T. J. Stiles
Page 25
With the bushwhackers in hiding, it was now the Conservatives’ turn to complain of armed intimidation. Angry letters poured into army headquarters in St. Louis. “If you do not interpose,” former governor Austin A. King wrote, “1,000 men will be rallied to exterminate this rabble.” A U.S. Army officer arrived to investigate, and filed a report scornful of the militiamen. The state troops were indeed a rough crowd, swaggering through the streets intimidating the non-Radical citizens. One of them even robbed the hapless Alexander Mitchell, prompting him to flee for his life.59 But they were also war-hardened veterans who were ready for action when, on the morning of December 13, a column of twenty-six bushwhackers led by Archie Clement galloped into the center of Lexington, with Dave Pool bringing up the rear. J. M. Turley, one of the militia officers, later identified four of the men: Pool, Clement, and Frank and Jesse James. As Montgomery stood in the square, he faced the very men he had come to suppress, especially their leader, Clement. There was still a $300 reward on Clement’s head, and Montgomery had a warrant for his arrest. But rather than stage an all-out battle in the middle of town, Montgomery managed the next few moments with self-possession and tact. He had received reports that the guerrillas planned to come to Lexington on the pretext of forming a militia company, according to the terms of the governor’s order, in order to reoccupy the town under the cover of the Radicals’ own authority. Montgomery allowed them to go through the motions of enlisting, then he ordered them to leave town and disperse. The rebels followed orders and rode out of town—that is, all rebels but one.60
In a few minutes, someone ran into the courthouse and reported that Clement had gone to the bar in the City Hotel, where he was drinking with an old friend. This was precisely the moment Montgomery had been waiting for. Clement was now isolated and vulnerable. Montgomery immediately ordered Turley and two other soldiers, George N. Moses and Tom Tebbs, to go to the hotel and arrest him. He kept the rest of his men in place at the windows of the courthouse. Soon, worried that three men might not be enough to capture Clement, he sent the unpredictable Sergeant Joe Wood, the roughest man in his command, to help.
As Turley, Moses, and Tebbs rode over to the City Hotel, Moses recalled, “we discussed the situation, finally determining that we should take them [Clement and his friend] if possible without shooting. Our plan was to get them into conversation and then ask them to take a drink, and while drinking get the drop on them and cause them to surrender.” When they arrived, they ordered drinks for themselves, hoping to put Clement at ease.
Suddenly Wood burst in the door, bellowing “Surrender!” Immediately Clement leaped from his chair and drew his revolvers, as his friend hopped over a billiard table and scrambled for the stairs. Moses snapped off a shot that caught Clement’s companion in the leg, then chased after Archie as he ran into a side office, where Moses shot him in the right side of his chest, sending him sprawling. Scrambling to his feet, Clement ran outside to his horse; Moses, Tebbs, and Turley sprinted after him. The wounded bushwhacker and his pursuers fired rapidly at each other as they careered down the icy street, past the courthouse where the rest of the militiamen were waiting. A roar sounded from its windows, and Clement tumbled to the ground. He was defiant to the last, trying to cock a pistol with his teeth. “I saw his eyes were glassy,” Turley recalled, “and said to him, ‘Arch you are dying. What do you want me to do with you?’ He said, ‘I’ve done what I always said I’d do—die before I’d surrender.’ ” As Montgomery later remarked, “I’ve never met better ‘grit’ on the face of the earth.”61
Clement’s death did not end Lexington’s troubles. Montgomery threatened to burn down the City Hotel unless Clement’s companion was turned over. He decreed that all movement in and out of the city would be stopped. When the Missouri Freeman in Richmond criticized the militia, Turley took a squad of men over the river, destroyed the presses, and arrested the editor. Finally, on December 20, a detachment of U.S. troops moved into Lexington to restore order. Montgomery soon had to defend himself against a lawsuit filed under—of all things—the Civil Rights Act, though the judge dismissed the case.62
Governor Fletcher and Montgomery were unrepentant. Fletcher named Montgomery a brigadier general of the militia and commander of the Second Military District, the portion of the state south of the Missouri River. On February 4, 1867, Montgomery posted his first order in Lexington. “The friends of the conduct of lawless desperadoes, who have terrorized Lafayette county … are now at our mercy,” he intoned. “I warn those who have, by a defence of Arch Clements, identified themselves with the men of that class, that if there is not protection given to law-abiding citizens, and if the law is not enforced against criminals, that I will return to Lafayette county with a force, and … there will then be no law but the law of the bayonet.”63
Of all the angry men in bitter, wounded Missouri, perhaps the angriest was the nineteen-year-old bushwhacker named Jesse James. It is likely that he was with Clement for all but the final, bloody moments of those days in Lexington, and it is certain that he retained a deep-seated fury at the fate of his friend. In his mind, Montgomery would always be the commander of “Tom Fletcher’s cut-throat militia … the scoundrel that murdered Capt. A. J. Clement.” A full decade later, he would still seethe. “He had Arch. Clement, one of the noblest boys, and the most promising military boy, of this age, murdered in cold blood,” he would write.64
The death of Archie Clement never became one of the canonical stories in the myth of Jesse James; it conflicted too directly with his grand alibi, the tale of his three-year recovery from the wound to his lung. But it was as important a moment as almost any other in his postwar life, a deeply personal loss that would nurture his long years of anger and defiance. On December 13, 1866, he lost his mentor, his companion in battle, and perhaps his best friend. At the same time, Clement’s death opened the way for Jesse’s rise to leadership, to become the man who would shake up the country.
* Hereafter the terms “Radical” and “Republican” will be used interchangeably for the party in Missouri. The state party, however, must be distinguished from the Radical faction of Republicans in Congress, a distinct subset of the national party.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Death of Captain Sheets
“IS THE WAR OVER?” It was a headline that could have been read anywhere in the early days of 1867. In Boston, Cleveland, or Chicago, it would have referred to outrages against freed slaves in the South; in the press of Charleston, New Orleans, or Memphis, it would have been directed at the Republican Congress and the Federal troops that still patrolled the streets and roads of the old Confederacy.1 But this particular headline ran in Missouri.
It appeared in the Lexington Caucasian on January 9. The editors spoke for the rebels, who counted the late Archie Clement as one of their own, who knew that they were the real targets of Governor Fletcher’s militia, of secret vigilante squads, of grand juries that issued indictments for wartime crimes and perjury in taking the Oath. To old Confederates, the Caucasian’s question answered itself, for the Radicals would never leave them alone.2
“I suppose you hear terrible accounts of our oppression by the powers that be,” wrote L. M. Matz to a cousin in the South on February 13. “I don’t see how we are to have permanent peace,” she mused. “Last fall when the Gov. was arming his militia … it looked to me like getting up civil war right under our noses.” Matz and other secessionists believed they were locked in a battle with the Radicals for the soul of Missouri—a cultural, political, and even military war. She wanted to move her family to friendlier territory, but her son argued that they could not abandon the state now. “My son Franklin says it is too good a country to give up to the Yanks,” she wrote, “& he is going to stay here & if it’s necessary to fight them will do his part.”3
The band of men who had terrorized Lexington still lurked in Lafayette County. On December 27, 1866, Montgomery’s temporary replacement, Captain W. E. Chester, wired to Governor Fletcher
, “I am confident that they are organizing and making their preparations to do some devilment.” Even the Conservatives were afraid, Chester wrote, “for they say if they were to assist the sheriff to arrest one of those men that their lives would most certainly pay the forfeit.… If you would give us the permission to scout for them, we would be able to kill or drive them out in a short time.”4 How different Missouri’s history would have been if Chester had made good on his boast—but he could not, for the bushwhackers did not remain together for long. It was a long-standing guerrilla tactic to disperse when pursued, and Clement’s death may also have left them leaderless for the moment, so they scattered to their homes and hiding places.
It has been customary for historians to assume that the Confederate guerrillas made a sudden and complete transformation into common criminals, that the end of the Civil War dropped onto the personal histories of Jesse James and his comrades like a meat cleaver, severing what was from what would be. They have been seen as simple men, acting almost compulsively. “In all probability, boredom and an inability to adjust to the calm of postwar life,” writes esteemed James biographer William Settle, “drove them to crime.”5
But postwar life was anything but calm, and the bushwhacker reaction to it was anything but simple. At first they surrendered and returned home. Then they bridled against angry Unionist neighbors and hostile Radical authorities. Some of this was simply the friction of wartime foes living side by side in a new culture of arms-carrying and personal vengeance. But the guerrillas went further, turning to organized resistance. Their ideological commitment should not be surprising: the veterans of Quantrill and Anderson’s bands hailed from some of the wealthiest, best-established families in western Missouri. They had risked their lives for secession, and their families had suffered terrible retribution from the Union authorities.6 In letters to military commanders, they had demanded recognition as legitimate Confederate warriors.
After the war was over, they had returned to a community inflamed with partisan fury, and their activity increased proportionately with the political crisis. In 1866, they began to rebel against Missouri’s homegrown Reconstruction with the same methods they had used during the war, ranging from robbery to intimidation to murder. As November approached, they directly confronted the political process, harassing registration officials, threatening Radical leaders, and even occupying Lexington on election day. To believe that there was no political content in their actions, we would have to believe that they were the only Missouri secessionists who were not enraged by the situation.
The bushwhackers were men with beliefs, men radicalized by war like so many veterans of the North and South. But the great weakness of the guerrillas had always been their lack of a strategic design; they had had no farseeing leader—no George Washington, no Mao Zedong, no General Giap—to guide their insurgency to victory. Theirs had been a spontaneous war, a tactical war, a war of isolated clashes; not even the most significant guerrilla triumphs had changed the strategic situation in Missouri. They knew how to strike back, but they did not know how to win.
Having scattered to their homes as 1867 began, these angry, violent men were utterly unsatisfied with the state of affairs but lacked a clear path of resistance. In Lafayette County, their intimidation may have secured the Conservative victory in the election—as the Radicals angrily claimed—but almost everywhere else their enemies had won. Northern voters had overwhelmingly endorsed the Republicans in their battle with President Johnson over Reconstruction, giving the party a sweeping congressional majority. In Missouri, the Radicals had routed their Conservative foes, thanks both to the restrictive Oath and to fears of a rebel resurgence.7 The state’s electorate had slammed the political door in the secessionists’ faces.
Their defeat was seemingly absolute. In the coming months, they would maintain their identity, preserve their organization, and plunder the institutions of Unionist society, but little meaning would be seen in their actions, apart from a general defiance of the Radical authorities. And moving among them, unnoticed as the authorities focused on his older and better-known comrades, would be Jesse James.8
IN MAY 1867, newspapers and telegraph wires carried news of continuing political tension. In Lexington, the Radicals disputed the election results. In Jefferson City, Judge Walter King of Clay County’s circuit court was undergoing an impeachment trial for throwing out indictments of bushwhackers for wartime crimes. And Liberty Tribune editor Miller was rallying the defeated foes of the Radicals with explosive language. “Organize! Organize!” he wrote. “November next [1868] is to decide whether this country is to be a Republic of white men, or a nigger despotism.… Better death than a nigger government.”9
All along the Missouri River valley, the press reported, “robberies, shooting affairs, and other crimes appear to be frightfully on the increase.” On March 3, 1867, there had been yet another bank robbery, this time in Savannah, a town that the Liberty Tribune described as “literally overrun with thieves, burglars, and highway robbers.” The half-dozen bandits had botched the attempt, however, and had retreated under heavy fire from their intended victims. Some of the same men were thought to be responsible for a jail break in Buchanan County. On March 28, John Bivens and three Titus brothers broke out of jail in Liberty, where they were awaiting trial for assassinating a Clay County deputy sheriff in 1866.10
Little of this turmoil affected Richmond, Ray County. True, the Conservatives fumed at the triumphant Radicals, and several horse thieves had been thrown into jail over the last few days, but on the whole it was a steady community that enjoyed the end of a long and stormy winter. On May 22, the townspeople looked ahead to a typically quiet Thursday, a day when few farmers came into town and merchants expected little bustle.11 So no one gave much thought to the small clusters of men who guided their horses into Richmond around 3:30 in the afternoon—that is, until a dozen of them had collected in front of the Hughes & Wasson bank. Four of them dismounted; the others rested in their saddles and silently scanned the streets.
As those four men swung the door open and stepped inside, they entered a bastion of Richmond society. Owners Joseph S. Hughes and George I. Wasson had lived in the community for two and a half decades; Wasson had served as a deputy sheriff and town constable, while Hughes had been a merchant in town since 1844. In 1859 the pair had opened a branch of the Union Bank of Missouri, and they had kept it open all through the war. When the parent body had reorganized as a national bank, they had purchased their branch’s assets and reopened on January 1, 1866, as a private firm. Hughes & Wasson could not be considered a Republican institution—Hughes, for one, was an influential Conservative—but its owners were solid Unionists.12
Outside on the street, someone grew suspicious at the sight of mounted men in front of the bank. A query, a cry of warning, perhaps a gunshot sounded, and the battle erupted. The men on horseback fired as the locals ran for cover or scrambled to get their guns. Lieutenant Frank B. Griffin ran out into the courthouse yard, positioned himself behind a tree, and took aim with a carbine. Mayor John B. Shaw sprinted down the street, pistol in hand, shouting for the people to fight the invaders. The gunmen at the bank held their ground and returned fire with astonishing precision. Shaw collapsed to the ground, shot through the heart, while Griffin fell back with a bullet hole in his forehead. The elderly father of the slain lieutenant, B. G. Griffin, ran toward the bank in grief and rage, and received a slug through his brain as he reached the doorway. As the four robbers inside emerged onto the street, one of them aimed his pistol at the crumpled old man and fired another round into his corpse.
The bandits mounted and spurred their horses west toward Liberty, then galloped northwest into the rugged Crooked River country. They left behind a town in shock, as the community where Bill Anderson’s corpse had been posed for souvenir photographs now cradled its own dead. “Heartrending beyond description were the plaintive wails of those near and dear relations—wives, children, mothers and sisters,” s
aid a local newspaper. Amid the sobs, a posse of some fifteen men gathered behind Deputy Sheriff Tom Reyburn. After an hour or so of hard riding, Reyburn and his force caught sight of their prey under the rays of the descending sun. A running fight ensued, as the bandits turned in their saddles and fired while they galloped on.
Reyburn lost sight of them. Shortly outside of Elkhorn, he found a fence rail taken down where the raiders had left the road and filed into the woods. He would never be able to track them now; clearly they were bushwhackers, familiar with the hidden trails through the bottomland of the Crooked and Fishing Rivers. The displaced rail was wet with blood; at least one bullet had found its target.13
Somewhere in the old guerrilla haunts among the timber and paw-paw bushes, the raiders split the $3,500 they had taken, then scattered. Perhaps ten of them crossed the Missouri River at Sibley; most of the rest probably returned to homesteads in Clay County. But it would be difficult for them to lie low in the coming days. “This horrible affair has created a profound sensation throughout the State,” reported the St. Louis Republican on May 30, “and the utmost efforts have been made to apprehend the perpetrators.” After more than a year of repeated clashes with bushwhackers, the authorities were ready to strike when old Quantrill and Anderson men appeared on the list of suspects.14
On May 26, Marshal P. J. Miserez of Jackson County received a warrant for the arrest of seven men: Dick Burns, Payne Jones, Andy McGuire, John and James White, a man named Flannery, and Allen Parmer. All were bushwhackers.15 At ten in the evening, Miserez led a posse of ten men on an all-night ride through pelting rain, arriving at the home of Jones’s father-in-law at six in the morning. As they gathered outside, Jones burst out the door, fired two rounds from a shotgun that killed a posse member and an eight-year-old neighbor girl, then escaped through a field. In the pursuit, one of the lawmen encountered Burns and other bushwhackers, who took away his guns and, the press reported, “advised him to return to Kansas City at once.”16