"...even less important than its Union counterpart (with fewer states the Confederate Senate was of course much smaller and thus even more driven by its individual personalities and state interests) but the practice had long been that Vice Presidents, as a "reward" for their serving six years in a powerless, meaningless job, were often granted some sinecure after the inauguration of their successor. In the case of Longstreet's ticket mate Augustus Garland it had been a seat on the Supreme Court; for Joseph Blackburn, it had been consistent appointments to the Cabinet, as Secretary of the Treasury and now Secretary of State; and for William Bate, it was to return to the Senate seat he had held for over two decades after a single-term interregnum by Henry Snodgrass, who was purely a seat warmer for Bate's return in early 1904. [1]
Of course, Bate had been quite elderly already upon his elevation to the Vice Presidency and his return to the Senate had come with eyebrows raised and questions about his potential longevity, especially as he quietly slid into an additional sinecure in the position of Senate President Pro Tem that had been held most of his previous tenure by the imperious [Wade] Hampton. No Senator since Hampton's retirement had held the office for even an entire Congress, either through death or maneuvering in "the world's most eloquent viper pit," and Bate was no different, dying on March 9, 1905 on his way back from serving in the Confederate delegation to the inauguration festivities of William Hearst in Washington.
Bate's death took nobody in Richmond by surprise, certainly not Pitchfork Ben. Since it became clear two years earlier that too many within the populist wing of the Democratic Party had their knives out for the movement's putative leader and would partner with the Bourbons to destroy him, Tillman had begun identifying a different and perhaps cleaner way to exercise power - to become the next Hampton, who had for twelve years held considerably more power than any President by virtue of maintaining an iron grip over the Senate and concomitantly the machinery of the party itself.
Tillman was greatly assisted in his quest for the ring by the debacle in Tennessee that followed Bate's death. Snodgrass [2] was not reappointed, instead denied a return to the Senate by a plot by the incumbent Tillmanite governor James Frazier to take the seat for himself in a deal cut with the Speaker of the Tennessee House (who would succeed him), John Cox, to appoint him immediately upon resignation. The "Tennessee Two-Step" replaced a moderate Bourbon in Bate (whom Frazier and Cox had had to be cajoled [3] with considerable deference on patronage to reappoint in the first place) with a reformist Pitchforker and, critically, gave the Tillmanites what they had lacked for years - a working majority in the Confederate States Senate. Even Vardaman fell in line to prevent the Bourbon faction from continuing to hold power and with that, Tillman had recovered from his political nadir to become quite possibly the most powerful man in the Confederacy. Almost as soon as he was in office, he began to box out Vice President Tyler (who had previously tried to bully the Senate as its typical presiding officer) and trained his attention on fomenting discontent towards two major Cabinet officers of the "Kentucky cabal" - Treasury Secretary John Carlisle and Secretary of State Blackburn, both former Senators and the new leaders of the Bourbon faction within the Jones administration - to divide the Cabinet into competing camps and make his mark on Richmond from the Senate. Patronage, appointments, legislation - everything now flowed through Pitchfork Ben.
The Tillmanite consolidation, far from having ended with Jones' compromise nomination, had only just begun..."
[1] The textbook doesn't need to cover this, but Roger Q. Mills doesn't get a soft landing by the old boys club thanks to his antics in Texas and everyone hating him
[2] What a great, stereotypically Southern name
[3] This being the South lets call this a polite aphorism for "bribed"