T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  The Radicals had won that fight, and once their delegates had been seated, they had voted against Lincoln’s renomination. These angry Missourians wanted sterner stuff—and they were prepared to provide it themselves. In 1864, in the midst of Price’s invasion, they had swept the legislative elections and voted in a new governor, Thomas C. Fletcher. The Radicals owed their victory to their adamant Unionism. Fletcher had been a brigadier general in the Army of the Tennessee, and actually had participated in the fighting against Price during the political campaign.23

  The Radicals had wanted to go deeper still. In perhaps their most important victory in the 1864 election, they had won approval for a constitutional convention and gained two-thirds of the slots for delegates. The stated purpose of this body, which assembled in St. Louis on January 7, 1865, was to free Missouri’s slaves. This was no mere technicality; tens of thousands still remained in bondage in the state. The convention swiftly enacted an ordinance of immediate emancipation, supplanting an act of 1863 that would have delayed freedom until 1870 at the earliest. On January 14, black Missourians poured into the streets to celebrate, marching in joyous parades through every major city in the state.24

  In the mind of Charles D. Drake, the convention still had much to do. An energetic, articulate, intemperate Radical from St. Louis, Drake immediately asserted leadership over the politically inexperienced delegates and directed the writing of an entirely new constitution. Blessed with a capacity for endless work and cursed with a bullying, intolerant personality, he drove his fellows forward, completing a final draft in a matter of weeks. On April 8, 1865, the convention voted overwhelmingly to send it to the voters for ratification.

  In most respects, the new constitution was a sound, even admirable, work. It barred the state government from lending its credit to private individuals and corporations, which closed off a major source of corruption; it restored some of the balance in the legislature toward urban areas, which had been badly underrepresented under the old constitution; and it extended critical civil rights, including property rights, public schooling, and access to the courts (though not the vote) to the newly freed slaves. Viewed from the 1861 perspective, these measures were astonishing. If there had been one thing that united white Missourians before the war, it was opposition to emancipation. Now the state had stepped out in front of the rest of the Union in extending rights to its black citizens. As historian Eric Foner writes, “Here were men acting as if in the midst of a revolution.”25

  The Conservatives were allergic to revolution, and they found little to like in the new constitution. Hailing largely from the old slave-dependent riverside counties, they did not want to lose power to the cities—and they especially did not want any rights extended to black Missourians. Even in this moment of emancipation, blatant, vicious racism was a basic ingredient of political debate. “Any Democrat who did not manage to hint that the negro is a degenerate gorilla would be considered lacking in enthusiasm,” wrote Georges Clemenceau, a future French premier who covered the national election of 1864 as a newspaper correspondent. In the former slave state of Missouri, such feelings were never far from the surface of conservative politics. “In the name of God,” protested Samuel A. Gilbert, a convention delegate from Platte County, “if you are going to free negroes, send them from us.”26

  As much as they disliked liberty for all, Conservatives found something else to hate above all else in the proposed constitution: the Oath.* Intended to “preserve in purity the elective franchise to loyal citizens,” the Oath required each potential voter to swear that he (women could not cast ballots) had not committed any of eighty-six acts of rebellion, including simply expressing sympathy for the rebels in general or any individual rebel. The convention mandated the Oath not only for electors, but also candidates for office, jurors, lawyers, corporation officers and trustees, and teachers. It was even required of Christian ministers. A comprehensive registration system was to sift through the voters every two years; county supervisors and local boards would have the right to bar anyone from the polls whom they suspected of disloyalty.

  The Radicals called it the Iron-Clad Oath; the Conservatives dubbed it the Code of Draco, after the ancient Athenian legislator who made almost all criminal offenses punishable by death. “The Constitution,” William F. Switzler argued, was created “in a spirit of malice and revenge … unworthy of a victorious and magnanimous people.” On a less lofty plane, they feared that it would cost them any hope of winning statewide elections, for the Radicals had a clear majority of the Unionist population. “If the letter of the law is carried out,” explained one Missourian, “very many who stayed out of the rebel army, but sympathized with & otherwise aided the Southern cause, will be disfranchised … and here is where the shoe pinches.” The Oath promised to strip the ballot from perhaps thirty-five thousand to fifty thousand men, all of them likely Conservative voters.27

  The Radicals, on the other hand, saw the Oath as the constitution’s most important element. On one level, it represented the final triumph of free-labor ideology. Slavery, the Republicans had always argued, blighted society in general. The Oath would drive the old rebels and slaveholders out of Missouri and attract Yankee immigrants, remaking it into a Northern state and unlocking growth and prosperity. “Which would you prefer,” asked Radical leader B. Gratz Brown in May 1865, “to have Missouri filled with men from Price’s and Dick Taylor’s armies, or with loyal men from Ohio, New York, and New England?”28

  On a more emotional level, the Radicals saw the Oath as an explicit rebuke to treason. “The people of the North are not such fools as to fight through such a war as this,” declared Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, “and then turn around and say to the traitors, ‘All you have to do is come back into the councils of the nation.’ ” In Missouri, such feelings were greatly intensified. More than 110,000 Missouri men had fought for the Union; at least 12 percent of them had died. Across the state, families had suffered directly at the hands of the bushwhackers. “I would rather today see a rebel with a musket in his hand than with a ballot,” declared the editor of the Kansas City Journal of Commerce. “If he outvotes me, I must take my musket and support the law or policy which he may impose.… Are the people prepared for this alternative? Is Missouri never to have peace? Is treason to become a virtue and loyalty a crime?”29

  This was the indignant wrath of righteousness—and who could blame them? But in their anger and their zeal, the Radicals began to see themselves as the only legitimate political party. Joseph Dixon of Independence summarized their case neatly in a letter to Governor Fletcher. “The Radical Union men,” he wrote, “are the government.” He equated Conservatives with secessionists, warning, “You know that secesh and bushwhackers have the same object, are of the same stock, and are therefore friends.” With this uncompromising outlook, the Radicals took every conceivable measure to ensure victory for the new constitution in the election set for June 6, 1865. The convention declared that the Oath would be applied to the ratification vote itself. It had poll books sent to Missouri troops still in the field, who were urged to—in the phrase of the times—vote as they had shot. With all this, plus a patriotic boost from Lincoln’s assassination, passage of the constitution seemed a foregone conclusion. Ultimately, though, it succeeded with only 52 percent of the vote.30

  “It is said the new constitution has a majority,” Amanda Savery wrote to her husband on June 18, 1865. “Don’t know what the Southern people will do. The country will be depopulated.” Her words would have made the Radicals smile.31

  ON MAY 2, 1866, a newspaper in Lexington, Missouri, published a letter from a man who was visiting the town for the first time since before the war. He was flabbergasted, he wrote, at the changes in “this once beautiful and pleasant, now dilapidated and ruined city.” As he walked through the streets, he declared, “I thought I could see much bitterness and opposition expressed, one to the other, in the countenances of citizens.… I inquired at the hotel of some stranger,
what could have brought about such a change in the town and in her citizens, and the ready reply was, ‘The war.’ Said he, ‘We have here three papers, and three parties:—Democracy [Conservative], Radicalism, and Southern.’ ”

  Such was the triangle of power in the heart of postwar Missouri: two hostile parties of Unionists, locked in a struggle for control of the government, and in the third corner, the former rebels—angry, isolated, alienated from politics. The newspaper that published this letter was the recently founded Lexington Caucasian, which claimed the largest circulation in the state outside of St. Louis. It was the “organ of the disfranchised and proscribed citizen,” proclaimed the masthead. “We are and have been Southern in our sympathies,” the editors declared, “and opposed to a mongrel breed, or a mongrel government.” Clearly the spirit of the rebellion survived along the banks of the Missouri River.

  Though former Confederates were barred from the political arena, their presence in the countryside was palpable. The same traveler who commented on Lexington went on to the town of Waverly, where he wandered outside his hotel. “I looked over across the street towards the stores,” he wrote, “and I saw several good-looking young men ride rapidly to the fence, tie their horses, and make for the stores. Arriving, I noticed they were all doubly armed. Said I to a young lady, ‘Who are they?’ She laughed, and said they were bushwhackers. The blood seemed to get cold in my veins.”32

  If the traveler had understood the full significance of what he had witnessed, his blood would have frozen solid. A full year had passed since the bushwhackers had surrendered at Lexington—yet here they were, riding in a group, going “doubly armed,” even shopping together. This persistence of organized rebel bodies speaks to the deeper revolution wrought by the war and the Oath: the creation of an explosive culture of hatred, personal firearms, and political alienation.33

  The trouble began immediately after the end of the war. Embittered Unionists could scarcely believe that surrendering bushwhackers were being treated identically to regular Confederates. “It looks very strange to me that such robbers and murderers can be turned loose to do as they please after causing so much trouble,” Sarah Harlan wrote to her parents on June 8, 1865. The bushwhackers themselves, conscious of their own deeds, understood this anger perfectly. “We must keep our side arms,” Ol Shepherd wrote on May 25, 1865, as he was negotiating the surrender of his band, “for you know we have personal enemies that would kill us at the first opportunity.”34

  Retribution hung in the air. “Don’t know who to trust [in] these times,” wrote Amanda Savery to her husband on June 18, 1865. “Your friends,” she told him, “would like to see you, if it was safe for you to come.” But it wasn’t, she thought. On July 1, she nervously scribbled that returning Southern soldiers “were shot as fast as they came, as civil war is in force.”35

  “Diaries, letters, even military reports, were filled with stories of old neighbors returning home to get even with each other, man to man,” comments historian Michael Fellman. On July 21, 1865, for example, a former Union scout named James Butler Hickok—already known as Wild Bill—confronted bushwhacker Dave Tutt in the town square in Springfield, Missouri. Both men fired one round, and Tutt fell dead with a bullet in the heart. Hickok was tried for murder before a jury that consisted entirely of Union men (thanks to the Oath) and a judge who had been the Federal commander in Springfield. Not surprisingly, they swiftly found him innocent on grounds of self-defense.36

  In other cases it was the loyal men—and the law—who got the worst of it. In Jackson County, bushwhacker Bill Runnells called two Unionists out of their homes and murdered them. When Sheriff James W. Holmes tried to serve him with a warrant on January 8, 1866, Runnells shot him, then killed James Copeland as he came to the sheriff’s assistance. Personal feuds smoldered on as late as June 15, when Lass Easton stormed up to bushwhacker Jim Green in a grocery store in Haynesville, just a few miles north of the Samuel farm. “Easton accused Jim of being in the company that burned his father’s house,” Sarah Harlan wrote. Green shot Easton in the ensuing melee, and fired two more bullets into his fallen form to be sure he was dead. “One of Easton’s brothers says he intends to kill Jim if he follows him to the end of the world,” Harlan added. “I fear it is not done with yet.”37

  On one level, this outbreak of personal violence represented a general crisis in American society. With the onset of peace, a nationwide crime wave filled prisons with returning soldiers. “The crime cause arises from the demoralization which ever attends on war and armies,” concluded the administrators of a Pennsylvania penitentiary in 1866. “Familiarity with deeds of violence and destruction … leaves its impression after the one is over and the other disbanded. We find in all parts of the country the most distressing evidence of this fact.” In Kansas in 1867, 83 percent of the state prisoners had served full terms in the army before taking to crime. “The mass are willing to tell you with great frankness,” officials reported, “that they are not old in crime and confirmed in a state of wrongdoing.” The incredible bloodshed of the war had put many soldiers through a social process of violentization, a process that was particularly intense in guerrilla-plagued Missouri.38

  The war was not the only cause. In Missouri and much of the South, the heritage of mayhem can be traced to long-standing traditions of personal violence. In the upper echelons of society, men sometimes settled matters of honor with duels. Public figures from Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri to Andrew Jackson faced off with rivals. At the bottom there were the “rough-and-tumbles,” anything-goes battles between backwoods “gougers.” These men were the heirs of the violent culture of the Scots, Protestant Irish, and border-county Englishmen who had settled the Appalachian hills and valleys. Every bit as proud as the upper-crust duelists and far more boastful, they bit off fingers, tore off ears, and gouged out eyes (the height of the rough-and-tumble art), in a surreal ritual of combat.39

  The war drew out and exaggerated the personal aggressiveness of the South’s culture of violence, but the gun shattered its formalized, ritual quality—specifically, the rapid-firing revolver invented by Samuel Colt. The war put weapons in the hands of millions of men, who were allowed to carry them home. The new custom of carrying firearms astonished contemporaries, who had seen nothing like it before the war. A Yankee in Mississippi noticed that “a great majority of the country white people wore [pistols] strapped outside their pants, and many outside their coats.” In Richmond, Kentucky, “all wear Navy revolvers strapped around their waist,” observed a reporter in 1866. “This habit of wearing firearms is not confined alone to the men, but boys scarcely fifteen years of age.”40

  In Missouri, mandatory militia service, guerrilla warfare, and aggressive postwar marketing by firearms manufacturers had saturated the population with six-shooters. In October 1866, Lieutenant James Burbank went to investigate reports of “an armed pistol company” in St. Clair and neighboring counties. “Nearly every man I saw during my stay in these counties carried army revolvers,” Burbank reported, “even men at work in their fields, and boys riding about town.” He described it as “a habit which grew out of the unsettled condition of the country since the war.” Unsettled indeed. Given the omnipresence of pistols, the persistence of wartime hatreds, and a fresh familiarity with death, confrontations rapidly turned lethal. “Fist and skull fighting has played out here,” wrote one Missourian in May 1866. “They now do that business in a more prompt manner.”41

  This new culture of gunslinging—and the personal feuding that went with it—was bad enough, but in Missouri it intersected with a social and political revolution sweeping the countryside at the grass roots, making the situation especially dangerous. All along the Missouri River—in the very stronghold of the old elite—the Radicals overthrew traditional leaders, tearing down the hemp growers and tobacco merchants, the slaveowners and slave traders, from their seats of power. Under the terms of the Ouster Ordinance, passed by the constitutional convention, no less than
eight hundred civil offices were declared vacant on May 1, 1865. Conservatives were tossed out of office at every level, from Supreme Court justices to county clerks, to be replaced by Governor Fletcher’s appointments. Dozens of letters from Radical committees poured onto his desk, recommending men in terms that would have horrified the old order: one man enlisted black recruits in the army as a provost marshal; another gave “the first emancipation speeches ever heard in this county”; all were “active,” “zealous,” and “unflinching loyal men.” These were the men the governor named.42

  In Clay County, Alvah Maret—the man who had sold land to Robert James and tried to help ease Reuben Samuel’s parole—lost his post on the county court, as did every other official. Their replacements were hardline Radicals, men who had protested against Colonel Moss and petitioned for sterner measures against their rebel neighbors. Across the river in Lafayette County, Conservative officeholders refused to go. The governor had them dragged out by a company of militia that consisted entirely of black men. With an acute sense of poetic justice, the militiamen threw two of the resisting officials into the old slave jail in Lexington. Rebels and loyal Conservatives alike were shocked.43

  The Oath scoured the legal system, the schools, and the churches. Lawyers, teachers, and ministers faced a deadline of September 2, 1865, to swear by its eighty-six proscriptions or abandon their professions.44 For many, the law was not enough. Here and there in the countryside, Radicals turned to extralegal measures to carry out their revolution. As early as March 1865, a Unionist committee in Clinton County issued a stark warning to secessionists: “We advise them not to make their abode with us, and if they do so, they do it at their peril.” In July, an organization of “Cass County Union Refugees” declared, “We warn those who … have helped in destroying and plundering Union men, that we will hold all such amenable to the laws they have outraged.” In the threefold division of Conservatives, Radicals, and rebels, observed a Lexington secessionist, the bile between the latter two was especially bitter. A full year after the war, he claimed, the Radicals “still feel and act like they were in the tented field.”45