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By Root 6282 0

OLDEST OF THE FOUR, Edward Bates was the first drawn into politics during the 1820 crusade for Missouri’s statehood. As the petition was debated in the U.S. Congress, an argument arose as to whether the constitutional protection for slavery in the original states applied to the newly acquired territories. An antislavery representative from New York introduced an amendment requiring Missouri first to agree to emancipate all children of slaves on their twenty-first birthday. The so-called “lawyer faction,” including Edward Bates, vehemently opposed an antislavery restriction as the price of admission to the Union. Bates argued that it violated the Constitution by imposing a qualification on a state beyond providing “a republican form of government,” as guaranteed by the Constitution.

To Northerners who hoped containment in the South would lead inevitably to the end of slavery, its introduction into the new territories aroused fear that it would now infiltrate the West and, thereby, the nation’s future. For Southerners invested in slave labor, Northern opposition to Missouri’s admission as a slave state posed a serious threat to their way of life. At the height of the struggle, Southern leaders declared their intent to secede from the Union; many Northerners seemed willing to let them go. “This momentous question,” Jefferson wrote at the time, “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”

The Senate ultimately stripped the bill of the antislavery amendment, bringing Missouri into the Union as a slave state under the famous Missouri Compromise of 1820. Fashioned by Kentucky senator Henry Clay, who earned the nickname the “Great Pacificator,” the Compromise simultaneously admitted Maine as a free state and prohibited slavery in all the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory north of the latitude 36°30'. That line ran across the southern border of Missouri, making Missouri itself an exception to the new division.

Later that spring, Bates campaigned successfully for a place among the forty-one delegates chosen to write the new state’s constitution. Though younger than most of the delegates, he “emerged as one of the principal authors of the constitution.” When the time came to select candidates for state offices, the “lawyer faction” received the lion’s share. David Barton and Thomas Benton were sent to Washington as Missouri’s first senators, and Edward Bates became the state’s first attorney general; his partner, Joshua Barton, became the first secretary of state. Two years later, Bates won a seat in the Missouri House, and two years after that, Frederick Bates was elected governor of the state.

This inner circle did not remain united for long, for tensions developed between Senators Barton and Benton. Barton’s followers were primarily merchants and landowners, while Benton gradually aligned himself with the agrarian disciples of Jacksonian democracy. A tragic duel made the split irrevocable. In the course of his legal practice, Bates’s partner, Joshua Barton, found proof of corruption in the office of Benton’s friend and ally, Missouri’s land surveyor-general, William Rector. Rector challenged Barton to a duel in which Barton was killed. Bates was devastated by the loss of his friend. He and David Barton went public with Joshua Barton’s indictment implicating Benton as well as Rector. They demanded an investigation from U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, Chase’s mentor and friend. The investigation sustained most of the charges and resulted in President Monroe’s dismissal of Rector. The affair came to an end, but the rift between Barton and Benton never healed.

Proponents of Barton, including Bates, eventually coalesced into the Whig Party, while the Bentonites became Democrats. The Whigs favored public support for internal improvements designed to foster business in a new market economy. Their progressive agenda included protective tariffs, and a national banking system to develop and strengthen the resources of the country. The Democrats, with