T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  During the damp weeks of April 1865, Clement had led Jesse and perhaps 70 other bushwhackers on the long ride from Sherman, Texas. Their group formed part of a larger mass of some 150 guerrillas, who coalesced around the strongest personalities among them: Dave Pool, the laughing prankster from Lexington; Jim Anderson, the less-accomplished brother of Bloody Bill; and, of course, Clement himself. After they crossed into Missouri, the bushwhackers told the beleaguered farmers they met that they knew nothing of Lee’s surrender, which they dismissed as “a damned Yankee lie.” What they did know was that the trees and brush had filled out with leaves again, giving them ample cover to continue their war of ambush and murder.8

  It was a war they carried steadily north as they rode toward the big river. After the scalping on the Osage, the guerrillas moved up to Johnson County. It was a homecoming for Clement, who had spent most of his life within its boundaries. At two o’clock in the morning on May 7, the teenager celebrated his return by leading a charge through the darkened streets of the village of Holden. Perhaps thirty guerrillas plundered a pair of stores, stopping only to gun down a civilian before they rejoined their comrades.

  At the first glow of the approaching dawn, Clement roused his fellows for another strike. Jesse and some one hundred bushwhackers donned Union uniforms in the thinning darkness, mounted up, and spurred toward Kingsville, the town closest to Clement’s boyhood farm. Kicking their way into homes and stores, they shot down eight startled men and boys stumbling out of bed, and set fire to five houses. Jesse, a friend later wrote, fired four bullets into the trembling postmaster, Leroy Duncan, who died soon after. Leaving the corpses and smoldering ruins behind, the guerrillas rode north into Lafayette County, where they rapidly murdered fifteen more civilians.9

  In the hours after the massacre at Kingsville, General Dodge’s staff groped for information. Gradually the guerrillas’ identities emerged as fresh intelligence blew away the fog of uncertainty. On May 8, reports came in that Pool and Jim Anderson led many of the guerrillas; on May 11, a surrendering Confederate soldier told the authorities that he had seen seventy men led by Clement, “Bill Anderson’s scalper and head devil.” On the same day, Clement announced himself with a letter to Major Berryman K. Davis, commander of the garrison at Lexington:

  SIR: This is to notify you that I will give you until Friday morning, May 12, 1865, to surrender the town of Lexington. If you surrender we will treat you and all taken as prisoners of war. If we have to take it by storm we will burn the town and kill the soldiers. We have the force, and are determined to have it.

  I am, sir, your obedient servant,

  —A. CLEMENT

  This absurdly polite note agitated the army high command. Major General John Pope, commander of the vast Division of the Missouri, demanded full details from Dodge, who scoffed at the rebels’ ability to capture Lexington. The town was garrisoned by at least 180 men, including a company of former slaves who were grimly determined to fight to the last man. Dodge believed that the message was designed to trick the troops into barricading themselves in Lexington while the guerrillas slipped over the Missouri River. He immediately telegraphed orders to seize all boats and keep a careful watch on the most important crossing places.10

  Clement’s message signified many things, none of them explicitly stated in his letter. For one thing, its very formality seemed to reflect his vision of himself as a legitimate Confederate. But Clement certainly knew by now that the Confederacy had ceased to exist. His surrender demand was a ruse, meant to buy the guerrillas more time—but time for what? The guerrillas reportedly debated the question fiercely among themselves. They could see that with each passing day, more and more rebels were giving themselves up and, once they took an oath of allegiance, were being allowed to go free. But pride, hatred, and fear of civil prosecution weighed heavily with these former followers of Quantrill and Bloody Bill. As the debate progressed, Pool seemed to lean toward surrender, but Clement was inclined to cross the Missouri River and continue his depredations on the northern side, where there were fewer Union troops.11

  The guerrillas investigated both options. On May 12, a group of bushwhackers fired on a detachment that stood guard over the abandoned village of Sibley, west of Lexington. Located just across the Missouri from the mouth of the Fishing River, Sibley was one of the rebels’ favorite crossing points. On the same day, Captain Clayton E. Rogers, the provost marshal in Lexington, received word that one hundred guerrillas wanted to surrender. Before long, Pool arranged to give himself up and bring in many of the bushwhackers still lingering in the hills. Even Clement sent a conciliatory note on May 14; this time, Major Davis reported, he “proposed with five men to meet an equal party [on May 17] … to learn particulars of terms, &c.”

  Despite this talk of surrender, Clement, Anderson, and Jesse thought they might still continue the fight, if only they could get across the Missouri River. “I am almost certain that Clement, with five or six men, was on the river yesterday,” Davis wrote on May 16, “prospecting for crossing the river. He talked with persons near there, and declared his [intentions] to be such. I am confident he and his party were fired upon yesterday, about six miles out on the Salt Pond road, on his return from the river.”12

  This little skirmish was hugely significant in the life of Jesse James. Before it was over, he would be prostrate with the second serious wound of his brief career, a wound that looked like it would be mortal. Such an injury would be important enough, but in surviving it Jesse was to swell the memory of this fight to epic proportions.

  • • •

  MOST INDIVIDUALS CREATE inner narratives of their lives, reshaping memories in light of subsequent experiences. In the lives of public figures, private events take on mythic meaning, as society comes to see them as representative of its sense of itself. Benjamin Franklin’s youthful studying by the light of the fire and Abraham Lincoln’s rail-splitting, for example, echoed the American ideal of the self-made man. Such incidents need not be true: George Washington’s honesty about the cherry tree was completely fabricated, yet it won acceptance as a symbol of the United States as a republic of virtue. In 1865, at the age of seventeen, Jesse James was far from a public figure, yet already he had started to construct an inner narrative that would one day grow into a symbolic tale for one particular segment of society—the Confederates.

  As Jesse bounced along atop his horse on the Salt Pond road on May 15, the lines of his story were already appearing, formed by persecution and revenge. In his inner—soon to be outer—mythology, ordinary events were exaggerated. The raid on his home in May 1863—a perfectly routine, if harrowing, search for a guerrilla gang—turned into an unforgivable act of tyrannical oppression. The massacre and battle at Centralia—a day of shocking brutality, even in this shockingly brutal war—was transformed into a noble duel between Jesse and the Union commander. These were the bricks that built his legend, and now one more was set in place.

  In the moments before the skirmish began, Jesse and Clement were returning from the Missouri River, where they had been looking for a safe crossing point, torn between surrendering or continuing to fight. They still had two more days before their proposed meeting with Major Davis. While they were considering their options, they suddenly confronted a squad of cavalrymen from the Third Wisconsin, who promptly yanked out their pistols and opened fire.

  In later years, Jesse would claim that he was riding into Lexington to surrender when the gunfire erupted; he even insisted to one neighbor that he was carrying a flag of truce at the time. The soldiers were drunk, he said, and recklessly opened fire. In 1882, a resident of Lexington would assert that Captain Rogers, the provost marshal, had actually dispatched the cavalrymen to escort the rebels into town, “but by some mistake an alarm was given and some of the [bushwhackers] attempted to escape and were fired upon by the Federals.” By then, however, the myth had taken hold. The simple truth—that a group of indecisive guerrillas blundered into an army patrol that reacted first�
��had become a tale of how the vindictive Federals refused to accept an honorable surrender.13

  For the moments that followed the first crack of gunfire, we have only Jesse’s word, filtered through friends, and the evidence offered by his corpse. Almost immediately, a .36 caliber bullet fired from a Navy revolver tore into the right side of his chest, inches from his wound of the year before. Apparently the lead ball passed between his ribs and carved its way though his lung. It would remain lodged in his body for the rest of his life.

  In the hailstorm of gunfire, the other guerrillas wheeled their horses and fled, but Jesse’s mount staggered and fell under the impact of a bullet. Untangling himself from his animal, Jesse ran into the woods, blood spouting from his wound. Close behind came two Union troopers, the leader spurring on a large black mount. “I turned and killed the big black horse,” Jesse reportedly said. “That will stop a man every time. That ended the fight. I was near a creek, and I lay in the water all night—I felt as if I was burning up. The next morning, I crawled up the bank and there was a man plowing nearby who helped me get to my friends.”14

  “I was in a dreadful fix,” he recalled. He lay in a nearby farmhouse, utterly incapacitated, and “everybody thought the wound would be mortal.” Continued resistance was no longer an option; he was in serious need of medical attention. His fellow guerrillas converged on the farm as his host procured a carriage. His comrades lifted him in and drove him to Lexington, riding alongside toward their inevitable surrender. A local man remembered the bushwhackers as they came in—long lines of men with “bronzed faces, long hair, rough and well worn garments,” their horses drooping and exhausted after weeks of hard riding. Once in town, they carried Jesse to a room in a hotel, where, like all surrendering Confederates, he raised his hand and took the oath of allegiance on his sickbed on May 21, 1865.15

  In later retelling by Jesse and his mother, the months that followed brought pain, helplessness, and misery. Day after day, more bushwhackers rode into Lexington to give themselves up. Not until June 13, Jesse claimed, was he able to make the trip across the Missouri River to the village of Harlem, just north of Kansas City, where his uncle John Mimms (husband of Mary, his father’s sister) ran a boardinghouse. For another month, he said, he remained in their care, attended by various doctors. On July 15, his sister Susie came to take him to Rulo, Nebraska, where the family remained in exile, living off Reuben’s meager earnings as a physician.

  Jesse remained there for eight weeks, Zerelda said later, sinking closer to death. Finally, she claimed, “he drew my face down close to his and whispered, ‘Ma, I don’t want to be buried here in a Northern state.”’ She reassured him that she would never bury him in Nebraska. “But, Ma,” he reportedly said, “I don’t want to die here.” The next day, she claimed (August 26, by Jesse’s account), they carried him on a sofa down to the landing, where they put him on a boat back to Clay County.

  But Jesse was too ill to accompany his family all the way home, we’re told. Instead, he was taken back to his uncle’s boardinghouse, where his cousin Zerelda—named for Jesse’s mother, but better known as Zee—nursed him back to health. Only in October was he supposed to have improved to the point where he could risk the journey back to the old farm. He was “emaciated, tottering as he walked, fighting what seemed to everyone a hopeless battle,” wrote a loyal defender. “His wound would not heal, and more ominous still, every now and then there was a hemorrhage. In the spring of 1866 he was just barely able to mount a horse and ride a little.” The injury to his lung, it was said, would plague him for at least another two years, until he finally made a miraculous recovery.16

  It all makes for a compelling story, hallowed by tradition. But this tale looks on closer inspection like a fact-based narrative greatly exaggerated. A bullet through the lung was not necessarily as grave an injury as common sense and Jesse’s own account would make it seem. A study of lung injuries conducted at Rama War Hospital in Croatia from 1992 through 1994 concluded that “The wounds inflicted by classic firearms need not be primarily severe and destructive. A direct wound of the … lungs is limited to the wound canal.… If none of the large blood vessels is involved, the bleeding is limited and diminishing, and ventilation disorders are not very pronounced.” As particularly soft tissue, the lung suffers less from the shock of a bullet than do bone or dense organs such as the liver. Wounds inflicted by weapons with low muzzle velocities—comparable to the Navy revolver fired at Jesse—are particularly survivable, and “can be treated conservatively.”

  Still, reliable contemporary accounts by disinterested parties confirm that Jesse was left prone for many weeks by his injury. Possibly an infection set in—the most common complication with lung wounds, according to the Croatian study. This, together with misguided nineteenth-century medicine, would have been the primary threat to his health, the threat that left him helpless in bed in his uncle’s house. And Zee Mimms did indeed tend his fever and change his bandages, according to her brother.17

  But the story of Jesse’s extraordinarily long recovery reeks of invention; no witness outside of the James family and its circle of friends and defenders ever supported it; other sources described him as active and apparently healthy by 1866 at the latest.18 Indeed, his wounding and recovery mark the beginning of the real mystery surrounding his life, when the inevitable incompleteness of the historical record becomes complicated by deliberate misinformation, misdirection, and lies. In truth, Jesse James’s multiyear recuperation was a retroactive alibi, manufactured after he had become famous to hide his activities in the years immediately following the war’s end. In those years of bitterness, there would be much to conceal.

  • • •

  WAR HAD UNMADE the world. Four years of bloodshed had paved the American landscape with gravestones. At least 620,000 soldiers had died (360,000 Union, 260,000 Confederate), more than the combined total of all the nation’s other wars, before and since. Were the United States to suffer an equivalent toll at the start of the twenty-first century, almost six million people would be dead.

  The South lay in ruins. Farms and villages along the paths of the major armies had been wrecked. Cities ranging from Jackson, Mississippi, to Columbia, South Carolina, from Atlanta to Richmond, were smoldering ruins. Basic infrastructure such as levees, roads, and bridges had gone unrepaired or had been destroyed by raiders from both sides. The financial capital of the rebel states had been annihilated as well, spent on arms and supplies, or converted into now-worthless Confederate bonds and currency. Across the region land values fell, crops went unplanted, workshops went unmanned.

  As for slavery, the great wheel that drove the South’s economy, advancing Union armies and the Emancipation Proclamation had knocked it loose, and it would soon be smashed to pieces. On January 31, 1865, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution; once ratified by the states, it would abolish slavery completely, without compensation or qualification. An enormous portion of the South’s wealth had once been measured in human bodies, and now it would disappear.19

  But the war had scourged Missouri as perhaps nowhere else. Homes had been torched, horses stolen, fence rails broken up for firewood, livestock killed by soldiers and bushwhackers. The population of Missouri fell by an estimated 300,00 people between 1861 and 1865. Roughly one out of every three citizens had been killed in battle, murdered at home, driven out by guerrilla threats, banished by the authorities, or simply had fled to a more hopeful place.20

  In Clay County, the trend was clear as early as 1864. A local census that year showed that the white population had fallen to 9,421 (104 fewer than in 1860), while the black population had plummeted by almost 50 percent, to 1,756. Most of the remaining black residents—still largely enslaved—were women and children, who lacked the option of enlisting in the army. In the mayhem surrounding Price’s raid, the flight, murder, and expulsion of both whites and blacks had intensified. “Most all of the families that used to live here mov
ed away,” Amanda Savery wrote to her Confederate veteran husband in 1865. “The Eatons are all banished with many others.… There has been a great many deaths among your friends.”21

  The war had torn apart Missouri’s political landscape like a volcanic eruption. The old parties had vanished, replaced by the Radicals and the Conservatives. Whigs, Democrats, even Republicans had spilled into one party or the other regardless of prewar affiliations. The defining question had been the conduct of the war.22

  The Radicals had argued for the iron fist. In their eyes, the Civil War was—as it was officially called in Washington—the War of the Rebellion, a war against treason. And in Missouri, those traitors were a very personal threat. Many of the sternest Radicals lived in the guerrilla-plagued regions and suffered directly, and bitterly, from the fighting. They were the rank and file of the militia, the volunteers in the Federal army, the farmers burned out by bushwhackers and chased into garrison towns. Once casually opposed to abolitionism, they came to see slaveowners as the cause of the war; by the end of 1864, most Radicals believed that opposition to emancipation was as much treason as carrying Confederate arms.

  The Conservatives, on the other hand, had struggled to ease the pressure of the military presence and preserve the peculiar institution. No better example can be found than Clay County’s Colonel James H. Moss, the former Whig, who had used his intermittent command of the militia to catch runaway slaves and reintegrate returning rebels. Despite the suspicions of Radicals, however, neither Moss nor the Conservative Party in general had been disloyal. Led by such stalwart old Whigs as James Rollins and William F. Switzler, they had specifically rejected the Democratic Party label because it had been tainted by sympathy for secession, thanks to antiwar Democrats in the North, known as Copperheads. Many Conservatives, such as Moss and Odon Guitar, served in the militia. The party had even nominated Lincoln for president in 1864, and had competed with the Radicals to send a delegation to the national Republican convention.