T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Clay County’s Unionists rapidly filled four EMM companies; across Missouri, more than fifty-two thousand men enlisted. They joined an admittedly ad hoc force. They served only as needed, received little or no training, wore their own clothes on duty, and elected their own officers. In Clay, each of the first companies was led by a former Whig/Know-Nothing politician; James H. Moss was named colonel of their regiment, the Forty-eighth. Colonel Penick relocated to Independence in September, leaving Clay and Platte Counties to their homegrown militia.11

  The Clay County EMM consisted of local, conservative men, but that hardly mattered to secessionists. Even though Anthony Harsel owned at least sixteen slaves, Confederate sympathizers derided him as an “abolitionist.” The day after he was elected captain of his company, the rebels burned down his house. They began to call EMM soldiers “radicals,” even though many were slaveowners.12 But as some of these conservative Whigs faced the abuse of their secessionist neighbors, admitted E. M. Samuel, “they were becoming more radically Union.” The hostility of rebel sympathizers infuriated the Unionists as they chased after guerrillas who ambushed militia patrols and burned out loyal families. “I have been on some thirty scouts with the militia,” testified Lieutenant Robert W. Fleming, “and could never obtain any information from the citizens relative to bushwhackers.” He often disguised his men as guerrillas when he sent them to farmhouses; they always received a warm welcome and a hot meal before they identified themselves and arrested the occupants.

  “Many [of the local women] have told me that they, the bushwhackers, had as much right there as I, with my company,” reported Captain William Garth. On one occasion, he captured a pair of guerrillas at a farmhouse that was ruled, like so many during the war, by a lone woman. “One of the bushwhackers was the lady’s son; she is a strong rebel, and gave me thunder that night. She said she had always understood I was a Southern man, and I ought to be hunting red-legs [Kansas bandits] instead of Southern boys.”13

  The militiamen had plenty of opportunities for retaliation. The EMM received no pay or equipment; instead, as Colonel Penick related, they were “authorized from headquarters to subsist on the rebels, and their aiders and abettors.” These untrained and often undisciplined men went to the homes of their neighbors and took what they liked, from horses to hogs to furniture.14

  The EMM was created for a straightforward military reason: to provide manpower as regiments of U. S. Volunteers were withdrawn from Missouri for service in the campaign against Corinth, Mississippi.15 It was imagined as an ad hoc shelter for Unionists. Instead, it completed the architecture of enmity among the civil population. Under General Order No. 19, there could be no neutrality; every adult male became a Union soldier (however part-time) or was marked down as disloyal. The only escape was the commutation tax, and those who paid it were usually regarded as secret secessionists by the men who chose to fight the rebels. The division of the countryside into armed camps was complete.

  This was a decisive moment. By pitting local Unionists against their neighbors, the EMM planted the seeds of a grassroots political movement that was unimaginable only a year or two earlier—a Radical Party, increasingly convinced of the necessity of abolishing slavery and imposing merciless measures against rebels. The new force also had lasting repercussions in the life of Jesse James. In later years, skeptics would scoff at the notion that the Civil War shaped his thinking in his career as an outlaw, noting that most of his victims were Missouri Southerners. But in the burgeoning war of bushwhackers against Unionist civilians, of Unionist militia against secessionist civilians, he learned that his enemies were not invading Yankees, but the men who lived next door.16

  “I LONG TO be free from this world with all its turmoil and deceit,” Sue Carter wrote from Clay County on March 22, 1863. “I think every day of my life that I surely was created to see trouble.” In the very midst of scratching out this letter, she was interrupted by a militia raid. Afterward neighbors began to drop by. “The women kept gathering in,” she chuckled, “until we had a room full of the most ranting, torn-down secesh you ever saw.… Hurrah for Price but Devil take the abolitionists I say.” But then she went on to relate an interesting anecdote. Uncle Philip, she wrote, had been threatened by a slave—so he called in the militia to help. And they did, chasing the slave for half an hour through the woods, administering thirty-six lashes to his bleeding, ravaged back. “It is a common report here,” wrote a militia officer from St. Joseph on February 14, 1863, “that Col. Moss of Clay County uses the Enrolled Militia of said county to prevent the escape of negroes.”17

  But the time was quickly passing when the militia would simultaneously fight bushwhackers and chase slaves. The war was steadily polarizing everyone. In the state legislature elections in 1862, old parties disappeared. Candidates were categorized instead by their attitude toward secessionists and emancipation (ranging from the Charcoals, soon renamed the Radicals, to the Claybanks and the Snowflakes, who became the Conservatives). The actions of Colonel Moss’s slave-catching militiamen shows this split at the grass roots. Moss and other conservative soldiers were appalled at the radical turn the war was taking. On January 1, 1863, for example, the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. Though it freed no slaves in Missouri, Kate Watkins reported that it aroused “a great deal of excitement” in Clay County. It was a sign that the conflict was going to the roots of Southern society, including the Southern society of officially loyal Missouri.18

  On February 3, 1863, the state government radicalized the war still further by creating yet another military force: the Provisional Enrolled Missouri Militia, staffed by men handpicked from the EMM. Designed as a more durable and professional organization than the EMM, it marginalized conservative soldiers such as Colonel Moss; his Forty-eighth Regiment essentially dissolved as its most effective soldiers were detailed to the new Fourth Provisional Regiment. By early April, the only Clay County men still serving were organized into Company L, led by Captain William Garth; they were joined by units from Ray, Mercer, Andrew, and Clinton Counties. There were “some bad men” among the new arrivals, Edward M. Samuel thought. They were “strangers to the people,” groused the now-displaced Moss. “They were from the northern counties.”19

  Those northern counties were not very far away from Clay, but they were home to far fewer slaveholders, and far more bitterness toward rebels. Many now saw slavery itself as the source of the rebellion. Once they raided a local farm, recalled Sheriff F. R. Long, and one of the slaves there “went off with them.” Long’s deputy tried to retrieve the runaway, but was driven out of the Provisionals’ camp. “I then, a couple of hours afterwards, arrested the negro and took him from the government wagon which he was driving, and instantly fifteen bayonets were pointed against me.”20

  Perhaps it was the Emancipation Proclamation that proved too much for the Samuel family. Perhaps it was the invasion of the hard militiamen from Andrew, Mercer, and Clinton, or the hopes raised by Lee’s stunning victory over the Union army at Chancellorsville, May 2–6, 1863. Perhaps it was simply the reappearance of the guerrillas with the coming of spring, after many had gone to Arkansas for the winter (when the lack of leaves and abundant snow made it hard to evade detection by Union troops). Or perhaps a persistent story is true, that the Provisionals rode onto the farm that spring, tied up Frank, and hauled him off to jail in Liberty, where he escaped with help from the outside. Whatever other factors were at play, the James brothers had inherited their mother’s ideological commitment to the South’s cause, and her determination never to be under anyone’s control again. In the war so far, one outside force after another had driven this family’s fate, but the time had come for the family to become their own protagonists and take control for themselves. At the beginning of May 1863, Frank loaded his pistols, saddled his horse, and stole into the woods.21

  AS THE SUN seeped between the houses of Missouri City,22 Clay County, on Tuesday morning, May 19, 1863, Lieutenant Louis Gravenstein looked ahe
ad to a day of hard work and nervous anticipation. He commanded sixteen men posted in the village, soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Missouri Infantry, a regiment of U. S. Volunteers that had been pulled from the main front in Mississippi to fight the elusive guerrillas. Today Gravenstein expected no combat; instead, he would hector his troops to get ready for a major operation—what a later generation of American soldiers would call a “hammer and anvil” sweep. The next morning, two companies were to drive up the rugged bottom of the Fishing River, one company on each bank. This was prime bushwhacker country; Gravenstein hoped the two-company hammer would drive the rebels out into the open, straight into the anvil of his squad, which would lie hidden on either side of a bridge upstream.

  Greeting the dawn with Gravenstein was his guide, Captain Darius Sessions of the EMM. If Gravenstein knew this local man’s background, he would have found it ironic that they should be fighting side by side. In the 1850s, Sessions had helped lead the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party in Clay County, and Gravenstein was a German from St. Joseph, like many men in the Twenty-fifth. But Sessions had felt the wrath of proslavery extremists, and he shared the German’s fierce Unionism. And so the Know-Nothing and the foreigner prepared for battle together.

  As the sun passed its peak, one of the town’s citizens ran up with some unexpected news: two bushwhackers had just come to his house, obviously drunk, boasting of being Quantrill’s men. Quickly Gravenstein and Sessions picked three soldiers and set out in pursuit. The lieutenant probably looked forward to an easy capture of two intoxicated bushwhackers, and perhaps some intelligence that might make the next day’s operation a complete success. Instead, as the party approached a bridge, he saw the dense green leaves alongside the road erupt in flame and smoke, dissolving in the crackling roar of an ambush. As Sessions and another man collapsed to the ground, Gravenstein tried to surrender. The guerrillas responded by shooting him dead. Another bushwhacker walked over to the fallen Sessions and blasted three more rounds into his skull.

  Whoever squeezed off those shots knew the captain’s name, for there were a number of Clay County men in the rebel squad: Fernando Scott, for example, the former saddler who led this gang, and a young recruit from Centerville named Frank James.23 For Frank, the Fishing River skirmish was a fantasy of warfare come true. He had seen combat before, of course, most notably at Wilson’s Creek. But he had been a private in an army then, subjected to endless hours of marching and camp duty and drill, punctuated by a single day of battle. Now he belonged to a small squad that initiated combat at will, deceiving and defeating the enemy in ecstatic bursts of fighting.24

  It was also an exercise in brutality. After the murder of the prisoners, Frank joined his comrades in a dash into Missouri City, where they spent the night pillaging local Unionists. Then they raced north into Clinton County on a plundering raid, before burning a path back into Clay. On Sunday, May 24, Frank was recognized by neighbor David M. Bivens when the guerrillas rode onto Bivens’s farm and demanded dinner. With stunning courage—or stubborn idiocy—Bivens refused, and plainly told them he would report them immediately. The next day, Frank stopped his fellows from robbing an old friend; the would-be victim, like Bivens, informed the authorities.25

  As the guerrillas raided through Clay County, they moved carefully, often taking over a farm, holding the family prisoner, and posting pickets (military watchmen) to stand guard during the night. These were wise precautions: the embarrassment at Missouri City had startled the Union command into action. The two Provisional militia companies currently in Clay (the Clinton men in Company F, under Captain John W. Turney, and the local unit, under Captain Garth) began to scour the countryside. In Liberty, the atmosphere was tense; with all the troops in the field, O. P. Moss organized an impromptu squad to protect the county seat.26

  On May 25, Scott and his men made their way back to a refuge where they were certain of a warm welcome: Zerelda’s farm, outside of Centerville. Frank led his fellow guerrillas to a spot in the woods not too far from the farmhouse; meanwhile, his mother undoubtedly told Charlotte to prepare a meal. And Jesse, now a slender fifteen-year-old, would have watched in envy as the fighting men rode by with revolvers, shotguns, and carbines clanking at their sides.

  Even though Frank had been in the saddle for only a few weeks, his family already knew Scott and his crew, having supplied them with food, information, and Zerelda’s outspoken support. Reportedly, and credibly, Jesse had tried desperately to join them, only to be turned away for being too young—though they put him to work loading revolvers. It was a vital if tedious task. The most common pistol in use in Missouri was Colt’s 1851 Navy model, a . 36 caliber revolver, which had not yet been adapted to take the new all-in-one metal cartridge. Instead, each of the six chambers in the revolving cylinder had to be filled with gunpowder and a lead ball, which was then rammed home and sealed with a bit of grease. A percussion cap, containing fulminate of mercury, had to be fitted on a nipple outside each chamber; when struck by the hammer, the cap would set off the charge inside. Loading was such time-consuming work that each guerrilla carried four or even six revolvers into combat, simply drawing a new pistol when one was emptied or jammed. Loading was also dangerous. According to one account, Jesse blew off the tip of the middle finger of his left hand while loading a Navy revolver sometime in 1863.27

  Frank and his friends settled into their camp in the woods, where they threw down a blanket, dealt out cards, and began to play poker. Jesse went back to work in the fields, along with the adult male slave. By now, the year’s crop of tobacco plants had sprouted and grown quarter-sized leaves, and had to be transplanted from the seedbeds into the fields. After that, Jesse and the hands had to cultivate them with a shovel plow, and hoe continually to destroy cutworms near the roots. The work could not wait, even with the bushwhackers on the farm.28

  As he manned the shovel plow, Jesse probably never heard the militiamen until they caught him round the throat. They dragged him—and whipped him, or beat him, or choked him, or pricked him with sabers, depending on the account—his feet sinking into the soft, upturned dirt, scraping through the fragile green tobacco plants all the way to the house. He saw militiamen everywhere, carbines and pistols in their hands, the unknown faces of Clinton County Provisionals interweaving with those he recognized—the despised Clay County Unionists of Captain Garth’s Company L (apparently led by Lieutenant John W. Younger).

  In the front yard, in the center of a circle of troops, was Reuben, timid and terrified, aged beyond his years. Lieutenant Henry C. Culver of the Clinton company hammered him with questions about the bushwhackers. Reuben pleaded ignorance, but Culver had information enough to damn him. Frank James had been identified as one of Scott’s men. Fresh reports put the band close by. “The militia judged him to be speaking falsely,” Lieutenant James H. Rogers reported, “and at once procured a rope, placed it about his neck, and gave him one good swing.”

  At that moment, as the rope was tied around Reuben’s neck and tossed over the limb of a sturdy tree, Jesse’s uncle, William James, appeared. A Baptist minister like his late brother Robert, he, too, had heard of Frank’s role in the guerrilla mayhem and decided to ride out to see the family. Jesse’s mother, the pastor recalled, was “making such an outcry and giving them such a tongue-lashing as only she could give.” William urged Zerelda to be quiet, whereupon she wheeled in his direction. “How can I be still,” she howled, “when they are hanging my husband?”

  And so they were, for now the militiamen—not occupying Yankees or rampaging jayhawkers, but neighbors and fellow Missourians—gripped the rope and pulled, making the tree groan as the frail doctor rose in the air by the twine around his throat. And then he came down in more senses than one. Breaking completely in his fear and pain, he surrendered his wife’s child to save himself. After that “one good swing,” Rogers declared, “his memory brightened up, and he concluded to reveal the hiding place of the rebels. He led the boys into the woods a short distance, and the
re, squatted upon the ground in a dense thicket, was discovered the whole band.”

  Then it was a mad dash through the trees, the sharp crack of gunfire echoing back to Jesse and his mother, the startled scrambling of guerrillas and horses through the brush. The militiamen shot two of Frank’s companions. When the bushwhackers gathered themselves together a short distance off, the Union troops found them again, gunning down three more and wounding others. Then the survivors made a relentless dash for miles through the country with the Provisionals and the Twenty-fifth Missouri after them on every road, every streambed, every ford, until they finally slipped over the Missouri River in skiffs, rowing through the scattered bullets from Union troops on the bluffs above.29

  Back at the house, the militiamen hauled away the shattered Reuben, carrying him off to the district headquarters in St. Joseph. They soon returned for Zerelda. A week before, on May 18, district commander Colonel Chester Harding, Jr., had ordered Assistant Provost Marshal Rhea to “arrest the most prominent and influential rebels and sympathizers.… Women who are violent and dangerous secessionists must be arrested as well as men.” Zerelda clearly qualified. So she was taken into military custody as well, leaving the teenage Jesse in charge of her fields.30

  That day in May, when the militia descended on the farm, has been described as the moment when Jesse James set out on his quest for revenge. But it was, in fact, the culmination of a process that stretched back to the day when Frank had joined the State Guard, back to the attack on Darius Sessions by a proslavery mob, back to the destruction of the Parkville Industrial Luminary, back to the battle Robert James had waged against abolitionists in the Baptist Church. For Jesse and his family, the dream of returning to life in a peaceful, tight-knit society had now ended, never to recur; from this day forward, they would count every neighbor as either an ally or an enemy.