Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [42]
Despite his immersion in the whirlpool of Missouri politics, an event occurred in 1823 that altered Bates’s life and forever shifted his focus—he fell in love with and married Julia Coalter. Thereafter, home and family domesticity eclipsed politics as the signal pleasure of his life. His first child, named Joshua Barton Bates in honor of his slain partner, was born in 1824. Over the next twenty-five years, sixteen more children were born.
When Julia was young, family friend John Darby recalled, she was “a most beautiful woman.” She came from a distinguished South Carolina family that settled in Missouri when she was a child. Her father was a wealthy man, having invested successfully in land. The husband of one of her sisters became governor of South Carolina. Another sister was married to the chancellor of the state of Missouri. A third sister married Hamilton Rowan Gamble, who served as a justice on Missouri’s supreme court and wrote a dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case. Despite these connections, Julia had little interest in politics. Her attentions were fully focused on her family. Her surviving letters, unlike those of Frances Seward, said nothing about the issues of the day, concentrating instead on her children’s activities, their eating habits, their games, their broken bones. Her entire being, Darby observed, “was calculated to impart happiness around the domestic circle.”
She succeeded in this beyond ordinary measure, providing Edward with what their friends uniformly described as an ideal home life. The enticements of public office gradually diminished in his contented eyes. When he sought and won a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1826, three years after his marriage, his pleasure in the victory was dimmed by the necessity of leaving home and hearth. Even short absences from Julia proved painful for him. “I have never found it so difficult to keep up my spirits,” he confessed to her at one point when she had gone to visit friends for several days. “Indeed, ever since you left me, I have felt a painful consciousness of being alone. At court I can do well enough, but when I come home, to bed or board, I feel so utterly solitary, that I can enjoy neither eating nor sleeping. I mention these things not because it is either proper or becoming to feel them, but because they are novel to me. I never before had such a restless, dissatisfied, indefinable feeling; and never wish to have it again.”
Disquiet returned a hundredfold when he departed on the lonely journey to take up his congressional seat in Washington, leaving his pregnant wife and small son at home. Writing from various taverns and boardinghouses along the way, he confessed that he was in “something of a melancholy and melting mood.” There was a “magic” in her loveliness, which left him “like a schoolboy lover” in the absence of his “dear Julia.” Now, after only a few weeks away, he was moved to cry, “a plague upon the vanity of petty ambition! Were I great enough to sway the destinies of the nation, the meed of ambition might be worth the sacrifice which it requires; but a mere seat in Congress as a subaltern member, is a contemptible price for the happiness which we enjoy with each other. It was always your opinion, & now I feel it to be true.”
His spirits revived somewhat when he settled into a comfortable Washington boardinghouse and took his seat in Congress alongside David Crockett, James Polk, and Henry Clay. Though Bates seldom went out to parties, preferring to spend his nights reading and writing to his wife, he was thrilled, he told Julia, to spend a private evening with Henry Clay. “That man grows upon me more and more, every time I see him,” he wrote. “There is an intuitive perception about him, that seems to see & understand at a glance, and a winning fascination in his manners that will suffer none to be his enemies who associate with him.”
The main issues that