Edward Bates (September 4, 1793 — March 25, 1869) was a U.S. lawyer and statesman. He served as the first attorney general of Missouri after it was admitted as a state. He served as the United States Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln from 1861 to 1864, and was notable as the first cabinet member to be appointed from west of the Mississippi River.
Born in Goochland County, Virginia, on his family’s Belmont plantation, Bates was tutored at home as a boy. When older, he attended Charlotte Hall Military Academy in Maryland.
Bates’s tenure as Attorney General generally met with mixed reviews. On the one hand, he was important in carrying out some of Lincoln’s earlier war policies, including the arbitrary arrest of southern sympathizers and seditious northerners. On the other hand, as Lincoln’s policies became more radical, Bates became increasingly irrelevant. Bates disagreed with Lincoln on emancipation and the recruitment of blacks into the Union Army. In 1864, Lincoln nominated Salmon P. Chase to be Chief Justice, an office Bates had wanted. Bates then resigned and was succeeded by James Speed, a Kentucky lawyer with Radical Republican views.
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