William B. Bate
William Brimage Bate (1826 - 1905) was governor of Tennessee fron 1883 to 1887 and subsequently United States Senator from Tennessee until his death in that office in 1905.
He had served as a volunteer in the Mexican War and in the Confederate forces in the Civil War.
He was elected governor as a Democrat in 1882 over the incumbent Republican, Alvin Hawkins, and re-elected in 1884 and is credited with having found a satisfactory solution to the debt problems of the state. His subsequent elections to the U.S. Senate were by the Tennessee General Assembly, the method of choosing U.S. Senators prior to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment.
