Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [43]
During the dispute over public lands, Bates published a pamphlet denouncing Benton that so angered “Old Bullion,” as he was known, that the two men did not speak for nearly a quarter of a century. “My piece is burning into his reputation,” Bates told Julia, “like aquafortis upon iron—the mark can never be effaced.” Beyond his open quarrel with Benton, Bates got along well with his colleagues. His natural warmth and easy manner created respect and affection. Night sessions he found particularly amusing and intriguing, despite the “roaring disorder” of people “hawking, coughing, thumping with their canes & kicking about spit boxes.” The hall, suffused with candlelight from members’ desks, and from the massive chandelier suspended from the domed ceiling, “exhibit[ed] a most magnificent appearance.”
Nonetheless, these few moments of pleasure could not compensate for missing the birth of his first daughter, Nancy. “As yet I only know that she is,” he lamented, “I long to know how she is—what she is—who she is like…whether she has black eyes or gray—a long nose or a pug—a wide mouth or a narrow one—and above all, whether she has a pretty foot,” for without a pretty foot, like her mother’s, he predicted, she could never make “a fine woman.”
“Oh! How I long to see & press you to my bosom,” he told Julia, “if it were but for a moment. Sometimes, I almost realize the vision—I see you with such vivid and impassioned precision, that the very form developing is in my eye.” In letter after letter, the physical immediacy of their relationship becomes clear. Responding to Julia’s admission of her own downcast spirits, he wrote: “O, that I could kiss the tear from that cheek whose cheerful brightness is my sunshine.”
Still, public life enticed him, and at the behest of his friends and supporters, Bates agreed to run for a second term. Despite his great personal popularity, he lost his bid for reelection in the wake of the great Jacksonian landslide that gave Benton and the Democrats complete control of Missouri politics. During the last days of his term, the usually soft-spoken Bates got into a heated argument with Congressman George McDuffie of South Carolina on the floor of the House. McDuffie ridiculed him personally, and Bates impulsively challenged the South Carolinian to a duel. Fortunately, McDuffie declined, agreeing to apologize for his offensive language. Years later, reflecting on the Southern “Code” of dueling, Bates’s friend Charles Gibson maintained that as wicked as the code was, the vulgar public behavior following the demise of the practice was worse still. “The code preserved a dignity, justice and decorum that have since been lost,” he argued, “to the great detriment of the professions, the public and the government. The present generation will think me barbarous but I believe that some lives lost in protecting the tone of the bar and the press, on which the Republic itself so largely depends, are well spent.”
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