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:
“Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.”
—Gerald Early (b. 1952)
“Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them.”
—Frank Moore Colby (1865–1925)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)