T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  On June 5, after perhaps a week in custody, Zerelda returned to her family. She signed a loyalty oath that day, and Major J. M. Bassett, provost marshal for the northwest district, granted her a parole. She had lied in signing the oath, of course, but what of it? She and her children saw themselves adrift in a sea of enemies, and they would lie to survive. Reuben, on the other hand, did not return for another two weeks. Bassett waited until June 24, 1863, to issue him a parole, with the condition that he report to the provost marshal’s office in St. Joseph every twenty days. It was ironic that he should be held so long and placed under such restrictions: it was Zerelda, not her husband, who railed against the Union, who fed and spied for the bushwhackers. In 1863, however, the authorities inevitably saw the man of the house as the moving force.

  Jesse’s thoughts as his bedraggled stepfather shuffled back into the house can only be guessed at. Were they surges of concern, pangs of embarrassment, or flashes of anger at how he had broken so quickly? The doctor himself was clearly uncomfortable. Within a week of his return, he approached Alvah Maret (the county court judge who had sold land to Robert James) and asked for his help in loosening the terms of his parole. Maret could do little; the military had assumed most governmental powers, making him almost as much a bystander as anyone else. But together with two other neighbors, A. C. Courtney and L. J. Larkin, Maret composed a letter to Major Bassett, urging him to release Samuel from his requirements. “We regard him as a peaceable, quiet, inoffensive man, who would harm no one,” they wrote. “He is, we hesitate not to state, under the control of his wife & stepson, and is really afraid to act contrary to their wishes in anything. This fear, we believe, caused him to make a false statement he would not otherwise have done. We know no man who is more peacefully inclined and who is more inoffensive.”31

  For Reuben Samuel, to be “peacefully inclined” was to be an outsider in his own home. When his wife and his stepsons slammed the gate on the Union authorities and their Unionist neighbors, he found himself caught in the doorway, unwilling to seal himself behind their wall of lies, deceit, and distrust—yet unable, or afraid, to abandon them. His stepson Frank belonged to a gang that murdered its prisoners and robbed civilians; the Union militia, on the other hand, had nearly tortured him to death; and the provost marshal simply ignored his terrified supplications. There was no place in this war for an inoffensive man.

  Zerelda, on the other hand, gloried in her offensiveness. When she gave birth to a girl that year, she named her Fannie Quantrell Samuel (using a common spelling of the famous bushwhacker’s name), “just to have a Quantrell in the family,” as she later put it. Imprisonment had only further hardened this hard woman. As for Jesse, he tended his trampled tobacco field with the remaining slaves and looked south to the Missouri River for signs that Frank had survived.32

  CHAPTER SIX

  Terror

  THE ONSET of summer brought fear and triumph in equal measure. In May 1863, Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia turned back yet another Union offensive against the Confederate capital with a stunning victory at Chancellorsville—a masterpiece of tactics, deception, and courage. In the same month, Grant delivered his own stroke of genius at Vicksburg, Mississippi, trapping a rebel army of thirty thousand men in a campaign every bit as daring as Lee’s. All through June, Grant besieged the Mississippi river town, one of the last two links between the Confederacy’s eastern half and its western states; meanwhile, Lee embarked on a bold invasion of Pennsylvania.

  Then an overconfident Lee finally overreached himself at Gettysburg, as he smashed his regiments against Union lines on heights named Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, Cemetery Hill, and Cemetery Ridge. On July 4, he led his shattered army south in retreat. That same day, the laconic Grant accepted the surrender of Vicksburg and its garrison. When news of its fall reached the besieged Confederates at Port Hudson, the final rebel stronghold on the Mississippi, they too surrendered. “Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success,” wrote Josiah Gorgas, chief of Confederate ordnance, in his diary on July 28, “today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.”1

  The Confederacy’s cast-off children in Missouri despaired at the disastrous turn of summer. But the changing tide of war made no difference within the state, where the fighting continued on more savagely than before.

  “We are getting quite hardened to this kind of thing,” wrote Union lieutenant Sardius Smith in his diary, “and I can go into a house with a pistol in my hand, with a smile on my face, speak politely to the ladies, ask where their men are in order that I may shoot them or take them prisoner with as much grace as though I was making a call for friendship sake.” That was in 1862. In January 1863, Colonel Penick reported that the bushwhackers were now mutilating their victims. On March 29, Brigadier General Ben Loan angrily forwarded a report to headquarters that the guerrillas had murdered twenty escaping slaves. “The contest for the supremacy in this State,” he fumed, “must be made a war of extermination.”2 During the tense summer of 1863, Loan’s idea spread to the public. “The whole population of the country,” reported a depressed Edward M. Samuel from Liberty, “may be said to have been … demoralized by this war.” By demoralized he meant that their ethics and decency had evaporated in the heat of the killing.3

  General Schofield worried most about the strife in Jackson County, the most “demoralized” area of all. As the new commander of the Department of the Missouri, on June 9 he created the District of the Border, which included both the two western tiers of Missouri counties and those parts of Kansas that were north of the thirty-eighth parallel and south of the Missouri River. He put Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, Jr., in charge of this vital district. Politically connected and shrewdly intelligent, Ewing grasped the essential problem in crushing the insurrection. “About two-thirds of the families on the occupied farms of that region are of kin to the guerrillas, and are actively and heartily engaged in feeding, clothing, and sustaining them,” he wrote to Schofield on August 3, 1863. “I can see no prospect of an early and complete end to the war on the border, without a great increase of troops, so long as those families remain there.”4

  In strictly military terms, Ewing had hit upon the classic answer to partisan warfare. Throughout the nineteenth century, the U. S. Army coped with Native American insurrections by relocating entire populations. Almost forty years later, the British would subdue the intractable Boer insurrection in South Africa by placing all civilian Afrikaners in concentration camps. The people, as Mao Zedong famously wrote, were the sea in which the guerrilla swims; Ewing wanted to drain the ocean dry.5

  In many ways, Ewing’s plans to move against civilians simply extended existing policies. In late July, his provost marshal used a three-story building at 1425 Grand Avenue in Kansas City to imprison ten female relatives of bushwhackers William Anderson, John McCorkle, Cole Younger, and others. On August 13, the building collapsed, killing five of the women and badly injuring others. Rumors spread that the building had been sabotaged by the army. Unmoved, Ewing pressed ahead with his program. On August 18, he issued General Orders Nos. 9 (freeing slaves of rebels) and 10 (banishing bushwhackers’ families). Neither order affected Jesse James and his family, but within Ewing’s district, the long-suffering civilians would suffer as never before.6

  • • •

  FRANK HAD SURVIVED. In the first week of August, Jesse saw him at the farm, where he had arrived with two companions. He had stories to tell. After his harrowing escape across the Missouri River (losing his horse in the process), he had made his way to the main guerrilla encampment. There, deep in the Sni-A-Bar wilderness on the border of Jackson and Lafayette Counties, Frank had met the greatest bushwhacker of all. “I will never forget the first time I saw Quantrill,” he recalled years afterward. “He was nearly six feet in height, rather thin, his hair and moustache was sandy and he was full of life and a jolly fellow.” Frank was awed by how natural he was. “He had none of the air of the bravado
or the desperado about him,” he later said, but “he was a demon in battle.”7

  In Jackson County, Frank had met most of Quantrill’s followers and allies, men such as the hulking Cole Younger, who had gained notoriety by ambushing and killing most of the militiamen who had murdered his father, and John McCorkle, whose sisters would soon die in the Kansas City prison collapse. They fought together under Quantrill and such guerrilla leaders as George Todd and David Pool—raiding, skirmishing, burning Unionist farms and killing informers. On June 17, Fernando Scott was killed in fighting near Westport.8

  Frank and his two friends soon went back across the Missouri, stopping only to rob a traveler on the way. The longer Frank stayed in Clay County, the more dangerous he made it for his mother and his stepfather. But he had a pressing reason to return to Jackson County: Quantrill had called. A rendezvous of his followers and fellow bushwhackers had been set for August 10, near Blue Springs.9

  What happened there and in the days that followed, Jesse only learned secondhand. But at that Blue Springs meeting, the ambitious Quantrill presented his grandest scheme to date. He wanted to attack Lawrence, the abolitionist capital of Kansas and home to Senator Jim Lane. The guerrillas had plenty of resentments that cried out for retaliation: the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Lawrence, meanwhile, had long been a center for the recruitment of black troops.10 Quantrill’s followers and allies swiftly agreed to his plan.

  For all its symbolic importance, Lawrence was in many ways a typical American town, resembling those in Ohio and New York and the more peaceful parts of Missouri. Its children played and went to school; its women labored at sewing, laundry, butter-churning, and domestic manufacturing; its men unloaded sacks of grain from wagons, hammered horseshoes into shape, and haggled over prices. Its families went to church on Sunday, attended dances and parties, wrote letters to sons serving in the Union army in a dozen different units. It was no den of evil, nor even a military target; at the moment, only a handful of raw recruits slept in tents on the edge of town.

  But that is precisely why Quantrill wanted to go, and why his allies and adherents agreed. He spoke to his men of getting “revenge,” and to Quantrill, revenge meant terror. The bushwhackers went to Lawrence not to score a victory; they went to inflict pain—not because of who their victims were, but because of who they, the guerrillas, had become.

  On the night of August 18, the Missourians began to collect for the strike into Kansas. Estimates of the force range up to 450 men, though McCorkle later put the figure at 150, and the first Union report counted only 200. On the morning of August 21, after an all-night ride from Missouri, they arrived at Lawrence. Quantrill led them on a thundering gallop into the center of the town. “Kill!” he ordered. “Kill and you will make no mistake! Lawrence should be thoroughly cleansed, and the only way to cleanse it is to kill! Kill!”

  They killed. They shot every man and boy they saw. They pulled them out of cellars and attics, knocked them off horses, and executed them in front of their families. They clubbed them, knifed them, stole their money and valuables, burned their homes and businesses. Black and white, ministers, farmers, merchants, schoolboys, recruits: at least two hundred died in terror, while others lingered wounded in the ashes of the town. Jim Lane, the man they most wanted to kill, narrowly escaped by dashing through a cornfield in his nightshirt. Did Frank James stand in the parlors, front yards, and side streets of Lawrence, firing his revolver at helpless civilians? That is what he came to do, though no specific act has been attributed to him.11

  The slaughter of innocents was hardly unknown to Americans. But massacres had almost always occurred—and almost always would occur—on the frontiers of race. A year before Lawrence, an even bloodier butchery took place in Minnesota, as frustrated, starving Dakota warriors broke out of their reservation and murdered homesteaders southwest of St. Paul. A year after Lawrence, an atrocity almost as costly would be inflicted on the Southern Cheyenne by Colorado settlers at Sand Creek. In the decade to come, hundreds if not thousands of African Americans would die in mass murders across the South. What made Lawrence particularly shocking to Unionist contemporaries was the common identity of the killers and most of the killed: white Protestant men of old American families. And what made Lawrence so acceptable to secessionists was the notion that the people of that town had deracinated themselves, since they consorted with blacks, treated slaves as equals, even gave them arms and put them in uniform. “One of them damned nigger-thieving abolitionists ain’t dead yet,” one of the guerrillas exclaimed to a companion during the raid. “Go and kill him.”12

  Retribution and countermeasures came in one package. On August 25, 1863, as Frank and the other raiders raced back to the refuge of the Sni-A-Bar ravines, General Ewing issued General Order No. 11: Everyone living in the counties in his district that bordered Kansas (Jackson, Cass, Bates, and the northern half of Vernon) was ordered to leave within fifteen days. Only those who lived near Kansas City or within one mile of four designated towns were spared. General Schofield approved. “The measure which has been adopted seems a very harsh one,” he explained; “but … I am satisfied it is wise and humane. It was not adopted hastily, as a consequence of the Lawrence massacre. The subject had long been discussed between General Ewing and myself.” The slaughter at Lawrence simply made it unavoidable.13

  And brutal. “There is hundreds of people leaving their homes from this country and God knows what is to become of them,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Bazel F. Lazear of the First Cavalry Regiment, MSM. He observed the desperate evacuation from his post in Lexington, and poured out his reaction in a letter to his wife at their home in Louisiana, Missouri. “It is heart sickening to see what I have seen since I have been back here. A desolate country and women & children some of them almost naked. Some on foot and some in old wagons. Oh God what a sight to see in this once happy and peaceable country.”14

  The area depopulated by General Order No. 11 became known as the Burnt District. Columns of Union troops marched through, killing abandoned livestock, seizing harvested crops, starting blazes in empty barns and houses. In Cass County, only 600 people were allowed to remain, out of the 9,794 counted in the 1860 census. When the refugees crossed to Clay and other neighboring counties, the military ordered them to move on, forcing them to resettle far from their homes.15

  General Order No. 11 aroused pity in the minds of Union soldiers, but not guilt. After Lazear described the horrors of the civilian evacuation to his wife, he placed the blame firmly on the bushwhackers. “There is no punishment on earth great enough for the villains who have brought this Rebellion about,” he fumed. “I yesterday had one publicly shot.… He was in the Lawrence raid. He is the second prisoner I have had shot and I will have every one of them shot I can get hold of, as such inhuman wretches deserve no mercy and should be shot down like dogs wherever found.”16

  Lazear’s Missouri militia struck at Quantrill’s stronghold along the Sni-A-Bar Creek from the east as the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry moved in from the west. It was grim work. On October 1, for example, Sergeant Sherman Bodwell and a detachment of Kansas troopers captured a bushwhacker, and the major in command began to interrogate the wounded Missourian. He “was talking, claiming to be a prisoner, etc.,” Bodwell scribbled in his diary. “Lt. asked Maj., Are you through with him? Maj. nodded assent. Lt. said to men standing about ‘mount your horses’ & as they drew off aimed & fired the revolver, ball striking just back of the eye.” Over the next few days, contacts with the enemy grew scarce. On October 4, they found an ominous abandoned camp, occupied only by a dog and the hanging corpse of a Union soldier. “Quantrill has evidently gathered his bands and left,” Bodwell concluded, “maybe for Kan., maybe for the South.”17

  IN NORTHEASTERN Clay County, the slaves were whispering among themselves. In the first weeks of August 1863, messages flew from farm to farm—rumors of free black men, heavily armed, crossing over from Kansas to free their comr
ades. The moment has come, they whispered; wait for the designated night, when all would go in one general escape across the Missouri.

  On the morning of August 14, they were gone. “Seven of the negroes left,” reported Kate Watkins, just over the hill from Zerelda’s farm. “They left on the night of the 13th of August, taking 6 horses, and a quantity of stolen clothes.… There was a general stampede the night they left. There is very few negroes left in the country.” No one knows how many of Zerelda’s slaves joined the “general stampede,” but Charlotte remained, along with at least one of the two teenage girls.18

  All of this enraged Colonel James H. Moss. Like Governor Hamilton R. Gamble, he was a conservative Whig to the core. But unlike his longtime friend Edward M. Samuel, he would never declare that he was “an Unconditional Union man, even radically so, if necessary to put down this rebellion.” Quite the contrary: Moss saw no point in destroying the old slaveowning society in order to save it. And when he returned to Clay County from St. Louis in September 1863, that society was in chaos: respectable old citizens in military jails or under bond, the civil authorities ignored, bandits loose, and slaves running off en masse. “When I reached home,” he wrote to Alexander Doniphan, “I found that the entire military force in Clay and Platte was nothing more or less than an armed mob.”

  Moss came ready to do something about it. Gamble had given him the authority to reorganize the militia in the two counties to protect them against the expected retaliation from Kansas for the Lawrence massacre. With Gamble’s letter in his pocket, Moss planned to do far more: he was going to clear away the radicalism wrought by the Provisional EMM. “My arrival,” he boasted, “was like the falling of a thunder bolt in their midst.”