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.
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Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or family:
“The best friend will probably get the best spouse, because a good marriage is based on the talent for friendship.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“English people apparently queue up as a sort of hobby. A family man might pass a mild autumn evening by taking the wife and kids to stand in the cinema queue for a while and then leading them over for a few minutes in the sweetshop queue and then, as a special treat for the kids, saying “Perhaps we’ve time to have a look at the Number Thirty-One bus queue before we turn in.””
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1940)