendent. Mr. Romaneck has also trained as a counselor and worked in areas such as crisis intervention, mediation, problem solving, and conflict resolution.  Greg has had several books and numerous articles published on a variety of subjects such as Education, Psychology, Self-Improvement, Backpacking, Eastern Philosophy, Civil War history, Poetry, and Bible studies. Greg has also had nearly 3,500 book reviews published by Childrenslit.com, a popular source of information for educators, librarians, and parents regarding books for younger readers and has reviewed Civil War books for four decades for a variety of publications and magazines. Most recently Greg was the featured book reviewer for more than a decade with the Civil War Courier. Greg resides in DeKalb, Illinois and enjoys spending time with his family & friends, hiking, kayaking, backpacking, reading, and writing.