Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [438]
Bates’s decision did not cover the status of slaves, nor did it suggest that citizenship implied the right of suffrage or the right to sit on juries. Nonetheless, as a local Washington paper noted at the time of his resignation: “Though esteemed by many as more conservative than the majority of his countrymen at the present day, Mr. Bates has given opinions involving the rights of the colored race which have been quite abreast with the times, and which will henceforth stand as landmarks of constitutional interpretation.”
From their first acquaintance, the relationship between Bates and Lincoln had been marked by warmth and cordiality. On occasion, Bates’s diary reveals frustration with Lincoln’s loose management style, which left the administration with “no system—no unity—no accountability—no subordination.” He believed Lincoln relied too heavily on Seward and Stanton. He could not fathom why the disloyal Chase had been kept in place for so long or why General Butler was not fired when complaints arose about his arbitrary arrests in Norfolk. In fact, Bates confided in his diary, his “chief fear” was “the President’s easy good nature.”
Nonetheless, by the end of his tenure as Attorney General, Bates had formed a more spacious understanding of the president’s unique leadership style. While troubled at the start by Lincoln’s “never-failing fund of anecdote,” he had come to realize that storytelling played a central role in the president’s ability to communicate with the public. “The character of the President’s mind is such,” Bates remarked, “that his thought habitually takes on this form of illustration, by which the point he wishes to enforce is invariably brought home with a strength and clearness impossible in hours of abstract argument.
“Mr. Lincoln,” Bates told Francis Carpenter, “comes very near being a perfect man, according to my ideal of manhood. He lacks but one thing…the element of will. I have sometimes told him, for instance, that he was unfit to be intrusted with the pardoning power. Why, if a man comes to him with a touching story, his judgment is almost certain to be affected by it. Should the applicant be a woman, a wife, a mother, or a sister,—in nine cases out of ten, her tears, if nothing else, are sure to prevail.”
As Bates prepared to leave Washington, each of his colleagues stopped to say goodbye, in contrast to the lonely leave-taking endured by Salmon Chase. Stanton was “especially civil,” Bates noted. “Told me to write to my sons, in the army and assure them that he would [do] any thing for them that they would expect me to do.” Bates joined Seward, Welles, and Usher in the president’s office for a “pleasant” farewell. The departing Attorney General was once again touched by the president’s “affable and kind” manner.
Bates left his colleagues and staff “with regret,” but with the knowledge that his life was forever connected with the history of his country. Because Lincoln had chosen him as his Attorney General, Edward Bates had been able to “leave a trail which might make known/That I once lived—when I am gone.”
To replace Bates, Lincoln felt he had to find a man from one of the border states. “My Cabinet has shrunk up North, and I must find a Southern man,” he explained to a colleague. “I suppose if the twelve Apostles were to be chosen nowadays the shrieks of locality would have to be heeded.” His first choice was Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt. The native Kentuckian had been one of the trio of cabinet members, together with Edwin Stanton and Jeremiah Black, who had stiffened Buchanan’s will to resist secession. Lincoln liked and respected Judge Holt, having worked closely with him on court-martial cases. Holt declined the offer, however, recommending instead his fellow Kentuckian James Speed, the older brother of Lincoln’s great friend Joshua. “I can recall no public man in the State of uncompromising