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Months and years slipped by, and Bates remained true to his word. Though he served two terms in the state legislature, where he was regarded as “the ablest and most eloquent member of that body,” he decided in 1835 to devote his full attention to his flourishing law practice, rather than run for reelection. Throughout the prime of his life, therefore, Bates found his chief gratification in home and family.

His charming diary, faithfully recorded for more than three decades, provides a vivid testament to his domestic preoccupations. While ruminations upon ambition, success, and power are ubiquitous in Chase’s introspective diary, Bates focused on the details of everyday life, the comings and goings of his children, the progress of his garden, and the social events in his beloved St. Louis. His interest in history, he once observed, lay less in the usual records of wars and dynasties than in the more neglected areas of domestic laws, morals, and social manners.

The smallest details of his children’s lives fascinated him. When Ben, his fourteenth child, was born, he noted the “curious fact” that the child had a birthmark on the right side of his belly resembling a frog. Attempting to explain “one of the Mysteries in which God has shrouded nature,” he recalled that a few weeks before the child was born, while his wife lay on the bed reading, she was unpleasantly startled by the sudden appearance of a tree frog. At the time, “she was lying on her left side, with her right hand resting on her body above the hip,” Bates noted, “and in the corresponding part of the child’s body is the distinct mark of the frog.”

Faith in the powers of God irradiates the pages of his diary. His son Julian, a “bad stammerer from his childhood”—the family had begun to fear that “he was incurable”—miraculously began one day to speak without the slightest hesitation. “A new faculty,” Bates recorded, “is given to one who seemed to have been cut off from one of the chief blessings of humanity.” In return for this restoration to speech, Bates hoped that his son would eventually “qualify himself to preach the Gospel,” for he had “never seen in any youth a more devoted piety.” Sadly, the “miracle” did not last long; within six months Julian was stuttering again.

On rare occasions when his wife left to visit relatives, Bates mourned her absence from the home where she was both “Mistress & Queen.” He reminded himself that he must not “begrudge her the short respite” from the innumerable tasks of caring for a large family. Giving birth to seventeen children in thirty-two years, Julia was pregnant throughout nearly all her childbearing years. Savoring the warmth of his family circle, Bates felt the loss of each child who grew up and moved away. “This day,” he noted in 1851, “my son Barton, with his family—wife and one child—moved into his new house…. He has lived with us ever since his marriage in March 1849. This is a serious diminution of our household, being worried that, as our children are fast growing up, & will soon scatter about, in search of their own futures, we may soon expect to have but a little family in a large house.”

The diaries Bates kept also reveal a deep commitment to his home city of St. Louis. Every year, on April 29, he marked the anniversary of his first arrival in the town. As the years passed, he witnessed “mighty changes in population, locomotion, commerce and the arts,” which made St. Louis the jewel of the great Mississippi Valley and would, he predicted, eventually make it “the ruling city of the continent.” His entries proudly record the first gas illumination of the streets, the transmission of the first telegraph between St. Louis and the eastern cities, and the first day that a railroad train moved west of the Mississippi.

Bates witnessed a great fire in 1849 that reduced the commercial section of the city to rubble and endured a cholera epidemic that same year that killed more than a hundred each day, hearses rolling through the muddy streets