Marriage and Family
Bates married Miss Julia Coalter from South Carolina. They had 17 children together. Her brother David Coalter lived in St. Louis, and her sister Caroline J. Coalter married Hamilton R. Gamble, another attorney of the city, who became the chief justice of the State Supreme Court.
Bates was, for the most part, happy with his large family. During the Civil War, his son Fleming Bates served with the Confederates, under the command of General Sterling Price. This was a cause of tension between the father and the son, and Bates rarely mentioned Fleming in his war-time diary. Another son, John C. Bates, served in the US Army and later became Army Chief of Staff. The youngest son, Charles, was still at West Point during the war.
Read more about this topic: Edward Bates
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or family:
“Our home has been nothing but a play-room. I’ve been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Papa’s doll-child. And the children have been my dolls in their turn. I liked it when you came and played with me, just as they liked it when I came and played with them. That’s what our marriage has been, Torvald.”
—Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)
“There was books too.... One was “Pilgrim’s Progress,” about a man that left his family it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)