Blair led Conservatives by example. He personally challenged the Oath, daring the officials to bar him from registering to vote; he also served as attorney for Father John A. Cummings, a Roman Catholic priest who refused to take the Oath. The case went before the U.S. Supreme Court in March 1866, and the decision was eagerly awaited as the campaign proceeded. With the return of warm weather in May, Blair traveled across the state, delivering dozens of speeches to rouse his party into action. Meanwhile, in virtually every county, Conservatives organized “Johnson Clubs” to voice their support for the president and do battle with the Radicals.33
And a battle it would be. The alarms sounded as early as May, when Missouri Conservative Abner Gilstrap warned President Johnson that the Radicals planned assassinations, even a new civil war. “And secret military organizations are now going on,” he wrote, “in many parts of this state.” What Conservatives feared most were the militia companies that Governor Fletcher had deployed; they believed that the bushwhackers were simply an excuse for putting troops on the streets to carry the election by force. “I am fully satisfied that the militia in the hands of Governor Fletcher,” wrote one captain in a letter of resignation, “will only rob the people of the state of their liberties, to forward the interests of a political party.”34
On July 24, Conservative Thomas C. Ready wrote to the president from Jackson County, where the state’s fight against the bushwhackers raged with particular intensity. Since the arrival of the militia, Ready claimed, the county had become a “theater of anarchy and confusion. Every day brings its fresh outrages and indignities. No man lies his head upon his pillow at night, but dreads to hear the tread of soldiery and the reports of the death-dealing musket ere morn.” A week earlier, he wrote, Deputy Sheriff James Meader—also a militia captain—had ambushed a man named Hulse as he returned from working in a neighbor’s field; Hulse drew a pistol in self-defense, but was quickly gunned down.35
The combative Blair family confirmed Ready’s letter. “You do not realize the truth of your own words,” Frank’s brother Montgomery told Johnson, “that the Radicals are preparing a new war to maintain themselves in power.” Fletcher, he claimed, was “openly arming his followers, including large numbers of Negroes.” This was more than Johnson could stand. He immediately ordered General Sherman, commander of the Division of the Mississippi, to confer with Fletcher and shut down the militia. At Sherman’s request, the governor came to see him in St. Louis on August 9, only to find that the general—himself a most unradical, even racist fellow—had invited Conservative leaders Thomas Gantt and Samuel Glover to attend. The two politicians peppered Fletcher with hostile questions in front of the suspicious Sherman; the enlistment of blacks into the militia particularly enraged them. The governor was flabbergasted at their refusal to believe that the bushwhackers were a real threat. Finally he agreed to disband the militia, if Sherman provided U.S. troops to keep the peace.36
It soon turned out that the Conservatives’ real problem was less the organized militia than unofficial Radical bands in the countryside. In Gallatin, Daviess County, John W. Sheets, a banker, expressed “little faith” that the governor’s action would save Conservatives from Radical “lawlessness and mobs.” Anarchy reigned in nearby towns, he wrote. “Armed bands of men are also seen in our county.” When an attempt was made to organize a Johnson Club in Gallatin, even Samuel P. Cox, the famed slayer of Bloody Bill Anderson, was “afraid to go in for the present.” Sheets summed up the situation with a single word, one that became a Conservative refrain: “Mobocracy.”37
Sheets’s worries were founded in fact. By the middle of August, Union veterans across Missouri had organized Soldiers’ Leagues and posts of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). Secretive and extremely militant, these groups operated as an underground extension of the Republican Party. In Gentry County, for example, they warned all ministers to take the Oath or stop preaching—or face the consequences. “There has been a great deal of murdering done in this state,” wrote Missourian F. R. Sieg on August 26. “This summer a great many ministers of the gospel have been shot at their churches, whilst ministering the gospel, by the Radicals.” The state GAR commander even offered to march on Washington with fifty thousand veterans to enforce Congress’s will.38
“Have we not good reason to apprehend another civil war?” mused one secessionist in Missouri City. “A war, too, in comparison to the atrocity of which the last one was a mere nothing.… And I say let the issue speedily come. There is not on the face of the earth a body politic so foully disgraced and so wretchedly misgoverned as ours. Yankee avarice, Yankee intolerance, Yankee oppression, Yankee hypocrisy have so permeated our whole country that it is as rotten as a dead Dutchman.”39
As the election approached, Conservative appeals piled up in army headquarters in St. Louis. In Daviess County, it was reported, a man named Broomfield stormed an outdoor religious debate and gunned down a political opponent; with a band of more than one hundred men, he began to drive Johnson supporters out of their homes. In Hickory County, an armed company of Radicals prevented a pro-Johnson speaker from addressing a crowd. Another gang interrupted a political rally in Caldwell County; afterward, a half-dozen of them halted a Conservative activist on his way home. “They told him that they had come to kill him—asked him if he was ready to die,” wrote an observer. “He replied he was not and had done nothing worthy of death. They then commenced firing.” Shortly afterward the man’s son and son-in-law were also found dead. “There is a complete reign of terror,” the writer continued; its leader, Daniel Proctor, was a Radical state legislator.40
Missouri, declared the Conservatives, was “groaning under Radical tyranny and terrorism.” Rumors of plots and arms shipments proliferated. The voter registration process in particular became the focus of paranoia on both sides, as Radical officials strictly enforced the stringent Oath. “We have been outrageously disfranchised in the registration,” wrote Conservative former governor Austin A. King, “and now we know that a Radical mob is intended at the polls, as a means of intimidation.”41
Paranoia was one thing that Republicans and Conservatives had in common. On September 6, the Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce accused Conservative leaders of urging the assassination of Radical registrars. The Conservative St. Louis Republican, it claimed, was advising its readers to “collect arms and ammunition, organize and drill.” The Radicals, it warned, were about to have “war … forced upon them.” The next day, a Republican in Fredericktown wrote to his brother that “there is a great deal said about another war.” Like his leaders, he believed “the rebel or Johnson party will resort to arms.”42
In this poisoned pond of electoral politics, Republicans sometimes ignored the fact that Conservatives and secessionists swam in separate schools. Even Conservatives tended to think of the former rebels as their automatic supporters.43 In fact, many Missouri secessionists were embittered and unreconstructed. “I am a stronger rebel than I was 5 years ago,” wrote L. M. Matz in Pettis County on April 2, 1866. “I don’t feel like the war is over.” Matz viewed both parties with deep suspicion. “Although A. Johnson seemed to try to do some good, I have always looked up on him with distrust,” she wrote at the end of October. “I didn’t think he was the clean thing, or he never would have required us to give up our slave property.” Rebels such as Matz could never forget that the Conservatives were still Unionists, led by former Federal soldiers, militia officers, and Frank Blair.44
But who could speak for the secessionists? Unlike Kentucky or the former Confederate states, Missouri had virtually no rebel leaders left. After Lee’s surrender, Confederate governor Reynolds, General Price, and General Shelby, along with Shelby’s prolix adjutant, John Edwards, had led an exodus to Mexico, where they had established colonies under the protection of Emperor Maximilian, an Austrian aristocrat placed in power by the French. Missouri secessionists closely followed newspaper stories about their exiled leaders, but at home they had no spokesmen, no
representatives, no one to forge a strategy to resist this peculiar Reconstruction-within-a-Reconstruction.45
The bushwhackers were the one (relatively) organized group of rebels who remained. Accustomed to violence, angry at the Radicals, alienated from Unionist society in general, they continued to be the most dangerous and unpredictable fish in these political waters—something Governor Fletcher never forgot. Others also grasped the complexities, and danger, of the situation. Kansas City Conservative H. D. Branch, for example, argued that the battle between Radicals and rebels threatened to topple Missouri’s three-legged political stool. “If the Sheriff of this county is permitted to ride over the county with a military force and murder a bushwhacker every opportunity,” Branch wrote in late August, “it is certain that they will concentrate and the company of militia at Independence will be put to death.” The Conservatives, he claimed, wished “to prevent the Radicals and the bushwhackers from involving our county in a state of civil war.”
But that was precisely what the rebels themselves expected. “The Radicals have been planning all summer to hold this state,” wrote L. M. Matz in October. “We are waiting to see if we are going to have another war.”46
DAVE POOL WAS not drinking. That alone was enough to capture attention in Lexington. Normally the lunch hour would find the bushwhacker chief in the barroom of the City Hotel or one of the other saloons in town, awash in liquor with his well-armed friends. But at noon on October 30, 1866, Pool and his brother John stood out on the sidewalk, patiently waiting for something.47
They were conveniently on hand, then, when four men fled from the nearby private bank of Alexander Mitchell & Company, carrying $2,011.50 in stolen greenbacks and national banknotes. Before the robbers had gone very far, the brothers organized a party of five former bushwhackers and gave chase. Eventually the posse ambled their horses back into town, where they explained that the bandits had driven them back in a brisk gun-fight and escaped. According to one newspaper, when some in Lexington wondered aloud if the chase might not have been what it seemed—or, rather, was exactly what it seemed—Dave Pool and his boys began “swearing around the streets that they would shoot any man who dare say they had anything to do with the robbery.”48
As Alexander Mitchell fretted over his losses, the bushwhackers tucked his money into their pockets and returned to more pressing business: their escalating campaign of harassment against the Republican government. In Saline County, for example, a bushwhacker gang under Woodson Thornton menaced the registration officials when they refused to allow former rebels to sign up to vote; local Radicals, including William Penick, once the militia commander in Liberty, complained to the governor of systematic intimidation at all the registration places.49
Saline’s troubles could not compare to the mayhem in Jesse James’s backyard. Tensions heightened in Clay County with the approach of election day, as the supervisor of registration, Anthony Harsel, denied the right to vote to rebel after rebel in this most rebellious of counties. In September, for example, an unknown party stopped a former Missouri State Militiaman on the road near Centerville and shot him to death. On November 7, Republican officials sent a desperate plea for help to the army commander at Fort Leavenworth. “We deem the lives of Union men in great danger at the present time in this county,” they wrote; “several of the most respectable citizens have been ordered to leave and many others have been publicly insulted and their lives threatened. An armed mob consisting of the most dangerous men in the county, numbering more than a hundred men, resisted the sheriff … while [he was] attempting to arrest a man for breach of the peace.” The appeal ended with an ominous warning: “We believe unless [troops are provided], every Union man will be driven out of the county or murdered.”50
“Clay county, Lafayette county, and Callaway county are today worse, if possible, than they were five years ago,” wrote the Republican Journal of Commerce. “Why is this? It is simply because these men [the Conservatives] have been for six months preaching violence from the stump.”51 In reality, the bushwhackers needed no encouragement from Conservatives to rebel against the government; the Radicals (and freed slaves) were their common enemy. In Lafayette County, however, particularly in Lexington, the well-organized population of secessionists vigorously attacked the Republicans in a seemingly coordinated campaign with the Conservatives, making this place the epicenter of Missouri’s election crisis.52
The rebel rallying cry echoed from the pages of the Lexington Caucasian. “Our citizens,” it noted proudly, “have no respect for the municipal authorities of this city,” deriding them as “worthless scamps.” The paper called for a boycott of the Radical businessmen of the town, darkly pointing out that many were Germans (as indeed they were). It regularly blasted the voter registration board as “The Farce,” sneering at supervisor Dr. Frank Cooley as “Pontius Pilate Cooley.” Secessionists particularly resented the large number of blacks who had moved into town and, though they could not vote, now sided openly with the Republican Party. The Radicals “are understood to have control of the worst of the negroes,” the Caucasian claimed, and were “endeavoring to form the blacks into companies, and addressing them in such words as ‘defend yourselves.’ ” When gunfire broke out between whites and blacks on a Saturday in November, the paper blamed the fight on the Radicals, who “induced it as a means of drawing out the bushwhackers, to give the negroes a chance to kill them.”53
The bushwhackers hardly needed Radical plots to bring them into the streets. Lexington was Dave Pool’s hometown and the rendezvous of Archie Clement and his followers; it was also the place where James M. Pool, a close relative of Dave, was running as the Conservative candidate for county sheriff. Here, even more than in Clay County, the guerrillas directly confronted Radical rule. A week before the robbery of Alexander Mitchell, Dave Pool disrupted the proceedings of the registration board with angry shouts and gunfire, sending Cooley and his fellow officials scrambling for their weapons; bloodshed was only averted when James Pool convinced Dave to go home. Then came election day, and the real hell began.54
A deadly bitterness permeated the air in this bluff-top community as morning dawned on the day for balloting. At the suggestion of Captain James J. Emerson, commander of the U.S. Army company stationed just outside of town, the mayor closed the liquor stores. The captain and his men, however, were called away to other villages, and were unavailable to keep the peace. Then the streets began to echo with the footfalls of scores of horses. “About one hundred bushwhackers came into town the morning of the election,” Sheriff Thomas Adamson wired to Governor Fletcher, “and were fully backed by the desperadoes from our town. They rode through the streets defying all law and officers; and if I had attempted to arrest them, we would all have been murdered.”
They were almost certainly the same company of one hundred guerrillas who terrorized Clay County that same week. Clay’s sheriff called them “the most dangerous men in the county,” which points to the many veterans of Bloody Bill’s old band, including the James brothers, who haunted both Clay and Lafayette. In light of subsequent events—and the fact that these same men were known to gather in Lexington—it seems the group that stormed in that day was led by Arch Clement and Dave Pool, two of the men behind so much of the trouble plaguing Missouri that year. And this election-day expedition was no lark: it was an organized and highly effective effort at intimidation. “They were placed in houses, ready to fire out of the windows,” Adamson wrote. “Over two hundred shots were fired in the streets.… For God’s sake, send help!”55
With Governor Fletcher away from the capital, Adjutant General Samuel Simpson forwarded Adamson’s letter to Major General Winfield S. Hancock, the commander of the Department of the Missouri. But Hancock, a conservative Democrat himself, was not about to intervene. “I cannot remedy the state of affairs at Lexington,” he sniffed. “The civil authorities must first be legally insufficient.” And so the crisis continued for another month. “This county,” the Radicals
explained to Hancock at the beginning of December, was under “the ignominious rule and control of the most fiendish, brutal wretches, viz. the bushwhacking, murdering, and thieving debris of the rebel army.”56
When Fletcher returned, he swiftly took matters into his own hands. Now that the bushwhackers had “boldly taken possession of certain localities” (as the newspapers pointed out), it was time to break his agreement with Sherman and deploy the troops. By December 2, Fletcher had a platoon of militia on the march to Lexington. On December 10, he issued a call for volunteers to fill two regiments of cavalry and one of infantry. “A portion of the state of Missouri is infested with murderers and robbers who defy the civil authority and have the sympathy and aid of a number of the people of the counties where they have their haunts,” he proclaimed, “and have … intimidated or obtained the sympathy of local authorities.” Little did he realize that this state of affairs would continue far beyond the election of 1866—until a day in April 1882, in some respects, when a young man from Clay County would turn up dead in a modest house in St. Joseph.57
On December 2, a platoon of thirty-seven militiamen galloped into Lexington, which was now strangely quiet, for the bushwhackers had withdrawn upon the soldiers’ approach. The soldiers rode straight for the courthouse in the center of town, took up residence in the ground floor, then strolled proudly through the streets in their cavalry overcoats, with pistols on their hips and carbines slung over their shoulders. Their leader, Bacon Montgomery, went about in civilian clothes, with a revolver strapped outside his pants, as he gave orders to his men or conferred with Republican leader Cooley. Despite appearances, he was the most soldierly in his crew. During the war, he had been a major in the U.S. Volunteers, rising to lead the Sixth Missouri Cavalry Regiment as he won a reputation for bravery and initiative in the Vicksburg and Red River campaigns. He was also an outspoken Radical, as the rebels of Lexington would long remember when they recalled his name.58
T. J. Stiles Page 24