T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  • • •

  To JESSE JAMES, the sprawling camp on Young’s Creek was a rare sight. Only once before (with Thornton in Platte County) had the seventeen-year-old wandered among so many campfires, so many horses unsaddled, so many boots being shaken out, so many blankets and socks hanging out to dry. Some two hundred to four hundred guerrillas spread out on the property of Colonel M. G. Singleton, a Confederate officer now living at home on parole.

  Though Jesse began to forge friendships with many of the bushwhackers gathered there, he probably settled on the grass among the cluster of Clay County guerrillas who now rode with Anderson. Having fought together under Taylor and Clement, they formed a tight-knit group that played a leading role in Bloody Bill’s band. “There was one reason that I liked [Anderson],” recalled Jim Cummins, “and that was because he always stood up for the Clay County boys.”22

  On the night of September 26, 1864, Anderson sat in conference with Todd and the other commanders while the men slept, cooked dinner over their flickering fires, or stood guard on the edge of camp. The next morning, Bloody Bill roused his crew. They were going into Centralia, he told them, a mile and a half to the northwest. Anderson had agreed to go there, in part to gather newspapers for more information about the Federal troops concentrating in their area—and especially for reports of General Price’s advance into Missouri.23

  On the morning of September 27, Jesse and Frank—part of a column of about eighty men—formed up behind Anderson and trotted toward Centralia, a mere bump on the horizon. It was scarcely a dozen buildings, almost all one-story structures, but it had blossomed around its new depot for the North Missouri Railroad, which connected St. Louis to the Hannibal and St. Joseph line.

  Young Jesse was merely a member of the rank and file, though an especially eager one. In clashes with Union militia, he had shown that he could maintain discipline and follow orders, remaining patiently in ambush or charging headlong against a fortified enemy. But he and his comrades were guerrillas—irregulars, to use another term—and they often degenerated into a barbarian horde, each man following his own whim. This was not necessarily a failing from their point of view: ultimately, theirs was a war against the loyal population, and terror was their greatest weapon. And so Jesse guided his horse the way he wished as the bushwhackers fanned out through the streets of Centralia, eager to spread horror on what would prove to be one of the most important days in his short and violent life.

  In a few moments, the sleepy railside village was transformed into a carnival of the absurd. Blue-clad guerrillas burst into house after house, shoving pistols into startled faces, demanding cash, sampling spoonfuls out of pots and plates. Breaking into Centralia’s two stores, they plundered for the sake of plundering. Laughing young men ran through the streets trailing rolls of calico and muslin. Suddenly a shout went up from the depot: “It’s whisky!”24 The smell of alcohol and cries of delight attracted the bushwhackers to a busted-in barrel like flies to a corpse.

  After an hour of looting and drinking, they saw a stagecoach clatter toward town, pulled by a four-horse team. A squad of guerrillas quickly rode out to meet it. As they robbed the hapless passengers, only one man dared to protest. “We are Southern men and Confederate sympathizers,” he said. “You ought not to rob us.”

  “What do we care?” a bushwhacker replied. “Hell’s full of all such Southern men. Why ain’t you out fightin’?” Unnoticed in the stage was Congressman James S. Rollins, a former Whig leader and a prominent Unionist. He and most of the other passengers were on their way to the Conservative Party’s state convention. They represented an invaluable haul of hostages, but went unrecognized by the drunken rebels.25

  Then someone heard a steady chuff in the distance and saw the trail of smoke that signaled an approaching locomotive. Yipping and cheering, the bushwhackers abandoned the stage and galloped back to rejoin their comrades at the depot. Anderson, they knew, had been waiting for the train, and had ordered his men to pile heavy wooden ties and other obstructions on the tracks. The bushwhackers rode alongside and opened fire. Bullets ricocheted off the iron-sided engine and smashed through windows. Finally the locomotive screeched to a halt.

  Hooting guerrillas immediately surged through the doors. Anderson himself led a cluster of men, including Frank James and other Clay Countians, into the baggage car, where they looted thousands of dollars in crisp new greenbacks.26 Some of the rebels scrambled into the passenger cars, where they were taken aback by the sight of twenty-three blue uniforms. The guerrillas rapidly sobered up, pointing their revolvers toward the Union troops. “Surrender quietly,” one of the bushwhackers said, “and you shall be treated as prisoners of war.”

  “We can only surrender,” a soldier replied, “as we are totally unarmed.”27 Many of them were veterans of Sherman’s army, returning on furlough to their homes in Missouri and Iowa after the recent capture of Atlanta. Each of the relieved bushwhackers singled out a man to rob. Then they heard their chief shout for all the passengers to step outside.

  As the train emptied, Anderson strolled down the platform beside Clement. As usual, Bill had a cavalry hat on his head, a Union officer’s coat on his shoulders, and pistols strapped outside a pair of black pants. He waved the civilians to one side, where his men shoved them into two files; he pointed the soldiers in another direction, ordering them to “fall into line.”28 Two of them hesitated as they came down the steps, whispering to each other. Anderson pulled his pistol and fired two shots, and they tumbled to the ground. The remaining passengers rushed to obey his orders, stutter-stepping out the doors to their assigned positions. Jesse, like the other guerrillas, would have been cursing civilians and military men alike, cocking his pistols and pointing them at the prisoners.

  Strip, Anderson told the soldiers. The frightened men—one on crutches and others recuperating from wounds—unbuttoned their uniforms, throwing their shirts and trousers into a pile. “What are you going to do with them fellows?” Clement asked his chief.

  “Parole them, of course.”

  The little teenager laughed. “I thought so,” he smiled. “You might pick out two or three, though,” he suggested, “and exchange them for Cave, if you can.” (Cave Wyatt, of course, had been taken prisoner by the Ninth MSM Cavalry.) At this, Jesse might have nodded; it was the kind of foresight he expected from Little Archie, who was always, as Frank put it, the “brains” of the outfit.29

  “Oh, one will be enough for that,” Anderson replied. “Arch, you take charge of the firing party, and, when I give the word, pour hell into them.”30 Then he stepped toward the line of nervous soldiers in their underwear. “Boys,” he demanded, “have you a sergeant in your ranks?” No one moved. Glowering, the bearded guerrilla repeated his question, louder this time. “If there be one,” he added, “let him step aside.” Thomas Morton Goodman, a burly six-footer, jerked forward, and he looked like a man who expected to be killed.31

  The guerrillas pulled Goodman aside as Anderson strode in front of the remaining soldiers. “You Federals,” he shouted, “have just killed six of my soldiers, scalped them, and left them on the prairie. I am too honorable a man to permit any man to be scalped, but I will show you that I can kill men with as much rapidity and skill as anybody. From this time forward I ask no quarter, and give none. Every Federal soldier on whom I put my fingers shall die like a dog.”

  A quiet clatter accompanied his words as the bushwhackers thumbed back the hammers on their revolvers, underscored by the continual sobbing from the crowd of civilians. “If I get into your clutches I expect death,” he continued. “You are all to be killed and sent to hell. That is the way every damned soldier shall be served who falls into my hands.” As Clement and the others raised their pistols, some of the soldiers frantically protested. They were from Sherman’s army, they babbled; they had nothing to do with scalping the guerrillas. “I treat you all as one,” Anderson snarled. “You are Federals, and Federals scalped my men, and carry their scalps at their sadd
le bows.” Then he nodded to Clement.32

  An overwhelming sense of inevitability had hung over this scene from the moment soldiers were discovered on the train. It had built as Anderson shot down the men who hesitated on the cars, as the Union troops were separated from the civilians, as they were stripped while Clement laughed over their impending “parole.” Now the inevitable was real. A crackling roar swept over the line of prisoners; they screamed in the mist of blood and smoke—lit by the flames that shot from pistol barrels—then collapsed. One enormous soldier dashed straight at his attackers and knocked down two before he was killed.

  Then the guerrillas walked slowly up and down, looking for survivors. Here they clubbed someone’s head with the butt of a carbine, there they slit someone’s throat with a knife. Now and then the report of a revolver punctuated the weeping of the civilians. One unconscious victim, bleeding from two head wounds, spasmodically jerked his right leg back and forth, over and over. Archie laughed and pointed. “He’s marking time,” he quipped. Then he or one of the others knelt down to take a pair of scalps.33

  The guerrillas began to rob the stunned passengers. One prosperous-looking young man, accompanied by his mother, handed over a few dollars. A suspicious bushwhacker told him that he would be searched, and if any more money was found he would be shot. Immediately the man kicked off his boot and pulled out $100 in greenbacks. The rebel pocketed the bills, then shot him dead. Now the guerrillas ordered all the passengers to take off their shoes. When one of them yielded a gold watch, its owner received a bullet in the head.34

  When the guerrillas remounted their horses, laughing in exultation as they galloped up and down the streets, Anderson ordered the tracks cleared and the train set on fire. He told the engineer to open the throttle and let it run. The engine chuffed away, trailing a line of flames as the cars burned. One of the stranded passengers asked Anderson if they could continue on to Sturgeon. “Go on to hell, for all I care,” he replied. Then he and his men rode away, leaving behind a burning depot, a slowly dispersing cloud of gunsmoke, and a lifeless mass of nearly naked men. “At last it was over,” reflected Sergeant Goodman, the sole surviving soldier, as his captors led him away, “the carnival of blood ended.”35

  BACK IN CLAY County, September was marked by signs and horrors. “There are so many reports,” wrote schoolgirl Kate Watkins, “that I cannot tell the true from the false.” George Todd and his men passed through on their way to join Bill Anderson, murdering Unionist farmers on the way. Even the heavens punished the county. Toward the end of the month, the sky erupted with a clattering roar, and a bombardment of gigantic, egg-sized hail battered the earth, snapping off branches, even killing rabbits and chickens. But nothing was so terrible as the news that flooded in from Centralia.36

  The assistant provost marshal in Liberty, Captain William B. Kemper, heard the tales as well, and he was determined to find out the truth. He had not held the position long, but he knew the county well, having hunted Fletch Taylor back in June, catching a bullet in the leg for his trouble. Now, as he prowled the countryside, he discovered that the names of the men involved in the recent atrocity were common knowledge. Both of the James boys, he reported, “were with Bill Anderson and assisted in the murdering of 22 unarmed Federal soldiers at Centralia.”

  “I speak not merely from hearsay,” he added, “but from my own personal knowledge.” Drawing on the expertise he had accumulated in his many months of service in the area, he pursued his investigation personally, secretly visiting the farms of Anderson’s men. One day, when he was lurking near Zerelda’s home, he observed a neighbor storm up to her.

  Angry and indignant, the neighbor confronted Zerelda with the news of her sons’ participation in the Centralia slaughter. Aren’t you ashamed of them, she (or he) demanded, after what they had done? The dowager reared to her full height. “She rejoined that she was not,” Kemper reported, “that she was proud of them, that she prayed to God to protect them in their work.” There was no doubt in the captain’s mind that both Jesse and Frank had stood beside Clement on September 27, 1864, and had gunned down those men. As for their mother, he wrote, “I regard [her] as being one of the worst women in this state.”37

  IT HAD COME to this, Sergeant Goodman reflected. After all his comrades had endured, after all the bloody fighting and lethal disease of the campaign through Tennessee and Georgia, they had died, unarmed and naked, just a few hours from home. And it seemed he would soon join them. As he rode back to the camp on Young’s Creek, trotting between his two guards, guerrilla after guerrilla cantered up to him to spill a few curses. Occasionally one of them would pull a revolver, cock it, and press it against his head. “I would like to kill the damn Yankee,” they snarled. “Hellfire is too good for you, you son of a bitch!” Only the threat of Anderson’s wrath, continually repeated by the guards, kept them from squeezing the triggers.

  Back at the camp, the bushwhackers spread out to unsaddle their horses and sleep off the whisky and murder. Goodman could see Anderson, Todd, and the other leaders sitting in a small circle on the ground some distance away, Todd sketching a map as Anderson nodded.38

  “Bill! Our scout!” someone shouted. Goodman and the others looked up to see a rider gallop in. Instantly the sleepy camp came alive again, as the rebels mounted and formed into squads of ten to twenty. Anderson gave a quick command to the scout, sending him galloping back the way he came. Then he spurred his horse over to Goodman and his guards. “Have your prisoner saddle yon gray horse, and mount him quick,” he snarled, “and mark me, if he attempts to escape in the battle, kill him instantly!”

  The battle, Goodman mused. That meant the scout had brought word of approaching Union forces. “I wondered,” he recalled, “if God had sent his Avenging Angel.” Bracketed by his guards, the Union soldier trotted behind Anderson’s men as they spent most of an hour maneuvering into position. They deployed in a line facing west, at the edge of the brush that lined Young’s Creek. They looked out onto a large, rectangular meadow that rose up to a low hill or ridge on the far end; it was bounded on the north and south by overgrown ravines that ran due west from the creek. Into these flanking gullies rode the remaining bushwhackers, where they hid themselves. Now only Anderson’s men—the connecting link in a great U-shaped trap—remained visible from the meadow.39

  The intended victim of this ambush was Major Andrew Vern Emen Johnston—better known as “Ave” Johnston—and a battalion of the Thirty-ninth Missouri Infantry, U.S. Volunteers. The Thirty-ninth was a green regiment, recruited scant weeks before, but Johnston himself was an experienced guerrilla-fighter. When he arrived in Centralia and saw the burning buildings and pile of bodies, he ignored the warnings of the shocked civilians and prepared to track down the marauders. Johnston ordered Captain Adam Theiss to remain in town with 33 men, and Johnston led 115 men on a hunt to the south.40

  Less than two miles away, Jesse sat in the familiar curve of his worn leather saddle, waiting. By now he had participated in several ambushes, and he knew that they required patience above all else. So he waited and watched. Bill Anderson was at the center of the line. Behind him, the tall Union prisoner loomed comically in his underwear between his guards, his face pale with anxiety.41

  Then came the sign they had been waiting for: a ripple of pistol shots, then a small cluster of guerrillas galloping toward them across the meadow. It was Dave Pool and his squad, decoys whom Anderson and Todd had sent out to lure the Union troops into their trap. Pool led his men behind Anderson to form a second line, as Johnston’s men appeared on the top of the low ridge to the west.

  Jesse now experienced the strange pause before a battle, after the enemy has been sighted but combat not yet joined. Anderson shouted for his men to check their saddles and weapons. Like men all along the line, Jesse must have dismounted to tie up clothing and equipment, fix loose percussion caps, and pull tight his saddle girth. At the other end of the meadow, he could see Johnston waving to his troops; they dismounted, eve
ry fourth man leading away the horses of the others. They, too, would have checked their weapons—long Minié rifles, the standard infantry arm of the Civil War.42 They were deadly at a distance, but they were slow-loading: after each shot, a soldier had to tear open a paper cartridge, pour gunpowder and a bullet down the muzzle, and ram it home with an iron rod.

  Looking out at the dismounted enemy, one of the guerrillas hooted loudly. “Why, the fools are going to fight us on foot!” he shouted. Then he muttered, “God help ’em.” They were accustomed to charging from ambush at close range against small clusters of the enemy, and believed a man on foot was helpless in such situations. But if the bushwhackers had experienced the war outside of Missouri, they would not have laughed. The long-range killing power of modern rifles made horsemen vulnerable targets; now cavalry usually rode to battle but fought on foot. The mounted charge across open ground against a line of infantry—the tactic the guerrillas planned to use against Johnston’s men—had become virtually a guarantee of disaster.43

  As tension filled the air, Anderson pulled out of line and trotted up and down behind his men. “Boys, when we charge, break through the line and keep straight on for the horses,” he said quietly. “Keep straight on for the horses! Keep straight on for the horses!” He returned to his place and took a final look at the enemy, where bayonets could be seen glinting on the ends of long rifles. He smiled and leaned over to Archie Clement. “Not a damned revolver in the crowd!” Actually, there was one—carried by Johnston, who stood in front with his horse’s reins in one hand and a six-shooter in the other.44