Team Of Rivals Part 3

SALMON PORTLAND CHASE, in contrast to the ever buoyant Seward, possessed a restless soul incapable of finding satisfaction in his considerable achievements. He was forever brooding on a station in life not yet reached, recording at each turning point in his life his regret at not capitalizing on the opportunities given to him.

He was born in the rolling hills of Cornish, New Hamps.h.i.+re, in 1808, the eighth of eleven children. His ancestors had lived in the surrounding country for three generations, becoming pillars of the community. Chase would remember that "the neighboring folk used to say" of the substantial Chase homestead that "in that yellow house more brains were born than in any other house in New England." Three of his father's brothers attended Dartmouth College. One became a distinguished lawyer, another a U.S. senator, and the third an Episcopalian bishop.

Salmon's father, Ithamar Chase, was a successful farmer, a justice of the peace, and a representative from his district to the New Hamps.h.i.+re council. He was "a good man," Chase recalled, a kind father and a loving husband to his young wife, Janette Ralston. He governed his large family without a single "angry word or violent e[x]clamation from his lips." Chase long remembered a day when he was playing a game of ninepins with his friends. His father interrupted, saying he needed his son's help in the field. The boy hesitated. "Won't you come and help your father?" That was all that needed to be said. "Only a look.... All my reluctance vanished and I went with a right good will. He ruled by kind words & kind looks."

Young Salmon, like Seward, demonstrated an unusual intellectual precocity. His father singled him out to receive a better education "than that given to his other children." The boy thrived in the atmosphere of high expectations. "I was...ambitious to be at the head of my cla.s.s," he recalled. During the summer months, his elder sister, Abigail, a schoolteacher in Cornish, kept him hard at work studying Latin grammar. If he failed to grasp his lessons, he would retreat to the garden and stay there by himself until he could successfully read the designated pa.s.sages. At Sunday school, he strove to memorize more Bible verses than anyone else in his cla.s.s, "once repeating accurately almost an entire gospel, in a single recitation." Eager to display his capacity, Chase would boast to adults that he enjoyed studying volumes of ancient history and perusing the plays of Shakespeare "for the entertainment they afforded."

While he was considered "quite a prodigy" in his written work, Chase was uneasy reciting in public. In contrast to Lincoln, who loved nothing better than to entertain his childhood friends and fellow students with stories, sermons, or pa.s.sages from books, the self-conscious Chase was terrified to speak before fellow students, having "little notion of what I had to do or of the way to do it." With his "hands dangling and head down," he looked as awkward as he felt.

From his very early days, Chase showed signs of the fierce, ingrained rect.i.tude that would both fortify his battle against slavery and incur the enmity of many among his fellows. Baptized Episcopalian in a pious family, where the Lord's day of rest was strictly kept, the young boy needed only one Sunday scolding for "sliding down hill with some boys on the dry pine leaves" to know that he would never "transgress that way again." Nor did he argue when his mother forbade a.s.sociation with boys who used profane language: he himself found it shocking that anyone would swear. Another indelible childhood memory made him abhor intemperance. He had stumbled upon the dead body of a drunken man in the street, his "face forward" in a pool of water "not deep enough to reach his ears," but sufficient, in his extreme state of intoxication, to drown him. The parish priest had delivered sermons on "the evils of intemperance," but, as Chase observed, "what sermon could rival in eloquence that awful spectacle of the dead drunkard-helplessly peris.h.i.+ng where the slightest remnant of sense or strength would have sufficed to save."

When Chase was seven years old, his father made a bold business move. The War of 1812 had put a halt to gla.s.s imports from Europe, creating a pressing demand for new supplies. Sensing opportunity, Ithamar Chase liquidated his a.s.sets in Cornish to invest in a gla.s.s factory in the village of Keene. His wife had inherited some property there, including a fourteen-room tavern house. Chase moved his family into one section of the tavern and opened the rest to the public. While a curious and loquacious child like the young Lincoln might have enjoyed the convivial entertainments of a tavern, the reticent Salmon found the move from his country estate in Cornish unsettling. And for his father, the relocation proved calamitous. With the end of the war, tariff duties on foreign goods were reduced and gla.s.s imports saturated the market. The gla.s.s factory failed, sending him into bankruptcy.

The Chase family was unable to recover. Business failure led to humiliation in the community and, eventually, to loss of the family home. Ithamar Chase succ.u.mbed to a fatal stroke at the age of fifty-three, when Salmon was nine. "He lingered some days," Chase recalled. "He could not speak to us, and we stood mute and sobbing. Soon all was over. We had no father...the light was gone out from our home."

Left with heavy debts and meager resources, Janette Chase was forced to a.s.sume the burden of housing, educating, and providing for her numerous children on her own. Only by moving into cheap lodgings, and scrimping "almost to suffering," was she able to let Salmon, her brightest and most promising child, continue his studies at the local academy, fulfilling her promise to his "ever lamented and deceased father." When she could no longer make ends meet, she was forced to parcel her children out among relatives. Salmon was sent to study under the tutelage of his father's brother, the Episcopal bishop Philander Chase, who presided over a boys' school in Worthington in the newly formed state of Ohio. In addition to his work as an educator, Philander Chase was responsible for a sizable parish, and owned a farm that provided food and dairy products for the student body. Young Chase, in return for milking cows and driving them to pasture, building fires, and hauling wood, would be given room and board, and a cla.s.sical and religious education.

In 1819, at the age of twelve, the boy traveled westward, first by wagon through Vermont and New York, then by steamboat across Lake Erie to Cleveland, a tiny lakeside settlement of a few hundred residents. There Salmon was stranded until a group of travelers pa.s.sed through en route to Worthington. In the company of strangers, the child made his way on foot and horseback through a hundred miles of virgin forest to reach his uncle's home.

The bishop was an imposing figure, brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking. His faith, Chase observed, "was not pa.s.sive but active. If any thing was to be done he felt that he must do it; and that, if he put forth all his energy, he might safely & cheerfully leave the event to Divine Providence." Certainty gave him an unbending zeal. He was "often very harsh & severe," recalled Chase, and "among us boys he was almost and sometimes, indeed, quite tyrannical." The most insignificant deviation from the daily regimen of prayer and study was met with a fearful combination of physical flogging and biblical precept.

"My memories of Worthington on the whole are not pleasant," Chase said of the time he spent with his domineering uncle. "There were some pleasant rambles-some pleasant incidents-some pleasant a.s.sociates: but the disagreeable largely predominated. I used to count the days and wish I could get home or go somewhere else and get a living by work." One incident long remained in Chase's memory. As punishment for some infraction of the daily rules, he was ordered to bring in a large stack of wood before daybreak. He completed the task but complained to a fellow student that his uncle was "a darned old tyrant." Upon hearing these words, the bishop allowed no one to speak to the boy and forbade him to speak until he confessed and apologized. Days later, Chase finally recanted, and the sentence was revoked. "Even now," Chase said, telling the story decades later, "I almost wish I had not."

When the bishop was made president of Cincinnati College, Chase accompanied his uncle to Cincinnati. At thirteen, he was enrolled as a freshman at the college. The course of study was not difficult, leaving boys time to indulge in "a good deal of mischief & fun." Salmon Chase was not among them. "I had little or nothing to do with these sports," he recalled. "I had the ch.o.r.es to do at home, & when I had time I gave it to reading." Even Chase's sympathetic biographer Robert Warden observed that his "life might have been happier" had he "studied less and had more fun!" These early years witnessed the development of the rigid, self-denying habits that, throughout his life, prevented Chase from fully enjoying the companions.h.i.+p of others.

When Chase turned fifteen, his uncle left for England to secure funding for the new theological seminary that would become Kenyon College. At last, Chase was allowed to return to his mother's home in Keene, New Hamps.h.i.+re, where he planned to teach while preparing for admittance to Dartmouth College. His first position lasted only weeks, however. Employing the harsh methods of his uncle rather than the gentle precepts of his father, he administered corporal punishment to discipline his students. When irate parents complained, he was dismissed.

When Chase made his application to Dartmouth, he found that his schooling in Ohio, though filled with misery, had prepared him to enter as a third-year student. At Dartmouth, for the first time, he seemed to relax. Though he graduated with distinction and a Phi Beta Kappa key, he began to enjoy the camaraderie of college life, forging two lifelong friends.h.i.+ps with Charles Cleveland, an intellectual cla.s.smate who would become a cla.s.sics professor, and Hamilton Smith, who would become a well-to-do businessman.

No sooner had he completed his studies than he berated himself for squandering the opportunity: "Especially do I regret that I spent so much of my time in reading novels and other light works," he told a younger student. "They may impart a little brilliancy to the imagination but at length, like an intoxicating draught, they enfeeble and deaden the powers of thought and action." With dramatic flair, the teenage Chase then added: "My life seems to me to have been wasted." While Seward joyfully devoured the works of d.i.c.kens and Scott, Chase found no room for fiction in his Spartan intellectual life. After finis.h.i.+ng the new novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Last Days of Pompeii, he conceded that "the author is doubtless a gifted being-but he has prost.i.tuted G.o.d's n.o.blest gifts to the vilest purposes."

The years after his graduation found nineteen-year-old Chase in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., where he eventually established a successful school for boys that attracted the sons of the cabinet members in the administration of John Quincy Adams, as well as the son of Senator Henry Clay. Once again, instead of taking pleasure in his position, he felt his talents went unappreciated. There were distinct cla.s.ses of society in Was.h.i.+ngton, Chase told Hamilton Smith. The first, to which he aspired, included the high government officials; the second, to which he was relegated, included teachers and physicians; and the third mechanics and artisans. There was, of course, a still lower cla.s.s comprised of slaves and laborers. The problem with teaching, he observed, was that any "drunken, miserable dog who could thre'd the mazes of the Alphabet" could set himself up as a teacher, bringing the "profession of teachers into utter contempt." Chase was tormented by the lowly figure he cut in the glittering whirl of Was.h.i.+ngton life. "I have always thought," he confessed, "that Providence intended me as the instrument of effecting something more than falls to the lot of all men to achieve."

Though this thirst to excel and to distinguish himself had been instilled in Chase early on by his parents, and painfully reinforced by the years with Philander Chase, such sleepless ambition was inflamed by the dynamic American society in the 1820s. Visitors from Europe, the historian Joyce Appleby writes, "saw the novelty of a society directed almost entirely by the ambitious dreams that had been unleashed after the Revolution in the heated imagination of thousands of people, most of them poor and young."

Casting about for a career befitting the high estimation in which he held his own talents, Chase wrote to an older brother in 1825 for advice about the different professions. He was contemplating the study of law, perhaps inspired by his acquaintance with Attorney General William Wirt, the father of two of his pupils. Wirt was among the most distinguished figures in Was.h.i.+ngton, a respected lawyer as well as a literary scholar. He had served as U.S. Attorney General under President James Monroe and had been kept in office by John Quincy Adams. His popular biography of the patriot and lawyer Patrick Henry had made a small name for him in American letters.

A warmhearted, generous man, Wirt welcomed his sons' teenage instructor into his family circle, inviting the lonely Chase to the small dinner parties, private dances, and luxurious levees attended by Was.h.i.+ngton's elite. At the Wirt household, filled with music and lively conversation, Chase found a respite from the constant pressure he felt to read and study in order to stay ahead of his students. More than three decades later, in the midst of the Civil War, Chase could still summon up vivid details of the "many happy hours" he spent with the Wirt family. "Among women Mrs. [Elizabeth] Wirt had few equals," he recalled. Particularly stamped in his memory was an evening in the garden when Elizabeth Wirt stood beside him, "under the cl.u.s.ters of the multiflora which clambered all over the garden portico of the house and pointed out...the stars."

Though supportive and eager to mentor the ambitious and talented young man, the Wirts delicately acknowledged-or so Chase felt-the social gulf that divided Chase from their family. Any attempt on the young teacher's part to move beyond friends.h.i.+p with any one of their four beautiful daughters was, he thought, discouraged. Since he was surrounded by the tantalizing fruits of professional success and social eminence in the Wirt family's parlor, it is no wonder that a career in law beckoned. His brother Alexander warned him that of all the professions, law entailed the most strenuous course of preparation: success required mastery of "thousands of volumes" from "centuries long past," including works of science, the arts, and both ancient and contemporary history. "In fine, you must become a universal scholar." Despite the fact that this description was not an accurate portrait of the course most law students of the day embarked upon, typically, Chase took it to heart, imposing a severe discipline upon himself to rise before daybreak to begin his monumental task of study. Insecurity and ambition combined, as ever, to fuel his efforts. "Day and night must be witness to the a.s.siduity of my labours," he vowed in his diary; "knowledge may yet be gained and golden reputation.... Future scenes of triumph may yet be mine."

Wirt allowed Salmon to read law in his office and offered encouragement. "You will be a distinguished writer," he a.s.sured Chase. "I am sure of it-You have all the sensibility, talent and enthusiasm essential to success in that walk." The young man wrote breathlessly to Wirt in return, "G.o.d [prospering] my exertions, I will imitate your example." As part of his self-designed course of preparation, Chase diligently took notes in the galleries of the House and Senate, practiced his elocution by becoming a member of Was.h.i.+ngton's Blackstone debating club, and read tirelessly while continuing his duties as a full-time teacher. After hearing the great Daniel Webster speak before the Supreme Court, "his voice deep and sonorous; and his sentiments high and often sublime," he promised himself that if "any degree of industry would enable me to reach his height, how day and night should testify of my toils."

Neither his opportunities nor his impressive discipline yielded Chase much in the way of satisfaction. Rather than savoring his progress, he excoriated himself for not achieving enough. "I feel humbled and mortified," he wrote in his diary, as the year 1829 drew to a close, "by the conviction that the Creator has gifted me with intelligence almost in vain. I am almost twenty two and have as yet attained but the threshold of knowledge.... The night has seldom found me much advanced beyond the station I occupied in the morning.... I almost despair of ever making any figure in the world." Fear of failure, perhaps intensified by the conviction that his father's failure had precipitated his death and the devastation of his family, would operate throughout Chase's life as a catalyst to his powerful ambition. Even as he scourged himself, he continued to believe that there was still hope, that if he could "once more resolve to struggle earnestly for the prize of well-doing," he would succeed.

As Seward had done, Chase compressed into two years the three-year course of study typically followed by college-educated law students. When the twenty-two-year-old presented himself for examination at the bar in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., in 1829, the presiding judge expressed a wish that Chase "study another year" before attempting to pa.s.s. "Please," Chase begged, "I have made all my arrangements to go to the Western country & practice law." The judge, who knew Chase by reputation and was aware of his connection with the distinguished William Wirt, relented and ordered that Chase be sworn in at the bar. Chase had decided to abandon Was.h.i.+ngton's crowded professional terrain for the open vista and fresh opportunities afforded by the growing state of Ohio.

"I would rather be first in Cincinnati than first in Baltimore, twenty years hence," Chase immodestly confessed to Charles Cleveland. "As I have ever been first at school and college...I shall strive to be first wherever I may be." Cincinnati had become a booming city in 1830, one of the West's largest. Less than two decades earlier, when the state was founded, much of Ohio "was covered by the primeval forest." Chase knew the prospects for a young lawyer would be good in the rapidly developing region, but could not help feeling, as he had upon his arrival in Was.h.i.+ngton, like "a stranger and an adventurer."

Despite past achievements, Chase suffered from crippling episodes of shyness, exacerbated by his shame over a minor speech defect that lent an unusual tone to his voice. "I wish I was as sure of your elocution as I am of everything else," William Wirt cautioned. "Your voice is a little nasal as well as guttural, and your articulation stiff, laborious and thick.... I would not mention these things if they were incurable-but they are not, as Demosthenes has proved-and it is only necessary for you to know the fact, to provide the remedy." In addition to the humiliation he felt over his speaking voice, Salmon Chase was tormented by his own name. He fervently wished to change its "awkward, fishy" sound to something more elegant. "How wd. this name do (Spencer de Cheyce or Spencer Payne Cheyce)," he inquired of Cleveland. "Perhaps you will laugh at this but I a.s.sure you I have suffered no little inconvenience."

Bent on a meteoric rise in this new city, Chase redoubled his resolve to work. "I made this resolution today," he wrote in his diary soon after settling in. "I will try to excel in all things." Pondering the goals he had set for his new life in the West, Chase wrote: "I was fully aware that I must pa.s.s thro' a long period of probation.... That many obstacles were to be overcome, many difficulties to be surmounted ere I could hope to reach the steep where Fame's proud temple s.h.i.+nes," complete with "deserved honor, eminent usefulness and a 'crown of glory.'"

Nonetheless, he had made a good beginning. After struggling for several years to secure enough legal business to support himself, he developed a lucrative practice, representing various business interests and serving as counsel for several large Cincinnati banks. At the same time, following Benjamin Franklin's advice for continual self-improvement, he founded a popular lecture series in Cincinnati, joined a temperance society, undertook the ma.s.sive project of collecting Ohio's scattered statutes into three published volumes, tried his hand at poetry, and wrote numerous articles for publication in various magazines. To maintain these multiple pursuits, he would often arise at 4 a.m. and occasionally allowed himself to work on Sundays, though he berated himself whenever he did so.

The more successful Chase became, the more his pious family fretted over his relentless desire for earthly success and distinction. "I confess I almost tremble for you," his elder sister Abigail wrote him when he was twenty-four years old, "as I observe your desire to distinguish yourself and apparent devotedness to those pursuits whose interests terminate in this life." If his sister hoped that a warm family life would replace his ambition with love, her hopes were brutally crushed by the fates that brought him to love and lose three young wives.

His first, Catherine "Kitty" Garniss-a warm, outgoing, attractive young woman whom he loved pa.s.sionately-died in 1835 from complications of childbirth after eighteen months of marriage. She was only twenty-three. Her death was "so overwhelming, so unexpected," he told his friend Cleveland, that he could barely function. "I wish you could have known her," he wrote. "She was universally beloved by her acquaintances.... She was gifted with unusual intellectual power.... And now I feel a loneliness the more dreadful, from the intimacy of the connexion which has been severed."

His grief was compounded by guilt, for he was away on business in Philadelphia when Kitty died, having been a.s.sured by her doctor that she would recover. "Oh how I accused myself of folly and wickedness in leaving her when yet sick," he confided in his diary, "how I mourned that the prospect of a little addition to my reputation...should have tempted me away."

Chase arrived home to find his front door wreathed in black crepe, a customary sign "that death was within." There "in our nuptial chamber, in her coffin, lay my sweet wife," Chase wrote, "little changed in features-but oh! the look of life was gone.... Nothing was left but clay." For months afterward, he berated himself, believing that "the dreadful calamity might have been averted, had I been at home to watch over her & care for her." Learning that the doctors had bled her so profusely that she lost consciousness shortly before she died, he delved into textbooks on medicine and midwifery that persuaded him that, had she been treated differently, she need not have died.

Worst of all, Chase feared that Kitty had died without affirming her faith. He had not pushed her firmly enough toward G.o.d. "Oh if I had not contented myself with a few conversations on the subject of religion," he lamented in his diary, "if I had incessantly followed her with kind & earnest persuasion...she might have been before her death enrolled among the professed followers of the Lamb. But I procrastinated and now she is gone."

His young wife's death shadowed all the days of his life. He was haunted by the vision that when he himself reached "the bar of G.o.d," he would meet her "as an accusing spirit," blaming him for her d.a.m.nation. His guilt rekindled his religious commitment, producing a "second conversion," a renewed determination never to let his fierce ambition supersede his religious duties.

The child upon whom all his affections then centered, named Catherine in honor of her dead mother, lived only five years. Her death in 1840 during an epidemic of scarlet fever devastated Chase. Losing one's only child, he told Charles Cleveland, was "one of the heaviest calamities which human experience can know." Little Catherine, he said, had "lent wings to many delightful moments...I fondly looked forward to the time when her increasing attainments and strength would fit her at once for the superintendence of my household & to be my own counsellor and friend." Asking for his friend's prayers, he concluded with the thought that "no language can describe the desolation of my heart."

Eventually, Chase fell in love and married again. The young woman, Eliza Ann Smith, had been a good friend of his first wife. Eliza was only twenty when she gave birth to a daughter, Kate, named in memory of both his first wife and his first daughter. For a few short years, Chase found happiness in a warm marriage sustained by a deep religious bond. It would not last, for after the birth and death of a second daughter, Eliza was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which took her life at the age of twenty-five. "I feel as if my heart was broken," Chase admitted to Cleveland after he placed Eliza's body in the tomb. "I write weeping. I cannot restrain my tears.... I have no wife, my little Kate has no mother, and we are desolate."

The following year, Chase married Sarah Belle Ludlow, whose well-to-do father was a leader in Cincinnati society. Belle gave birth to two daughters, Nettie and Zoe. Zoe died at twelve months; two years later, her mother followed her into the grave. Though Chase was only forty-four years old, he would never marry again. "What a vale of misery this world is," he lamented some years later when his favorite sister, Hannah, suffered a fatal heart attack at the dining room table. "To me it has been emphatically so. Death has pursued me incessantly ever since I was twenty-five.... Sometimes I feel as if I could give up-as if I must give up. And then after all I rise & press on."

LIKE SALMON CHASE, Edward Bates left the East Coast as a young man, intending, he said, "to go West and grow up with the country." The youngest of twelve children, he was born on a plantation called Belmont, not far from Richmond, Virginia. His father, Thomas Fleming Bates, was a member of the landed gentry with an honored position in his community. Educated in England, the elder Bates was a planter and merchant who owned dozens of slaves and counted Thomas Jefferson and James Madison among his friends. His mother, Caroline Woodson Bates, was of old Virginia stock.

These aristocratic Southerners, recalled Bates's old friend Charles Gibson, were "as distinctly a cla.s.s as any of the n.o.bility of Western Europe." Modeled on an ideal of English manorial life, they placed greater value on family, hospitality, land, and honor than on commercial success or monetary wealth. Writing nostalgically of this antebellum period, Bates's grandson Onward Bates claimed that life after the Civil War never approached the "enjoyable living" of those leisurely days, when "the visitor to one of these homesteads was sure of a genial welcome from white and black," when "the negroes adopted the names and held all things in common with their masters, including their virtues and their manners."

Life for the Bates family was comfortable and secure until the Revolutionary War, when Thomas Bates, a practicing Quaker, set aside his pacifist principles to take up arms against the British. He and his family were proud of his service in the Continental Army. The flintlock musket he carried was handed down to the next generations with the silver-plated inscription: "Thomas F. Bates, whig of the revolution, fought for liberty and independence with this gun. His descendants keep it to defend what he helped to win." His decision to join the military, however, cost him dearly. Upon returning home, he was ostracized from the Quaker meetinghouse and never recovered from the debts incurred by the family estate while he was away fighting. Though he still owned extensive property, he struggled thenceforth to meet the needs of his seven sons and five daughters.

Like Seward and Chase, young Edward revealed an early apt.i.tude for study. Though schools in Goochland County were few, Edward was taught to read and write by his father and, by the age of eight, showed a talent for poetry. Edward was only eleven when his father's death brought an abrupt end to family life at Belmont. Left in straitened circ.u.mstances, his mother, like Chase's, sent the children to live with various relatives. Edward spent two years with his older brother Fleming Bates, in Northumberland, Virginia, before settling into the home of a scholarly cousin, Benjamin Bates, in Hanover, Maryland. There, under his cousin's tutelage, he acquired a solid foundation in the fields of mathematics, history, botany, and astronomy. Still, he missed the bustle and companions.h.i.+p of his numerous siblings, and pined for his family's Belmont estate. At fourteen, he entered Charlotte Hall, a private academy in Maryland where he studied literature and the cla.s.sics in preparation for enrollment at Princeton.

He never did attend Princeton. It is said that he sustained an injury that forced him to end his studies at Charlotte Hall. Returning to Belmont, he enlisted in the Virginia militia during the War of 1812, armed with his father's old flintlock musket. In 1814, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the flood of settlers into Missouri Territory, lured by the vast potential west of the Appalachian Mountains, lately opened by the Louisiana Purchase. Over the next three decades, the population of this western region would explode at three times the rate of the original thirteen states. From his home in Virginia, Bates set out alone on the arduous journey that would take him across Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana to the Missouri Territory, "too young to think much of the perils which he might encounter," he later mused, "the West being then the scene of many Indian outrages."

Young Bates could not have chosen a better moment to move westward. President Jefferson had appointed Bates's older brother Frederick secretary of the new Missouri Territory. When Edward arrived in the frontier outpost of St. Louis, Missouri was seven years away from statehood. Bates saw no buildings or homes along the riverbank, only battered canoes and flatboats chafing at their moorings. Some 2,500 villagers dwelt predominantly in primitive cabins or single-story wooden houses. When he walked down Third Street to the Market, he recalled, "all was in commotion: a stranger had come from the States! He was 'feted' and followed by young and old, the girls looking at him as one of his own town la.s.ses, in Virginia, would have regarded an elk or a buffalo!"

With help from his brother, Bates secured a position reading law with Rufus Easton, a distinguished frontier lawyer who had served as a territorial judge and delegate to Congress. "After years of family and personal insecurity," Bates's biographer Marvin Cain writes, "he at last had a stable situation through which he could achieve the ambition that burned brightly in him." Mentored by his older brother Frederick, the lawyer Easton, and a close circle of St. Louis colleagues, Bates, too, pa.s.sed his bar examination after two years of study and instantly plunged into practice. Lawyers were in high demand on the rapidly settling frontier.

The economic and professional prospects were so promising in St. Louis that the Bates brothers determined to bring the rest of their family there. Edward returned to Virginia to sell his father's estate, auction off any family slaves he would not transport to Missouri, and arrange to escort his mother and his older sister Margaret on the long overland journey. "The slaves sold pretty well," he boasted to Frederick, "a young woman at $537 and a boy child 5 years old at $290!" As for the land, he expected to realize about $20,000, which would allow the family to relocate west "quite full-handed."

Edward's attempts to settle family affairs in Virginia dragged on, complicated by the death of his brother Tarleton, a fervent Jeffersonian, killed in a duel with a Federalist. "I am ashamed to say I am still in Goochland," he wrote Frederick in June 1818, nearly a year after he had left St. Louis; it is "my misfortune rather than my fault for I am the greatest sufferer by the delay." Finally, with his female relatives ensconced in a carriage and more than twenty slaves following on horseback and on foot, the little party set forth on an exasperating, difficult expedition. "In those days," one of Bates's friends later recalled, "there were no boats on the Western rivers, and no roads in the country." To cross the wilds of Illinois and Indiana, a guide was necessary. The slow pace caused Bates to worry that Frederick would think him "a lazy or squandering fellow." He explained that if accompanied only by his family, he could have reached St. Louis "in a tenth part of the time & with 1/4 of the trouble and expense-the slaves have been the greatest objects of my embarra.s.sment." The journey did have benefits, he reported: "Mother & Sister are more active, more healthy & more cheerful than when they started. They bear the fatigues of hot dry traveling surprisingly." And once they reached St. Louis, Bates a.s.sured his brother, he would "make up in comfort & satisfaction for the great suspense and anxiety I must have occasioned you."

As he again settled into the practice of law in St. Louis, the twenty-five-year-old Bates fully appreciated the advantages gained by his older brother's prominence in the community. In a fulsome letter, he expressed fervent grat.i.tude to his "friend and benefactor," realizing that Fred's "public reputation" as well as his "private wealth & influence" would greatly enhance his own standing. His brother also introduced him to the leading figures of St. Louis-including the famed explorer William Clark, now governor of the Missouri Territory; Thomas Hart Benton, editor of the Missouri Enquirer; and David Barton, speaker of the territorial legislature and the guiding hand behind Missouri's drive for statehood. Before long, he found himself in a partners.h.i.+p with Joshua Barton, the younger brother of David Barton. Together, the two well-connected young men began to build a lucrative practice representing the interests of influential businessmen and landholders.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN faced obstacles unimaginable to the other candidates for the Republican nomination. In sharp contrast to the comfortable lifestyle the Seward family enjoyed, and the secure early childhoods of Chase and Bates before their fathers died, Lincoln's road to success was longer, more tortuous, and far less likely.