T. J. Stiles
Page 14
Outwardly, there was nothing unethical about his shooting of that elephant: Who could say the animal would not go berserk again? Indeed, the author acted as everyone expected him to act. But he refused to congratulate himself; instead, with searing honesty, Orwell recognized the small atrocity he had committed, and saw that he had committed it against himself. His words remind us of the power of a civilized mind, of how a humane imagination may defy evil, even the subtlest kind, and penetrate the veils of self-justification. He reminds us that no one is simply a creature of circumstance, even among a hostile people in a restive colony halfway around the globe.
Jesse was no stranger in a foreign land—he was at home among old neighbors and friends. Yet he helped to tear apart his community without reflection or self-doubt. He did far more damage, both outwardly and inwardly, than Orwell ever would, yet he never questioned the justice or effects of his actions. Seized by his hatred and ideological convictions, he could not see himself for what he was. Unlike the Unionist Anna Slayback of St. Joseph, he never moaned, “But this is a family quarrel, brother against brother, & we bite & devour one another that other nations may mock & laugh at our folly.”39
Instead, he reveled in the power his murders earned him. It may not have been easy at the beginning. Perhaps his legs felt weak as he rode to his first killing; perhaps nausea swept over him in a fit of nervous tension when the gunfire erupted; perhaps his heart pounded when he first squeezed the trigger. But his mind was prepared for the work, honed by his beliefs, his experiences, and his family—and repetition soon made it routine. Jesse James’s face did not grow to fit the mask of the bushwhacker; by the time he put it on, in the third year of the war, it was already close to a perfect match.
WITH THE COUNTRYSIDE dissolving into chaos, Colonel Moss dropped out of view; in Clay County, his Paw Paws were largely deactivated. To replace them, Captain Kemper asked three of the best local guerrilla-fighters, John S. Thomason, John W. Younger, and William Garth, to organize new companies of Enrolled Militia. General Fisk kept the telegraph busy with a flurry of orders, sending a fifty-six-man militia company from Ray County on the march west and reinforcing Kemper with the rest of his MSM cavalry company. Meanwhile, Edward M. Samuel and other Unionist leaders pleaded for more troops.40
More troops were exactly what Kemper needed. “There is a great number of men of Clay County who had left their homes in the last few days and gone in the brush,” he informed Fisk on June 15. He compiled a list of men whom Colonel Thornton had sworn in for regular Confederate service, then went house to house, arresting dozens, including some once thought to be strong Unionists. Taylor’s guerrillas were another matter. “I have a scout of thirty men,” Kemper wrote to the general, “lying on the road for the purpose of capturing them as they pass. I did not succeed in seeing but one whilst I was out. I shot his horse, but failed to get him.”41
Stymied, Kemper resorted to old-fashioned detective work. Scouting the heavily timbered Fishing River, he found signs of guerrilla activity on the farm of John Eaton. “I noticed at the yard fence a path made, both by horses and men,” he reported. “I was convinced at once that the track must be that of the bushwhackers.… I took the track at once, and followed it through a pasture adjoining the yard into a densely brushy pasture, where I came upon this party of bushwhackers.” Jesse was probably sitting in that camp when the captain and his troopers burst in, revolvers barking, bullets spitting through leaves and branches. But the rebels scrambled to safety, returning fire as they scattered through the brush, a typically frustrating skirmish for a Union soldier in Missouri.42
Fisk dearly wished to exterminate the guerrillas, but he reluctantly agreed to let two local citizens negotiate a cease-fire. In late June, they found their way to Taylor’s camp with a message: If he promised to abandon Clay County, the military authorities would leave secessionist families alone. All the residents wanted, they told him, was peace—a return to the status quo, much as Colonel Moss had maintained with the Paw Paws. Taylor accepted their terms.
Then the militia shot a secessionist, and Taylor decided to retaliate. This time they were going to kill Solomon G. Bigelow, one of the first organizers of the EMM in Clay County. In late June, Jesse cleaned and loaded his revolvers, threw a saddle over the back of his horse, and rode with Frank and a dozen other bushwhackers to Bigelow’s house. When Taylor asked his victim to step outside, however, he was answered by a blast of gunfire that sparked a grueling siege. Jesse experienced hostile fire for the first time as Bigelow and his brother defended the house to the last, even tearing apart furniture to make clubs when they ran out of ammunition. When the brothers finally fell, Jesse looked down to see his own blood dampening his clothing; by one account, this was when he lost his fingertip.43
Tellingly, Jesse’s first real fight had not been on a grand field of battle, but at the home of a local farmer who was no longer an active soldier. But neither the petty brutality of it nor the Bigelows’ stiff resistance cut short his growing ferocity. In the company of armed, unrestrained, and angry young men, he who was most savage garnered the most respect; he who was the least bit sensitive was accounted a fool. The very next day, the guerrillas murdered a Unionist civilian who had the misfortune to meet them on the road. Meanwhile they gathered up new recruits, swelling their numbers to twenty-five or more.
On the rainy night of July 3, the bushwhackers rode to a new camp on the Fishing River. With battle-tested instincts, Taylor kept an eye on his own trail; after the attack on the Bigelows, he expected a response from Captain Kemper. The next morning, he learned that Kemper was indeed close behind. Taylor ordered the men over a steep bank along a bend in the river, just above a ford. The young James scuffled with the others through the sticky mud to the water’s edge, then crouched down and waited.
Soon he heard the heavy tramp of Kemper’s horsemen crashing through the brush toward the water, then splashes as they moved into the river. Taylor gave the command. The line of guerrillas rose up and blasted the patrol with a hurricane of bullets. Kemper himself tumbled out of his saddle, his leg torn by a lead ball. The militiamen immediately broke off the disastrous fight, carrying their injured commander back to Liberty.44
Jesse could only have been ecstatic. His second pitched battle had been an exhilaratingly one-sided victory, the sort of textbook ambush that Frank had seen a year earlier on the same river. Taylor, on the other hand, was enraged. He sent a letter to Kemper, lacerating him for breaking the terms of the cease-fire. “I am going to stay here,” he wrote, “until the Radicals all leave this county.” This was a revealing admission, though fully in keeping with his recent attacks: it acknowledged that the guerrillas’ primary target was not the detachment of soldiers in Clay, but the civilian “Union party.” Now, however, Taylor brashly offered to fight the MSM alone, provided the Union captain stopped harassing rebel civilians. “I will carry war on as you carry it on,” he declared. “You can’t drive me out of this county.… If I find that you are warring on the citizens, so be it; I will retaliate—if you fight me alone, I will return the compliment.”
He signed the letter, published on July 8 in the Liberty Tribune, “Chas. F. Taylor, Captain Commanding the Country,” and addressed it to “Capt. Kemper, Commanding the Town.” The choice of words was clever, an apt summary of the classic situation in a successful guerrilla insurrection. Of course, Taylor had no such rank as “captain”; none of the guerrillas, with the exception of Quantrill, held a formal Confederate commission. They often affected such titles, but all (even Quantrill’s) were truly meaningless. Military ranks reflect the subdivision and articulation of a military force, which allows a commander to manipulate the elements under his control. Bushwhacker gangs, however, were spontaneously organized, forming and dissolving almost randomly, men rising to power through personal ability and popularity. Only once during the war would a sizable number of guerrillas within Missouri respond to the Confederate chain of command—a time that was rapidly approaching,
bringing with it disaster.45
The guerrillas’ war on the civilian population had nearly succeeded. “A general terror prevails,” wrote one former militiaman on July 12, 1864. “Today there is not in the county of Clay one unconditional loyal Union man who dares to go into the harvest field to do a day’s work. Many of them have left the State; all are now talking of going.” On July 20, some fifteen hundred citizens gathered in a mass meeting in Liberty and condemned Taylor’s gang in the starkest terms. “Guerrillas—whatever the name they assume—and bushwhackers are the ravenous monsters of society,” they declared, “and their speedy and utter extermination should be sought by all brave and honorable men.”46
The bushwhacker leader had already left, however, taking Jesse, Frank, and the rest of his men west into Platte County, where Colonel Thornton had gone to gather more recruits. On July 6, they attacked the village of Parkville. On July 10, they linked up with Thornton’s makeshift regiment for an assault on Platte City. At ten o’clock that morning, their column of three hundred to four hundred men marched into its deserted streets. Within fifteen minutes, the Paw Paw defenders confronted the invaders—in Confederate uniforms. The entire force had defected.
Platte City took on all the appearances of a liberated town. The population poured into the streets and chatted amiably with the rebels, and cheerfully looted a Unionist-owned dry-goods store. Jesse went to a photography studio and posed in his guerrilla shirt, one revolver in hand and two in his belt, his eyes staring hard and cold from his soft sixteen-year-old face. Fletch Taylor, overcome with enthusiasm, delivered a harangue, waving a bloody knife that he claimed to have thrust into the chest of a Radical only moments before. Then the bushwhackers dashed to the county’s northern border, where they murdered an abolitionist minister of the Northern Methodist church. With Taylor and Thornton around, the secessionists could congratulate themselves, who needed General Price’s army?47
Unfortunately for the Confederates, that was precisely the thought that occurred to Thornton. When the civilian crowds turned out to welcome him, when the Paw Paws defected, he began to believe that he could hold Platte County as a liberated zone until Price came to free the state. This sort of thinking rapidly sobered Taylor out of his speech-making megalomania. Now was the time to scatter, he told Thornton, before the enemy could counterattack. Thornton waved him off. After a couple of days, he shifted his little army to Camden Point, where the local ladies presented him with a flag reading, “Protect Missouri.” Disgusted, the bushwhackers trotted away, leaving the recruits and rebellious Paw Paws to their fate.
Taylor, of course, was exactly right. On July 12, as Thornton admired his flag, General Fisk spent the day in his telegraph office, coordinating three columns of troops that converged on Camden Point. At dawn on July 14, Colonel James H. Ford led the attack. The result was less a battle than the start of a mad chase. Surprised and outfought, Thornton fled east, trailing stragglers all the way through Clay County. Back in Platte City, Charles Jennison, now in command of the Fifteenth Kansas Cavalry Regiment, sent his men from house to house, methodically burning the town as repayment for its rebellion. When they finished, only fifteen residents remained.48
The bushwhackers had long since returned to Clay County. According to one source (an intimate of Jesse James, though an unreliable chronicler), Jesse’s close friend Archie Clement accompanied him on the ride home. As the pair arrived there, they surprised two militiamen picking apples from a tree. Yanking their pistols, the pair of teenagers blasted them out of the branches, laughing happily, “and made sport of the fruit that such apple orchards bore.” Many historians believe that Clement was elsewhere, but the story may be true. “This moment the news comes in,” wrote a Unionist in Liberty on July 12, 1864, “that two young soldiers were bushwhacked today at Centerville.”49
Home, however, would soon be no place for a guerrilla. Clay County now swarmed with perhaps five hundred Union troops. “I have my whole force since my arrival at Liberty constantly scouting,” wrote Colonel Ford on July 18. Many of them haunted the landscape around Zerelda’s house. “Look where you will, you see one,” wrote a teenage girl from the Watkins farm. “So many of the confounded Feds were here, and doing us so much mischief,” she wrote on July 24. Small wonder, then, that the guerrillas broke up into small groups and fled.50
The “enemy here seemed to have scattered in every direction,” Colonel Ford reported on July 25. “We labored under a great disadvantage,” he complained; “the citizens gave the enemy information of any movement I made, stand picket for them, and I can get no information whatever, only as I send out small parties to play bushwhacker.”51
Ford’s words provide a fitting conclusion to the first phase of Jesse’s guerrilla education. Missouri’s war was no longer a struggle over a line on a map, whether an international boundary would be drawn along Iowa’s southern rim. It was now a war to remake society itself. In Clay County, Jesse and the other bushwhackers spent most of their time slaying Unionist civilians, clashing with Kemper’s troops only when Kemper tracked them down. In Platte County, Taylor had gone out of his way to kill a Northern Methodist minister—who, as an abolitionist spokesman, was as great a threat to Missouri’s Southern identity as an entire company of Federal troops. He abandoned Thornton not only for tactical reasons, but because conventional warfare was a distraction from the bushwhackers’ political cleansing of the countryside. The Unionists fought the same kind of war, against each other as well as against secessionists. The controversy over Colonel Moss’s Paw Paws represented a clash between a conservative, proslavery Unionism and the growing abolitionism of the Provisional militia and EMM captains Anthony Harsel and John Younger.
This was the lasting lesson that Jesse learned in his first days as a gunman. It was a lesson that would stay with him until the end of the war, through the tumultuous year that followed, through a decade more of life as an outlaw. Guerrilla warfare was deeply personal, yet also purposeful. It was small-scale and vicious, with none of the standard trophies of conventional victories. Rather, its successes could be measured from farm to farm, in the sentiment of the people, in the flight of frightened foes. “At the start of the rebellion, the people of Clay were a unit for the Union,” thought Sheriff F. R. Long. But at the end of 1864, Captain Kemper would write, “I feel today that I am almost as much in ‘rebellion’ here in this county as I would be in South Carolina.” This was the bushwhacker goal, and the bushwhackers triumphed. By attacking the dissenting population, they waged a war of ideology, in which their most effective weapon was pure terror.52
Jesse’s time with Fletch Taylor had come to an end. After the guerrillas scattered, Taylor crossed the Missouri River, and Jesse and Frank looked for a new leader. Their choice showed how deeply they had absorbed all these lessons. They were going to join the most brutal gang of terrorists in Missouri, whose leader, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, was rapidly becoming the personification of horror.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Horror
WILLIAM T. ANDERSON was a hard man. A handsome twenty-five-year-old, he had grown up tough in Kentucky, Kansas, and Missouri. After his father was killed in the Kansas Territory, he had drifted into simple banditry. Then the Civil War unleashed his full potential. Already an embittered, brooding man, he had filled with bile after one of his sisters died and two others suffered injuries in the Kansas City prison collapse. At Lawrence, he had killed the innocent with a special passion, telling one woman, “I’m here for revenge and I have got it.” Afterward in Texas, he began his rise to notoriety by breaking away from Quantrill, leading his own column of guerrillas back to Missouri in the spring of 1864. He brought terror to the Unionists in Jackson and Lafayette Counties. As he operated outside of Lexington in July, he sent a letter to the newspapers that exceeded even Fletch Taylor’s megalomania. “I will hunt you down like wolves and murder you,” he warned the loyal citizens. “You cannot escape.” Small wonder they began to call him “Bloody Bill.”1
At some point during Anderson’s parade of terror north of the Missouri River, Jesse and Frank James rode to join him, along with the other Clay County guerrillas who had followed Taylor. Given the massive influx of Union troops into their old killing grounds, they may have linked up with him as early as the third week in July. If so, Jesse would have been back with his friend Archie Clement when the rebels ambushed a patrol near Huntsville, killing two. After the fight, Clement scalped the dead—an act that was fast becoming his trademark. “You come to hunt bush whackers,” Anderson (or one of his followers) scratched on a piece of paper. “Now you are skelpt. Clemyent skept you. Wm. Anderson.” Then he pinned the note to one of the bodies, and the guerrillas rode off.2
One way or another, the James brothers joined up with Anderson, who set up camp on or near their mother’s farm in the first week of August 1864. The arrival of “Bloody Bill” was a grand occasion for local secessionists, and small bands of local, less notorious bushwhackers rode in. “In evident anticipation of the gathering together,” wrote a friend (and embellisher) of Frank and Jesse, “Mrs. Samuels [sic], as much devoted to the cause as her two heroic boys, had prepared a splendid dinner.”