T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  The impact of all of this on the sixteen-year-old Jesse can scarcely be exaggerated. As a member of the most dangerous guerrilla organization in Missouri, he was now at the center of the secessionist cause. Indeed, with his mother playing hostess to Anderson’s crew, his farm became the cause’s physical home. But there must have been something even more personal that thrilled him. He had never known his father, and Reuben Samuel offered a poor substitute; but as he rode with the bushwhackers, he finally found himself in the company of authoritative men. This is not to say that Anderson had instantly become a father figure to him, or that Anderson alone was the definitive influence in his life—but Anderson, Taylor, Clement, and other guerrilla leaders did indeed become Jesse’s role models. Far from being repelled by their savagery, Jesse was attracted to it. As his long career would show, he admired the way they inspired fear in their victims. He sought to emulate them and win their respect.

  Anderson had much to teach the teenage boy. The education began with a quick plundering raid into Platte County. As Jesse and the others watched, Anderson tortured a prisoner with a knife, slicing off both ears before firing his revolver into the man’s head. Then he led the gang back to Clay County. On August 10, they encountered “a harmless, inoffensive Union man” (according to locals) as he was on his way to get a doctor for his sick mother. By now, Jesse would have vied with the others to empty his pistol into the man’s body. The victim had married three days before; now he was a naked corpse on the muddy bank of a creek.3

  All this proved too much for Reuben Samuel. The year before he had been hanged for the sake of one stepson and a relatively obscure guerrilla chieftain. Now he had two stepsons in the brush, and the most notorious bushwhacker in Missouri in his yard. So as his domineering wife laughed with the visiting guerrillas and ordered Charlotte to throw another ham into the pot, he quietly slipped off the farm for the twelve-mile journey to Liberty. There he made his way to Edward M. Samuel, most likely in his office at the Clay County Savings Association. Hat in hand, he begged the influential Unionist to write a letter on his behalf to the provost marshal. Under his parole, he explained, he needed explicit permission to leave the state—and he had decided to go to Indiana.

  As E. M. Samuel looked over the broken figure in front of him, he saw “an easy, good natured, good for nothing fellow.” This pathetic man, he remarked, was “completely under the control of his wife,” a woman with a formidable reputation as a razor-tongued secessionist. A year earlier, the politic banker had spoken up for Reuben; now he had no interest in helping him. “I told him, very bluntly and plainly, that it was his duty to help the military authorities in finding out his stepsons,” he wrote to the provost marshal in St. Joseph, “and in bringing them to justice.” When Reuben saw that he would never get his pass to Indiana, he quietly returned home to the twin dangers of bushwhackers and militia.4

  The Union authorities had no intention of letting him stay there. By now it was common knowledge that both Jesse and Frank rode with Bill Anderson, and that Zerelda had assisted the bushwhackers at every opportunity. In the second week of August, Colonel Edward C. Catherwood, the new MSM commander in Liberty, ordered the Samuel clan and ten other Clay County families to prepare for evacuation from Union-held Missouri. He gave them just ten days; after that, they would be banished from the state (as General Fisk wrote) for being “the most disloyal of that disloyal locality.”

  Zerelda and her shattered husband no doubt loaded their things into a wagon and waited for the final order to leave. It never came. A bureaucratic glitch stalled their banishment: Union headquarters in St. Louis sent back Catherwood’s list, telling him to annotate it with “the reason why, with evidence,” each person should be banished. As the fighting intensified in August and September, the colonel never found time to return to the matter.5

  If Jesse and Frank’s recruitment into Anderson’s band made things worse for their mother and stepfather, it magnified their stature among the bushwhacker fraternity. Bloody Bill was, quite simply, the most vicious man in Missouri. “You talk about Quantrill, Todd, and Taylor being reckless raiders and fighters,” wrote fellow Clay County bushwhacker Jim Cummins, “but Anderson I thought was worse than any of them when I joined him.” He stood a slender five feet ten inches tall in his captured Union officer’s coat, “quick and lithe in action as a tiger—whose nature he at times possessed,” wrote one observer who spared no tender feelings for the guerrilla leader. “His hair was his greatest ornament,” a mass of shoulder-length, brown, wavy strands that surrounded a tanned face with a full beard, topped by a cavalryman’s hat. Most striking were his eyes, a blend of blue and gray. “They were cold, unsympathizing and expressionless, never firing in anger or lighting with enthusiasm in battle.” And yet, by all accounts, battle is what he hungered for.6

  Fletch Taylor had since gone across the Missouri River. On August 8, 1864, a shotgun blast forced the amputation of his right arm (which led editor Robert Miller of the Liberty Tribune to express his sincere hope that the wound might prove fatal).7

  By now, the woods and roads echoed with the relentless tramp of Catherwood’s Sixth Cavalry Regiment, MSM, and two local EMM companies under Captains Garth and Younger. They interrogated civilians, burned down the houses of sympathizers, occasionally caught a guerrilla or two in the open.8 On August 11 or 12, Anderson decided to move east into Ray County. After two months in the brush, the ritual would now be familiar to Jesse: currying his mount, cleaning and loading his revolvers, packing his bedroll and clothes. “Anderson always made us keep our horses in good condition,” Frank later remarked. “If a man did not keep a good horse and good pistols,” he found himself in trouble. As the column of guerrillas trotted out of their creek-bottom or farmyard camp, Jesse may have kept close to his friend Arch Clement, who was feared and admired by all the bushwhackers. If so, he also kept close to Anderson himself, who relied heavily on the ruthless Little Archie—“the real brains of Anderson’s command,” in Frank’s words.9

  On August 12, just across the Ray County line, Anderson’s column of fifty to seventy-five bushwhackers thrashed one EMM patrol, then lured another into a trap.10 For the men of the Enrolled Missouri Militia, these encounters were harrowing indeed. Most of the men were just farmers, as one general noted, “leaving their homes at a time of the year when their services on their farms was badly needed … and without any preparations for the comfort of their families, or without any pay or prospects of being reimbursed for money and time expended in defending their government.” Nor did they have any prospects of glory when they died, as they did so often when facing the bushwhackers.

  The next day, Anderson drove his men on a rapid march from west-central to southeastern Ray County. The bushwhackers carefully kept clear of the professional, well-equipped Missouri State Militia, now pursuing from the west, but they eagerly fell on the ill-prepared EMM. They came across one man riding in his wagon, and casually shot him out of his seat. They caught two troopers on the road and cut their throats from ear to ear, then scalped them. They tied the bloody scraps to their saddles and bridles, in the increasingly popular style among Anderson’s men. Jesse himself, according to one source, put his knife to the skull of one of these victims.11

  As the James brothers trotted along together, toward the latter part of this swift and deadly ride across Ray County, Jesse caught sight of a fine-looking saddle balanced on a fence rail. His own, he mused, was rather poor by comparison, so he did what any guerrilla would do: he reined in his horse, slipped to the ground, and reached out to take it. Suddenly he heard a pop and felt the searing bite of a bullet tearing through his chest. In the doorway of a nearby house stood a man with a smoking gun, a German immigrant named Heizinger; the man turned and fled out the back, escaping through a cornfield as Frank rushed to help his brother.

  At first, Jesse probably felt little pain. With Frank’s help, he climbed back into the saddle, then rode on for three more miles, clinging to his brother for support
. The shock soon wore off, however, and was replaced by piercing agony as blood soaked his bullet-torn shirt. Finally he could no longer keep his balance. The guerrillas commandeered a wagon, set him inside, and drove to the home of John A. Rudd, a secessionist who lived close by on the Missouri River. As he bounced along in the rattling wagon, Jesse reportedly explained to a friend, he was in such intense pain that he wished the Federals would catch and kill him.12

  He apparently remained in Rudd’s home until a doctor came to see him. The physician’s name was I. M. Ridge, and he had known Jesse since he was a boy. Dr. Ridge had been at home in Kansas City when Thomas James, a wealthy uncle of Frank and Jesse, came to ask for his help. “It was a dangerous undertaking,” Ridge recalled, “but I agreed to do the best I could.” He traveled “by a circuitous route on horseback,” to throw off Union scouts. “I hitched my horse out in the thick underbrush and made my way into the house by the back way, the family aware of my coming. I was shown to a room in the second story and then into a clothes closet, from the floor of which a small moveable ladder reached to a trap door opening into the loft. There lay Jesse in great pain and in a very dangerous condition, for he had received no medical attention.”

  Examining the injured boy, he saw that a large-caliber bullet had struck him outside the right nipple and passed clear through his chest. There was little Ridge could do, given the time that had passed and the limited nature of medicine in 1864. Already scar tissue may have begun to form; perhaps a mild infection had set in, turning the ragged holes red and swollen. The doctor probably cleaned up the entrance and exit wounds, changed the bandages, and perhaps gave Jesse some useless medicine. Then he left, promising to return every week or so.13

  And so Jesse lay there, hidden away in an attic, staring at the ceiling in the choking August heat. One moment, he had been an invincible bushwhacker; the next, he was on his back with a searing pain in his chest. Instead of catching a bullet in battle, he had been shot while stealing a saddle. Worst of all would have been the sense that he was missing out. His brother and friends were suffering, fighting, and winning without him; later he would have to listen to their stories. He must have wondered if he would ever rejoin them.14

  BILL ANDERSON was weeping. “Great tears coursed down his cheeks, his breast heaved, and his body shook,” recalled one of his followers. Then the bushwhacker lapsed into silence, “morose, sullen, and gloomy.” For half of September he had ruled Boone County from the waterside town of Rocheport—“my capital,” as he called it—stopping riverboat traffic and collecting “taxes” from the population. Then things turned sour. Five of his tax collectors died at the hands of the Ninth Cavalry Regiment, MSM, which also had captured their scalp-decorated horses.15

  All this made Anderson the silent, brooding figure that Jesse saw when he rejoined the band. The wound turned out to be less severe than it looked. The low-velocity bullet had probably skipped along the outside of Jesse’s rib cage, missing his internal organs. Four weeks of rest and an active immune system had allowed him to saddle his horse again, probably by September 23, when Anderson ambushed an MSM wagon train, killing twelve troopers and three black teamsters. But the Ninth struck back the same day, catching seven bushwhackers sleeping in a hayloft. The Union troopers killed and scalped six of them, and made a prisoner of the seventh, Cave Wyatt.16

  Early on September 24, 1864, Bill Anderson mounted his distinctive black horse and led his men north to Fayette, determined to hit the Ninth in its base. Jesse and his brother cantered toward town in the column of bushwhackers, and they caught sight of another body of mounted men, some in blue uniforms, some in civilian dress, carrying a mix of carbines, shotguns, and revolvers. It was typical of an EMM company—or a guerrilla band. After a few tense moments, they learned that it was a bushwhacker gang under George Todd, the other leading heir of Quantrill’s command.17

  Todd’s band numbered well over one hundred men, gathered from various squads (including that of a bushwhacker from Lexington named Dave Pool). As Anderson rode forward to meet them, his men caught sight of a slender fellow with sandy hair and a calm, self-assured presence—Quantrill himself. He had put aside the humiliation of the rebellion against him, and rejoined his old followers for a special purpose. General Price, Todd explained, had sent word that the long-awaited liberation of Missouri was about to begin; the guerrillas were to raid the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad and draw Federal forces north of the Missouri River.18

  Anderson may not have trusted what Todd told him. Like Confederate currency, promises of a rebel liberation of Missouri had circulated a little too freely to be worth much. But Bloody Bill was happy to unite with his guerrilla comrades, if they would help him attack Fayette. Todd agreed to the plan, over Quantrill’s objections. Their combined force—anywhere from two hundred to four hundred men—would surely overwhelm the garrison, disguised as they were in captured Union uniforms.

  At 10:30 on that Saturday morning, Anderson’s boys pulled on their blue coats and formed a column. Jesse kept close to his friend and mentor Arch Clement as they trotted into town. They were in luck: much of the Ninth MSM was still on patrol, leaving behind only 150 men. Anderson’s force cantered through the streets, arousing no suspicion.19 Then one of the bushwhackers saw a black man in a Union uniform. It was more than he could stand. Pulling his revolver, he shot him down. The echoing crack of the pistol immediately caught the attention of the garrison. In the center of Fayette, twenty men of the provost guard raced into the courthouse and barred the door. The guerrillas scattered as this small squad cheered loudly and poured fire out of the windows, impervious behind brick walls to all but the luckiest shots. Anderson and Clement waved their men off, beckoning them on a half-mile dash to the edge of town. There they could see the main militia camp, a cluster of tents they could riddle with bullets.

  Sitting in that camp was Captain S. S. Eaton, who was tending to his paperwork when an old German appeared at the tent flap and started chattering about how the troops were cheering. Annoyed, Eaton was ready to tie the tent shut when he heard gunfire. Darting outside, he saw the bushwhackers approach. He ran through the camp, ordering his men into some cabins they had built out of logs and railroad ties. They scrambled into the heavy-sided buildings, where they manned windows and knocked out chinking for gun ports. As the troopers cocked revolvers and carbines, Eaton peered out at the charging enemy, now less than seventy-five yards away. Turning to his troops, he shouted, “Let them have it!”

  As Jesse charged forward in the mass of galloping guerrillas, a blade of fire erupted from the cabins, cutting through their line like a bandsaw. “Not one of the enemy could be seen, but the muzzles of the muskets protruded from every port hole, belching fire and lead,” wrote one guerrilla. “Horses went down as grain before the reaper.” A second assault met the same fate. “It was like charging a stone wall,” Frank recalled, “only this stone wall belched forth lead.”

  Jesse and Frank went in again to help rescue the wounded. They surged forward, then dropped down to the ground under the scant cover of a slight rise. “We were in plain view of the Federals and they simply peppered us with bullets,” Frank remembered. “I was mightily scared. I knew if we raised up we would expose ourselves to the fire of the Yankees [actually, fellow Missourians] and we couldn’t stay still. I tell you, pride makes most of us do many things we wouldn’t do otherwise.… Well, pride kept us there until we got [the wounded] rolled up in a blanket and then we made tracks.” Frank and two others rescued Oliver Johnson, while Jesse helped save Lee McMurtry, who had been blinded by a grazing shot.

  The rebels retreated. Thirteen had died, at least eight of whom they left behind on the field, and some thirty had been wounded. In turn, they had killed one, maybe two Union soldiers. As Frank admitted, they were “whipped” by a force less than a third the size of their own.20

  They rode away from Fayette, their mood bitter and brittle. In the biggest fight since Jesse’s return, he had been lucky simply to
survive. Anderson and Todd commanded the largest force of guerrillas in Missouri since Quantrill’s march to Texas in October 1863—perhaps the largest ever—and they had wasted it, abandoning their accustomed tactics to hurl their men against experienced, prepared defenders in fortifications. It was as if their very numbers had gone to their heads.

  But this unusually large gathering of bushwhackers totaled at most 400 men—less than half a full-strength regiment. On the main battlefronts, generals threw regiments about like handfuls of rice. On May 5, 1864, Grant had begun the Wilderness campaign with an army of 115,000 men, facing Lee’s 64,000, and both commanders worried about a lack of manpower, as they clashed again and again. That same month, General William T. Sherman led some 98,000 on a campaign to capture Atlanta. Even lesser battles occurred on a comparatively vast scale. At Winchester, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, General Philip T. Sheridan led 37,000 men to victory against 15,000 Confederates under General Jubal Early on September 19, 1864. No action in Missouri would ever boast as many combatants as this somewhat peripheral event in the eastern theater. The Confederate army alone at Fisher’s Hill (a nearly forgotten battle fought by Sheridan and Early on September 22) may have outnumbered all the men who ever wore the guerrilla shirt or the insignia of the Missouri State Militia.21

  Missouri’s war was small-scale, intensely personal, and intensely vicious. Its signature weapons were the revolver and the scalping knife, close-range arms that required the killer to look his victim in the eyes, even to reach out and tear his flesh apart. The guerrillas’ enemies were not alien invaders, but men from their own state. They saw them as traitors and heretics who deserved the worst kind of fate. And in the aftermath of the Fayette defeat, they would soon inflict on their foes the most grisly atrocity ever seen in long-suffering Missouri.