Early Life and Career
Bate was born in Bledsoe's Lick (now Castalian Springs) in Sumner County, Tennessee, the son of James H. Bate and Amanda Weatherred Bate. He attended a log schoolhouse known as the "Rural Academy." When he was 15, his father died, and he left home to find work. He was eventually hired as a clerk on the steamboat, Saladin, which traveled up and down the Cumberland, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers between Nashville and New Orleans.
While his steamboat was docked in New Orleans, word of the outbreak of the Mexican-American War arrived, and Bate enlisted in a Louisiana regiment. When this enlistment ended a few months later, he reenlisted with the rank of lieutenant in Company I of the 3rd Tennessee Volunteer Infantry. He accompanied General Joseph Lane on several raids in pursuit of Santa Anna toward the end of the war.
After the war, Bate returned to his family farm in Sumner County, and established a pro-Democratic Party newspaper, the Tenth Legion, in nearby Gallatin. He was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1849. In 1852, he obtained his law degree from the Cumberland School of Law (then located in Lebanon, Tennessee), and was admitted to the bar. After the state constitution was amended to allow for direct election of judicial officers in 1854, Bate was elected attorney general for the Nashville district.
Bate campaigned for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Johnson in 1855, and was an elector for Southern Democratic presidential candidate John C. Breckinridge in 1860. He was offered his district's nomination for Congress in 1859, but declined. He was a staunch supporter of secession in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Read more about this topic: William B. Bate
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)