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Edward Bates
27th United States Attorney General
In office March 5, 1861 – November 24, 1864
Preceded by	Edwin M. Stanton
Succeeded by	James Speed
Born	September 4, 1793 Belmont, Virginia, USA
Died	March 25, 1869 (aged 75) St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Political party	Democratic-Republican, Whig, Republican
Profession	Lawyer, Politician

Edward Bates (September 4, 1793 – March 25, 1869) was a U.S. lawyer and statesman. He served as United States Attorney General under Abraham Lincoln from 1861 to 1864. He was also the brother of both Frederick Bates and James Woodson Bates.

Born in Belmont, Virginia, he attended school in Maryland and served in the War of 1812. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri Territory in 1814 and there studied law, earning admittance to the bar in 1817, and serving as a U.S. Attorney from 1821 to 1826.

His first foray into politics came in 1820, when he was elected as a member of the state's constitutional convention and then became the new state's attorney general. In 1822, Bates was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives. He moved up to the United States House of Representatives for a single term (1827-1829), then returned to Missouri to sit in the State Senate from 1831 to 1835, then again in the Missouri House from 1835.

Lincoln met with his Cabinet for the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation draft on July 22, 1862. L-R: Edwin M. Stanton, Salmon P. Chase, Abraham Lincoln, Gideon Welles, Caleb Smith, William H. Seward, Montgomery Blair and Edward Bates.

Bates became a prominent member of the Whig Party during the 1840s. President Millard Fillmore asked him in 1850 to be U.S. Secretary of War, but Bates declined. Charles Magill Conrad then accepted the postion. At the Whig National Convention in 1852, Bates was considered for the vice-presidential slot on the ticket, and he led on the first ballot before losing on the second ballot to William Alexander Graham.

After the breakup of the Whig Party in the 1850s, Bates became a Republican, and was one of the three main candidates for the party's 1860 presidential nomination, which was won by Abraham Lincoln. The next year, after winning the election, Lincoln appointed Bates as his Attorney General, an office Bates held from 1861 until 1864. Bates believed that free blacks should be deported to Africa, a position that sometimes led to clashes with Lincoln. Bates was the first Cabinet member to hail from the region west of the Mississippi River.

Bates returned to Missouri after leaving Lincoln's cabinet. He died in St. Louis in 1869.

• Biographical Directory of the United States Congress: BATES, Edward
• Cain, Marvin R. Lincoln’s Attorney General: Edward Bates of Missouri. Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 1965.
• Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2005.
• Judah, Charles and George Winston Smith. The Unchosen. New York : Coward-McCann, 1962.

• Biography of Edward Bates by the Lincoln Institute

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