Politics / Law
Asher B. Bates
1810–1873 · lawyer, mayor of Detroit, Hawaiian royal official
Detroit lawyer who finished Augustus Porter's mayoral term in 1839 and later became a privy councillor and legal adviser to King Kamehameha III of Hawaii.
- Born
Le Roy, New York- Died
San Francisco, California
aged 63- Also known as
- Asher Bates Jr.
- Detroit years
- 1831–1840s
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Asher B. Bates, a Union College graduate from New York, came to Detroit in 1831 and worked as an attorney, justice of the peace, city attorney and city recorder. With Elon Farnsworth he founded a law firm that became a training ground for Michigan's legal elite: its later partners and clerks included future state attorneys general and Michigan Supreme Court justices. When Mayor Augustus S. Porter resigned in March 1839 to run for the U.S. Senate, Bates served as mayor for the rest of the term, about a month. He later moved to Jackson County and by 1848 had emigrated to the Kingdom of Hawaii, where his brother-in-law Gerrit P. Judd was a powerful cabinet minister. Bates became a Hawaiian citizen, sat on the Privy Council of King Kamehameha III, served as registrar of conveyances and acted as the king's lawyer. He died in San Francisco in 1873 of leprosy contracted in Hawaii.
Highlights
- Mayor of Detroit, March–April 1839
- Co-founder of the Detroit law firm Farnsworth & Bates
- Member of the Privy Council of King Kamehameha III (1849–1853)
- Registrar of Conveyances of the Kingdom of Hawaii, 1849–1859