T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  The first bandit pushed William into the open vault and handed him a cotton sack, telling him to put the money into it. The young clerk knelt down in front of the safe and began to pull out bags of gold and silver coin. These were special deposits (much like modern-day safety deposit boxes). In a quirk of the marketplace created by the new greenback, gold dollars were actually worth much more than the more abundant paper currency, so consumers hoarded rather than spent or invested them. “The other robber had me in tow outside of [the] vault,” Greenup Bird recalled, “and demanded the greenbacks. I pointed to a tin box on the table.” The man emptied it of paper dollars and bonds, then handed them through the vault entrance to the first robber, telling him to put them in the sack “and to be in a hurry.” Then they shoved the cashier and his son in the vault and closed the door.

  Greenup Bird listened carefully as the two men rushed back outside. When all was quiet, he shoved the door gently; it was unlocked. He cracked it open, looked and listened, then ran to the front window. “As we were going from the vault door to the window,” he wrote a few days later, “I saw several men on horseback pass the window, going east, shooting off pistols.” Bird hoisted open the window and shouted out the news of the robbery. At that moment, one of the horses on the street reared on its hind legs as its rider fired, killing nineteen-year-old George Wymore, who was standing opposite the bank. Wymore may have repeated Bird’s shouts before he was shot, though the Liberty Tribune reported that he “knew nothing of the robbery, like everyone else.”

  Between the pair who came in the bank and their comrades waiting on the street, perhaps thirteen men galloped down Franklin Street, firing their pistols all the way. After killing Wymore they hurt no one else, thundering east out of town.

  Two large posses quickly collected in Liberty and galloped in pursuit. They followed the raiders to Mount Gilead Church near Centerville, where the bandits had stopped to divide up the loot, then tracked them to a spot on the Missouri River just opposite Sibley, the bushwhackers’ favorite crossing point. There the posses lost the trail. Back in Liberty, Greenup Bird and his son tallied the losses: $58,072.64 at face value.11

  The raid on the Clay County Savings Association was a classic bank robbery—except there was no such thing in 1866. Criminals had frequently plundered banks, of course, but almost exclusively through fraud or late-night burglary. Indeed, this event has often been called America’s first daylight bank holdup in peacetime; certainly there had never been anything like it in Liberty.12

  From the moment that Greenup Bird shouted the alarm, it was clear that the robbers were (as bank president James Love declared) “a band of bushwhackers.” In the Liberty Tribune, editor Robert Miller noted the universal belief that the bandits were guerrillas. “But it makes no difference who they are, or what they claim to be,” he wrote, “they should be swung up in the most summary manner.”

  This was a startling and revealing statement. Simply put, it was an argument against the notion that being bushwhackers somehow justified them in their crime, or at least entitled them to sympathy. Miller never would have made this argument if a significant part of the population was not speaking of the bandits in these terms. Miller’s sentence illustrates once again the three-way split between Conservatives, rebels, and Radicals, for clearly those whom Miller was trying to convince were the secessionists. After all, the Radicals hardly needed to be persuaded that the robbers should be hanged even if they were bushwhackers.

  With blood on the streets of Liberty, the Conservatives sided with the Republicans. The pursuit of the bandits was led by William G. Garth and John S. Thomason, former militia officers who now voted the Conservative ticket. (Thomason had been a Paw Paw commander—one who actually chased and fought guerrillas—while Garth was a leading Conservative.) The other bank in town, the Liberty Savings Association, had no Radicals or even prominent Unionists among its officers, but it quickly offered its own $2,000 reward, on top of $5,000 from the victimized bank. Editor Miller, a Conservative, called for “a thorough organization of the people … to enable the people at a moment’s notice to pursue and kill all violators of the law.” On this issue Unionists of every political stripe stood together.13

  The Radicals, however, saw the Liberty robbery as a sign that the smoldering hatred between themselves and the bushwhackers was flaming into open warfare. With the dawn of the new year, gunfights between angry neighbors had begun to coalesce into violence on a larger scale. Already Governor Fletcher had ordered a company of militia into service in Johnson County to suppress guerrilla activity; the company killed two bushwhackers just days before the Liberty raid.14

  The Clay County robbery focused Radical attentions on a single rebel organization. When James Love published the bank’s offer of a $5,000 reward, he blamed the robbery on “a band of bushwhackers, who reside chiefly in Clay county, and have their rendezvous on or near the Missouri River, above Sibley in Jackson county.” At least nine men were named in succeeding days by witnesses to the robbery and pursuit: Ol Shepherd, Bud and Donny Pence, Jim and Bill Wilkerson, Frank Gregg, Joab Perry, and Redman Munkers (though Munkers soon provided an alibi, supported by five witnesses). These men were the surviving core of Bill Anderson’s terrorist gang, who had followed Pool, Clement, and Jim Anderson back from Texas in early 1865.15 Rumors and hard evidence would soon point to Anderson and particularly Clement as the leaders of the raid.

  If the James brothers were with their old friends on February 13, few in Liberty would have recognized them, since neither had spent time in Liberty for at least five years, since Jesse was a child. A Captain Minter reportedly identified the brothers as two of the perpetrators, then he retracted his statement after being threatened. In any event, it seems safe to assume that Frank and Jesse were still stalwarts of Clement’s crew.16

  In Jefferson City, Governor Fletcher personally directed the state’s response to the bushwhacker threat. The former general gathered intelligence reports, drafted plans, and dispatched orders to various counties. On March 10, he received a man named T. L. Byrne, who carried a letter from Sheriff H. H. Williams of Jackson County. Byrne, the sheriff wrote, had been selected to lead a platoon of militia (about forty men) to track down the Liberty bandits, but he needed specific authorization for the force. More important, however, was the intelligence that Williams had gathered. “I have advices from the sheriff of Lafayette County,” he wrote, “that Clements & Anderson are organizing a large band of bushwhackers at Waverly for some purpose and cautions me to be prepared for them.”17

  Clement and Anderson: If they were behind the mayhem in western Missouri, Fletcher realized, then the state faced a serious problem. The governor acted quickly. The same day, he authorized Byrne’s platoon of militia. Two days later, on March 12, he signed a proclamation that offered a $300 reward for “the apprehension and delivery” of Archie Clement—or Clements, as he was called in the document—as well as bushwhacker Frank Gregg, another Liberty suspect. On March 14, the governor signed into law a bill that had been rushed through the General Assembly, explicitly empowering him to call out the militia to aid county sheriffs. A general enrollment in the militia was ordered; eventually 117,411 citizens were made eligible for duty. On March 16, he sent a special message to the General Assembly, asking for more money for his efforts “to break up these lawless bands.”18

  A few days later, James Love arrived in Jefferson City to confer with the governor. As a Republican leader and Clay County official, Love was well known to the governor, who called him “a good Union man and a clever gentleman.” Fletcher explained to him his strategy for destroying Clement and Anderson’s band, then dispatched him on March 19 to coordinate the effort with an unnamed colonel—presumably a Union veteran and Radical public official. “I have requested him [Love] to confer with you, and [learn] if you think well of the plan suggested by me,” Fletcher wrote in a letter of introduction. “I hope you will cooperate in the movement. I am told that Jim Anderson & his men are abo
ut Franklin, Howard County. If they can be captured or killed it would be the best thing for the state I know of.” Fletcher authorized the recipient to raise a platoon of militia, urging him “to take hold of the matter.”19

  The governor’s information was accurate. Not long after Love departed on his mission, Jim Anderson and follower Isaac Flannery showed up just across the Howard County border in Rocheport, Boone County. There, in the town that Bloody Bill had called his “capital,” the pair tried vainly to persuade local merchants to accept Missouri Union Military bonds extraordinarily reminiscent of those stolen in Liberty. As they rode back into the country, they ran into an ambush. Five men opened fire, killing Flannery. In all likelihood, the gunmen were members of Fletcher’s militia platoon.20

  At best, the governor’s counteroffensive merely forced the guerrillas to disperse for a few weeks. Though Anderson now disappeared from view, Clement and his followers soon reassembled in Lafayette County, the band’s base of operations. Clement’s mother had a house there, while Dave Pool lived in Lexington, home of the Caucasian and virtually the secessionist capital of Missouri. Here the bushwhackers found a warm reception; when one observer saw them in Waverly on April 28, he noted that the local citizens seemed to respect them.21

  The only other success against the bushwhackers came in late spring, when Joab Perry, one of the Liberty suspects, landed in an Independence jail for horse stealing. Even this went awry. On June 14, 1866, a half-dozen men demanded that Marshal Henry Bugler surrender Perry; when he refused, they gunned him down, wounding his seven-year-old son in the process. Outraged Radicals promptly held a mass meeting, where they condemned anyone who incited resistance to state law, and resolved that “every rebel or supposed bushwhacker, having no visible means of support, should be notified to leave the city within twenty-four hours.”22

  That crowd voiced the deeper convictions of the Radicals by explicitly linking the bushwhackers with those who incited resistance to state law. Clement and his followers were not making public speeches attacking the legal code, but the Conservatives were. Starting in the summer of 1866, the Radical battle against the bushwhackers became entangled with the larger political crisis that gripped Missouri and the nation at large. In an increasingly poisonous partisan atmosphere, with gangs of armed men roaming the countryside, the Conservatives, Radicals, and rebels alike convinced themselves that a second civil war was about to begin.

  “ANDREW JOHNSON WAS the queerest character that ever occupied the White House,” thought Illinois congressman Shelby M. Cullom. One of the moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill, Cullom reflected the broad spectrum of Northern political opinion. Johnson was elected on Lincoln’s ticket, he noted, but he never pretended to be a Republican. He was an old-fashioned Jacksonian Democrat from Tennessee whose outspoken Unionism had made him Lincoln’s running mate—he had been the only U.S. senator from the eleven Confederate states to denounce secession as treason. And that aspect of his personality was precisely what made him so peculiar. “He sought rather than avoided a fight,” Cullom observed. “Headstrong, domineering, having fought his way in a state filled with aristocratic Southerners from the class of so-called ‘low whites’ to the highest position in the United States, he did not readily yield to the dictates of the domineering forces in Congress.”23

  After struggling with the moderately minded Lincoln, the Radical faction of Republicans in Congress thought they saw a kindred spirit in the sharp-tongued, rebellion-hating, planter-resenting Johnson. But the new president drew a clear distinction between opposing secession and extending civil rights to freed slaves. “Damn the Negroes,” he once exclaimed, “I am fighting those traitorous aristocrats, their masters.”24

  He first made Republicans nervous in May 1865, when he began issuing a series of proclamations to reconstruct the former Confederate states. One by one, he appointed provisional governors, ordered new elections, and implicitly barred blacks from voting. Only the congressional Radicals, however, were truly alarmed. “Johnson was, probably in good faith, pursuing the Lincoln policy of reconstruction,” thought Cullom. His fellow moderates agreed; they would wait and see.25 Congress could do little anyway, as it was in a long recess until December 1865.

  If Johnson had stopped at his proclamations, moderate Republicans would probably have supported him. But the president quickly overreached. Instead of hanging prominent rebels as he had promised, he handed out mass pardons, until every former Confederate was beyond the reach of the law. He ordered the return of seized lands to the pardoned rebels—halting efforts to provide homesteads to freedmen—and withdrew black troops from the South. At the same time, the Southern states began to pass “black codes,” laws that virtually reenslaved African Americans through a combination of contract-labor requirements, vagrancy laws, and apprenticeship arrangements. White violence against blacks proliferated, with the approval of the Southern press. “If one had the power,” said the Memphis Daily Appeal, “it would be a solemn duty for him to annihilate the race.”26

  All of this upset even those Yankees who snorted at the idea of giving black men the vote. Radical orators and newspapers succeeded in making the issue one of Unionism as much as race. Johnson’s policies, they argued, rewarded the rebels while penalizing the freed people—the only truly loyal population in the South.27 So when the Thirty-Ninth Congress assembled, it tried to take some control over Reconstruction. The majority Republicans began by voting unanimously to exclude the new senators and representatives elected by the former Confederate states. Then they focused their efforts on two bills: a renewal of the Freedman’s Bureau (the national bureaucracy established to help freed slaves get education, work, and land) and the groundbreaking Civil Rights Bill. The latter legislation in particular promised a revolutionary change in American law. For the first time, Congress would offer a national definition of citizenship (one that included African Americans), specify basic rights that went with it (not including the vote), and extend federal protection over those rights. The Republicans thought the bills were quite reasonable, and moderates and Radicals united behind them.

  Johnson vetoed both, leaving the Republicans stunned, then outraged. The two bills, declared Senator John Sherman of Ohio, were “clearly right.” The protection of freedmen’s rights “followed from the suppression of the rebellion,” argued a Republican newspaper. “The party is nothing, if it does not do this—the nation is dishonored if it hesitates in this.” The president made matters worse by explaining his actions in terms that were notable, as historian Eric Foner writes, for their “explicit racism.” The veto of the Freedman’s Bureau renewal on February 19 flummoxed Congress, but after the Civil Rights Bill veto a month later it rallied and overrode the president. The time had come, one Republican wrote to Senator Sherman, “to draw our swords for a fight and throw away the scabbards.”28

  The fight proved to be more than a metaphor. On May 1, a three-day race riot erupted in Memphis, as policemen and firemen led white mobs on a rampage through black neighborhoods. Forty-six African Americans and two whites died, seventy-five people were wounded, five black women were raped, and ninety-one houses, twelve schools, and four churches were burned to the ground. A second outbreak occurred on July 20 in New Orleans, when the white police force attacked a meeting of Louisiana’s state constitutional convention, which was considering the enfranchisement of black men. General Sheridan called the ensuing events “an absolute massacre.” Thirty-four blacks and three white Radicals were killed and 119 were wounded.29

  The slaughter in Memphis and New Orleans echoed across the country like war drums in the night. Now no one could mistake the gravity of the fight between Congress and the president. This was a battle over the meaning of the Civil War, over the very nature of the American republic, and the casualties were already mounting. The election of 1866 would be far from a typical midterm campaign—it would be a referendum on two versions of Reconstruction, on two visions of the nation. The threat of violence hung in the air; Jo
hnson even ordered measures to protect the capital from “insurgent or other illegal combinations.”30

  The fury of 1866 erupted in Missouri with heat and force unseen almost anywhere else in the Union. In some respects, Missouri was a microcosm of the United States; its people had split in the Civil War, had fought with each other, then had imposed on themselves their own, entirely homegrown Reconstruction. “The condition of Missouri,” wrote St. Louis Conservative Edward Bates to President Johnson, was not “local and peculiar to us.… It is part and parcel of the condition of the nation.” National issues immediately colored the state campaign because they spoke directly to Missouri’s internal struggle, a struggle of rapidly escalating bitterness. “We unhesitatingly denounce him [President Johnson] as a traitor,” resolved a Republican meeting in Putnam County. Conservatives in Vernon County castigated the “fanatical Radical majority in Congress.… All attempts to elevate [the black man] to the level of the white man,” they declared, “by making him politically and socially his equal, we will resist.”31

  The man who led the Conservative effort in Missouri was Frank Blair—the founder of its Republican Party, the mastermind behind the Federal seizure of the state in 1861, and a successful Union general. Like his friend Andrew Johnson, Blair was an old Jacksonian Democrat, and, also like Johnson, Blair condemned slavery but intensely loathed black people. The two men hated slavery in large part because of the power it gave rich planters; they believed the Southern yeoman farmer was loyal in his heart and had been duped into secession by the slaveowning aristocracy. With slavery dead, Blair’s racism became the flagship of his political principles. “No man can advocate an amalgamation of the white and black races and so create a mongrel nation,” he wrote to Johnson, in one of his mildest statements. “The policy of the country must therefore be a gradual segregation of the races.”32