T. J. Stiles
Page 19
Edward M. Samuel, together with Unionist official James M. Jones, strongly endorsed Kemper’s report. On December 9, the document arrived in St. Louis bearing the endorsement of General Fisk, who observed that it should be acted on before spring, when the leaves would return and provide cover for the bushwhackers. On January 9, 1865, the new commander of the Department of the Missouri, Major General Grenville M. Dodge, issued General Order No. 9, requiring the banishment of the ten families on Kemper’s list within twenty days. The assistant adjutant general forwarded the order to Fisk with a few words of advice. General Dodge, he wrote, “directs me to state that it embodies the policy intended to be pursued by him in all similar cases. He desires, however, that it should not be made public, any farther than may be necessary.”
On January 29, 1865, Kemper summoned Reuben and Zerelda, along with fifteen-year-old Susie James, into his office in Liberty. If anything could have added to Reuben’s despair or Zerelda’s bitterness, it was the words of General Order No. 9. Then Kemper presented a form, an acknowledgment that they had heard and understood. They signed.31
General Order No. 9 required that the family be shipped via Little Rock or Memphis through Union lines to Confederate territory. That movement never took place, perhaps because of the discretion requested by General Dodge, perhaps because there was so little Confederate territory left. Instead, the clan went west to the southeastern tip of Nebraska. In the little town of Rulo, Zerelda and her family began their exile within eyesight of their home state, separated only by the sandbars and muddy current of the Missouri River.32
ON THE AFTERNOON of January 15, 1865, Brigadier General Adelbert Ames stood with Major General Alfred Terry on a sandy peninsula on the coast of North Carolina, a spit of land separating the Cape Fear River from the sea. They were looking at the northern wall of Fort Fisher, the massive bastion that guarded the entrance to the river, which made it the gateway to Wilmington, North Carolina, the last seaport left to the Confederacy. If Fort Fisher fell, the rebels would be left without any means of importing arms and supplies. It would be all but the final blow.
But Fort Fisher, Ames knew, would not be easy to take. He had already served on one expedition against it, under Major General Benjamin F. Butler, who had retreated without even attempting an assault. The north wall, running from river to sea, stood twenty feet high, shaped out of tons of sand, with a parapet twenty feet wide. Twenty cannons bristled from its face, with immense mounds, or “traverses,” that flanked the gun chambers. Terry gestured to the wall and ran through the plan once more. A force of sailors and marines would attack the seaward bastion, he explained, while Ames would storm the river end with his division of three brigades, some thirty-one hundred men in all.33
Shortly before 3:30, as shells from sixty-four Union ships exploded on Fort Fisher’s walls, Terry told Ames to send forward his First Brigade under Colonel Newton Curtis. “Before starting to the assault,” Ames wrote to his parents a few days later, “I asked General Terry when he wished my 2d and 3d lines moved up. He replied whenever in my judgment I thought best. And so I fought the battle as much as though General Terry was miles away.”34
Ames could be excused for a bit of boastfulness. Just twenty-eight, the boyish general had marched straight from West Point to the first battle of Bull Run, where his bravery had earned him a promotion (and a future Medal of Honor). He had gone on to fight in dozens of major campaigns and battles—the Seven Days, Antietam, Gettysburg, the siege of Charleston, the bloody assault on Fort Wagner, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg, to name a few. Among his personal treasures was the smoke-stained battle flag of the Twentieth Maine. It had been his first regimental command; soon after he was promoted to general, it had gone on to save the Union line at Gettysburg under his old protégé, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain. After the battle, the unit had honored him by presenting him its banner.35
Now, as the bombardment lifted, Ames watched his first brigade struggle to capture the traverse at the end of the wall. After twenty minutes he ordered his second brigade to advance; turning to his staff, he said, “Gentlemen, we will now go forward.” As the cluster of officers walked toward the fort, rebel sharpshooters zeroed in. Two of Ames’s assistants staggered and fell, followed by a third, but Ames strolled into the fort unharmed, wearing a brigadier general’s full dress coat.36
At the far end, Confederate defenders butchered the sailors and marines, but on the river flank, Ames’s division swarmed up and into the fort. For five long hours, the young general directed the fighting inside that sand-encased inferno, sending most of his men down the massive north wall while he fortified a position within the interior. All three of his brigade commanders fell dead or wounded, along with countless junior officers. After nightfall, naval shells continued to scream and plunge into the works, as rifle and cannon fire raked the Union position. Terry eventually joined him in the fort and ordered that the battle continue; around nine o’clock, Ames organized a flanking maneuver that finally drove out the remaining defenders. The impregnable Fort Fisher fell.37
Elsewhere on that sandy peninsula, Sim Younger helped dig a line that protected the rear of Ames’s division. Though Younger did not fight inside the fort, he and the other black troops on the expedition probably appreciated the victory more than anyone else. It brought freedom for African Americans that much closer—even for those still in bondage in far-off Missouri, where Sim’s white nephew Cole Younger had fought as a rebel bushwhacker.38
TO THE DWINDLING guerrillas and Confederate soldiers wintering in Texas, the fall of Fort Fisher looked like only one domino in a long toppling row. On December 15 and 16, 1864, the Union army under Major General George H. Thomas had annihilated the rebel Army of Tennessee at Nashville. At the end of the same month, Sherman had completed his March to the Sea. “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift,” he had wired to Lincoln, “the city of Savannah.” From there Sherman marched into South Carolina, capturing Columbia on February 17 and Charleston the day after. After torching Columbia, Sherman moved into North Carolina, easily throwing back Confederate counterattacks in the middle of March. As April began, Grant forced Lee out of his lines around Petersburg, capturing Richmond soon after; on April 7, Grant finally trapped the Confederate commander. On April 9, 1865, at the home of Wilmer McLean in Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. The war was over.39
More than any other group of Confederates, the Missourians found it almost impossible to reconcile themselves to defeat. General Shelby and Major Edwards discussed their options, spoke with their men, then made a drastic decision. They would not surrender. Together with 132 die-hard troopers, they broke camp and set out for Mexico.40
By then, the guerrillas were already gone. As warm weather crept back in late March or early April, Archie Clement told his friend and follower Jesse James to saddle his horse for the long ride north. They were going to end their exile. They set off for Missouri with perhaps one hundred other bushwhackers, unaware of Lee’s surrender. It scarcely mattered. Where they went, the war would continue.
Robert James, the father of Jesse and Frank James, moved from his native Kentucky to Clay County, Missouri, in 1842. There he emerged as a prosperous hemp farmer, slaveholder, and prominent Baptist preacher. He died in California in 1850 during the gold rush, leaving Jesse fatherless at the age of three. (James Farm & Museum, Kearney, Missouri)
Wedded to Robert James at age sixteen, widowed at twenty-five, Jesse’s mother Zerelda remarried for the second time at age thirty to Dr. Reuben Samuel. She was a dominating figure, a fierce secessionist with steel nerves, a lacerating tongue, and a vigorous intellect. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia)
The farmhouse where Jesse James was born, as it appeared in 1877. Note the outbuildings, rail fences, and timber surrounding the home, all of which played a role in various raids on the farm by militia, sheriffs’ posses, and Pinkerton detectives. (Library of Congress)
Althou
gh this small sternwheeler was photographed in the 1870s, its heavily laden decks offer a glimpse of the brisk river traffic that sustained western Missouri in the antebellum era. (Denver Public Library)
This 1859 engraving captures the urban density and frenetic waterfront activity that made St. Louis the commercial capital of Missouri. Scores of steamboats jostled for a landing on the levee, unloading goods and passengers from the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers, including tens of thousands of German and Irish immigrants. Here, too, hemp and tobacco grown by slaveholders was transshipped to the South, making the city both a Northern-style metropolis and a critical junction in Missouri’s links with Dixie. (Library of Congress)
Sterling Price—former Missouri governor, commander of the State Guard, and Confederate major general—led the military struggle to take Missouri out of the Union and into the Confederacy. His unsuccessful campaigns in 1861 and 1864 framed the beginning and end of the guerrilla conflict that defined the state’s Civil War experience. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia)
This 1872 engraving is based on Order Number Eleven, a famous painting by George Caleb Bingham, noted Missouri artist. This melodramatic scene captures the secessionists’ resentments of the Union military authorities in Missouri that fed the guerrilla movement and animated the former rebels during Reconstruction. (Library of Congress)
This 1862 photograph shows slaves escaping to Federal lines in Virginia. Identical scenes became commonplace in Missouri by 1863 as the increasingly radicalized Union militia offered protection to fugitive African Americans. (Library of Congress)
An 1864 photograph of three bushwhackers, as Confederate guerrillas were known. Often hailing from prosperous slaveholding families, they divided their efforts between battling Federal forces and murdering or burning out their Unionist neighbors. Two of these men, Archie Clement (1) and Dave Pool (2), were close friends and allies of Jesse James. (Library of Congress)
This photograph shows Jesse Woodson James at age sixteen, during his first summer under arms. He is sporting the bushwhacker’s customary multiple revolvers and “guerrilla shirt” with breast pockets for percussion caps and lead balls. The distinctive clearness of Jesse’s blue eyes is detectable even in this black-and-white image. (Library of Congress)
From left, Fletch Taylor, Frank James, and Jesse James. Frank fought in the Confederate army, under William C. Quantrill, and then with his younger brother Jesse under Taylor. This photograph was taken in 1864, in the first weeks of Jesse’s guerrilla career, prior to the amputation of Taylor’s right arm. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia)
William “Bloody Bill” Anderson was a guerrilla chieftain who conducted a campaign of terror along the Missouri River in 1864 that is widely regarded as one of the most brutal episodes in American history. Jesse James followed him for most of this period, and spoke proudly in later years of the affiliation. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia)
In Centralia, Missouri, in 1864, Bill Anderson’s gang hauled two dozen unarmed Union soldiers off a train and murdered them. Major A. V. E. Johnston, shown here, gave chase with a battalion of mounted infantrymen. He and almost all of his men were killed, and many were then dismembered. Jesse was credited with killing Johnston. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia)
General Joseph O. Shelby emerged from the Civil War as Missouri’s most famous Confederate officer. After the Confederate surrender, he went into exile in Mexico for almost two years. After his return to Missouri he extended personal and political support to the James brothers. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia)
Major John Newman Edwards served as Jo Shelby’s adjutant during the Civil War. Upon his return to Missouri he became an influential newspaper editor and voice of the Confederate wing of the Democratic Party. An unapologetic champion of the Lost Cause and a close friend of Jesse James, he largely shaped the outlaw’s public image and political strategy, spearheading the former Confederates’ rise to political and cultural preeminence in the 1870s. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia)
Decoyed, ambushed, and killed by a Union militia detachment, “Bloody Bill” Anderson was photographed in his embroidered guerrilla shirt. His followers regrouped under Archie Clement, giving rise to the James-Younger gang after the war. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia)
PART THREE
Defiance
1865–1876
O then at last relent: is there no place
Left for repentance, none for pardon left?
None but by submission, and that word
Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame
—Paradise Lost
It is of no use to shut our eyes to the facts, and to pretend that a little thieving is at the bottom of all this. It is a deeper and more serious evil than that.… These guerrillas, in addition to being thieves and robbers and murderers, are rebels.
—Kansas City Journal of Commerce
May 11, 1865
They looked upon it as merely a continuation of the war. Don Carlos refuses to recognize the Spanish government, and why should not the Jameses decline to recognize the terms of Appomattox?
—Kansas City Journal of Commerce
October 20, 1876
CHAPTER NINE
A Year of Bitterness
FOR NEARLY TWO WEEKS, the killer ran free. Day after day, the nation held its collective breath as soldiers and Federal agents scoured the countryside around Washington. Finally, on April 26, 1865—twelve days after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln—the searchers trapped John Wilkes Booth in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia. They set fire to the building to flush him out, and the fugitive soon died from a bullet that he may have fired himself. If he did commit suicide, it would have been a fitting end, for Booth had played Judas Iscariot to Lincoln’s Redeemer, even to the extent of killing him on Good Friday.
Back in Washington, Lincoln’s body remained in the White House, lying in state until April 19. Not far away, Secretary of State William H. Seward lingered close to death, having been wounded by one of Booth’s co-conspirators; rumors of Seward’s demise spread across the country. Then Lincoln’s funeral train began a slow, winding trip back to Illinois, with some seven million grieving Americans weeping beside the tracks. The president’s assassination provided a shocking counterpoint to the triumph at Appomattox. That Good Friday gunshot echoed across the North, warning that peace would not erase the South’s bitterness.1
Missourians needed no education in bitterness. In their farmyards and creek-bottom brush, far from the famous battlegrounds, no one really believed the war had ended. “We hear great talk of peace,” wrote Sarah Harlan, “but the bushwhackers are plenty.” Three days after Lee’s surrender, she learned that such guerrillas as Ol Shepherd remained in the area, dodging army patrols sent out from Liberty. “I think they are waiting for Captain [Jim] Green to come so that they will have a better show,” she mused. Still, she held on to hope. As she looked out her windows at the pouring rain, she wrote eagerly about “the indications of peace.”2
The next Saturday, Harlan traveled up to the festively decorated town of Plattsburg, where a weekend celebration heralded the end of the war. “But on Sunday morning, the people were cut down very much,” she wrote to her sister, “on account of the news coming into town that our President and Seward were killed, which has proved to be a sad truth.” Her letter palpitated with despair as she reflected on these events. “We were all so set up to think that peace was so near at hand,” she mourned. “I fear that we will have worse times now on account of it.”3
Nothing, the military authorities believed, could make the times worse in Missouri. Lee’s surrender meant that U.S. troops in the state would soon be demobilized; meanwhile, the bushwhackers were sure to return from their winter refuge in Texas. “Organize! Organize!” General Fisk urged a Unionist elder of Platte County on April 26, 1865. “All volunteer troops are being withdrawn from Nort
h Missouri; martial law will soon be abrogated; civil law will be supreme. Spencer rifles must aid in the good work.”4
And the guerrillas did come. Telegraph wires hummed across the state as various posts tracked the bushwhackers’ approach from the south. On May 5, the garrison at Fort Scott, Kansas, reported that 150 guerrillas had passed by on their way north. Major General Grenville Dodge, the commander in St. Louis, immediately sent warning to Colonel Chester Harding, Jr., who commanded the Central District, and various other subordinates. “Keep all your cavalry in the saddle,” he ordered. Two days later, almost exactly a month after Appomattox, the rebels struck.5
SOMETIME IN THE first week of May 1865, Jesse James watched with admiration as Archie Clement flourished his Bowie knife over a struggling militiaman whom Jesse and two other guerrillas held pinned to the ground near the banks of the Osage River. With practiced skill, Little Archie cut through the skin and arteries of his victim’s throat, then carved away the scalp, his characteristic trophy.6 “Clement,” Jesse would reflect a decade later, was “one of the noblest boys, and the most promising military boy, of this age.”7