T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Despite this humiliating setback, the search continued. More guerrillas were added to the list of suspects, including Bill Hulse, member of a notorious bushwhacker clan that had fought against the authorities repeatedly since the end of the war. Vigilante squads began to post warnings in Clay County’s Washington and Fishing River townships (home to the James brothers and the site of many guerrilla hiding places). In Richmond, rumors spread that horse thief Felix Bradley, currently locked up in the county jail, was linked to the robbery. A few days after the raid, an angry crowd hauled him out of his cell and hanged him. The fury of the community could be seen in the pages of the Conservative Richmond Conservator, which encouraged support for the Radical sheriff Adam Reyburn. “No politics is known in this matter,” the paper declared. “Our lives and property are at stake.”17

  As he did the year before, Governor Fletcher took personal charge of the government’s counterattack. First he offered a $300 reward for each bandit. Then, on May 29, he learned that suspect Tom Little had been seen on the riverboat W. L. Lewis as it steamed out of Jefferson City. Immediately he wired instructions to St. Louis chief of police William P. Fenn to have him arrested. Little and a companion were duly seized when the boat landed in the city. They were sent west and lodged in the jail in Warrensburg. A mob stormed the jail, hauled the suspects out, and hanged them from a tree.18

  Neighbors and acquaintances whispered that Jesse James—“regarded as a desperate and dangerous character,” according to one merchant—had joined the robbery. Seven years later, a man who grew up with the brothers and was in Richmond that day said “positively and emphatically that he recognized Jesse and Frank James … among the robbers,” the press reported. At the time, however, their names remained unspoken by the authorities. Jesse and his older brother were simply not prominent enough among the guerrilla fraternity to draw any attention from the law.19

  The lynchings in Richmond and Warrensburg marked a grim new turn in the bushwhackers’ history, as their casualties mounted. On November 22, 1867, the blanket-wrapped body of Dick Burns turned up in a field three miles south of Independence, his head crushed by a blunt object. Payne Jones turned up dead as well—reportedly at the hands of Jim Chiles, another old bushwhacker and bandit suspect.20

  At the close of the business day on November 27, the robbers struck again, holding up the First National Bank in Independence with quiet efficiency. One of the men who plundered the vault was James M. Devers, a suspect both in the Richmond affair and in a recent murder.21 Before the end of the year, the authorities captured Andy McGuire in St. Louis. Like Frank James, he had been with Quantrill when the guerrilla leader was killed in 1865, and he was another suspect in the Richmond robbery. After he was transported to the Ray County jail, he broke down and told Sheriff Reyburn that Devers had also taken part in the bloody raid. In February 1868, one of Reyburn’s deputies captured Devers in Kentucky and brought him back. At midnight on March 17, vigilantes removed McGuire and Devers from the Richmond jail and hanged them both from a tree.22

  For the bushwhackers, war had hardly been more deadly than these days of peace. But as the “old men” disappeared, their younger and lesser known companions would carry on the fight. Out of the slaughter of 1867 and 1868 the twenty-year-old Jesse James was about to emerge.

  THE JAMES BROTHERS may have reached Kentucky the same way their father did in 1846, booking passage on a paddlewheeler that rode the high spring waters of the Missouri River, into the wide Mississippi, and up the Ohio. Or perhaps they decided to cut several days from their trip by taking the train, riding the newly completed Missouri Pacific from Kansas City to St. Louis, where they boarded a steamboat for the rest of their journey. In early March 1868 Jesse and Frank James were in a hotel in Chaplin, Kentucky, together with five former guerrillas: Ol Shepherd and his cousin George Shepherd, Arthur McCoy, John Jarrette, and Cole Younger.23

  They were most likely in Chaplin to finalize a plan conceived some weeks before by George Shepherd, now a resident of Kentucky. According to one report, he had returned to Missouri at the beginning of the year to tell his cousin Ol about a rich and vulnerable bank in the town of Russellville. The pair had gathered McCoy and Jarrette for the robbery; Jarrette, in turn, had recruited Younger. Cole had only recently returned to Missouri after spending the end of the Civil War in California, followed by a prolonged stay in Texas.24 Not surprisingly, Jesse and Frank appear to have been relegated to peripheral roles; unlike Younger and the two Shepherds, neither had been a leader during the war, and Jesse was still quite young. The other five men, it seems, were to ride to Russellville to visit the Nimrod L. Long & Co. bank.25

  Great care marked the Missourians’ passage through the Kentucky countryside. On March 10 and 18, they scouted the interior of their intended target, the private bank owned by Nimrod L. Long and George W. Norton (brother of Elijah H. Norton, a prominent Unionist politician in western Missouri). An experienced banker, Norton had joined Long to open the firm in 1863, when many of Kentucky’s rebels were in exile. But Nimrod L. Long & Co., unlike the Clay County Savings Association, was not a political target.26

  The reconnaissance aroused Long’s suspicions. First one of the bandits—posing as Thomas Colburn* of Louisville—tried to sell him a mature $500 U.S. 7.30 bond at par, even though it would normally fetch a 6 to 7 percent premium. Long declined. The second time “Colburn” showed up, he tried to get change for a $100 bill, which convinced the banker that he was dealing with a counterfeiter. He gruffly refused to accept the note, and the man left. Two days later he returned.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon of March 20, 1868, Colburn strode into Nimrod L. Long & Co. with a companion glowering over each shoulder. He slapped down a $50 bill with a fierce glare. “Is that good, sir?” he snarled. It’s a fake, the crusty Long replied. Colburn drew a revolver, pushed the muzzle against the banker’s head, and told him to empty his vault. Suddenly Long darted for the back door. Somehow he escaped safely, and townspeople ran to the scene with weapons in hand. But for every bullet they fired, the press reported, they received three in return from the pair of mounted gunmen who stood watch outside, wielding seven-shot Spencer carbines. The two bandits shot one local citizen before their comrades emerged with $9,000 in paper currency and $3,000 in gold coin.27

  When news of the Russellville robbery appeared in the press, Louisville detectives Delos T. Bligh and John Gallagher took up the hunt, with Bligh in the lead. The raid had originated in Chaplin, Kentucky, Bligh learned; he placed the James brothers there, though he could not identify them as members of the robbery party. On March 28, he and his partner arrested George Shepherd, who was eventually convicted and sentenced to three years in the state penitentiary. Bligh then tracked Ol Shepherd to his father’s home near Lee’s Summit, Missouri, and sent the information to the Jackson County sheriff. Since Shepherd was also a suspect in the Richmond affair, the sheriff easily procured a warrant. He placed it in the hands of a deputy, dispatching him and a posse to make the arrest in early 1868.

  When the lawmen knocked on the door to Shepherd’s father’s house, they met a blast of gunfire through the weatherboarding. They besieged the house all night. At daybreak, the fugitive burst out the door carrying a shotgun and a brace of revolvers. As Shepherd darted into a nearby field, the posse opened fire. The James brothers’ old friend and leader, the man who had once scoured Clay and Clinton Counties with a death squad, was now dead himself.28

  In the months that followed Clement’s death, the old Anderson guerrilla organization had increasingly descended into simple crime. But the bloody hunt for the outlaws led to one more incident with political overtones. In the early summer of 1868, a Ray County deputy sheriff went to Kentucky to capture Bud Pence, a suspect in the Richmond robbery who, with his brother Donny, had served under Anderson and had settled in Kentucky’s Nelson County after the war. Pence, the deputy claimed, escaped from custody with the aid of the Nelson County sheriff and Kentucky’s lieutenant governor
, William Johnson. Missouri’s Radical press raised an uproar. Kentucky, the Republicans noted, was governed by former Confederates, who had won control of the state’s Democratic Party after restrictions on former rebels there were lifted in December 1865.

  Missouri’s Democratic newspapers swiftly replied, showing that the bitterness of 1866 still lived. “The present State government is one of force and not of consent,” said the Jefferson City People’s Tribune. “Physical force alone prevents the people from meeting and abolishing the odious form under which we live.… If this were attempted, the people would be read the registration law, and if they disregarded that law, the Radical … Montgomerys, with their brigands, would be turned loose upon a defenseless people.”29

  IF THE WORLD could be judged by a single corner, then a visitor to Zerelda Samuel’s farm in 1868 would imagine that the South had won the Civil War. The family was prospering again, with real estate and personal property that compared favorably to those of the neighbors. The old house rattled with noise from the children whom Zerelda had brought into the world, year after year, all through her late thirties and early forties. Nine-year-old Sarah and seven-year-old John would be scampering about, with four-year-old Fannie Quantrell toddling after. Eighteen-year-old Susie James would be cradling the infant Mary, or perhaps playing with two-year-old Archie—named in honor of Archie Clement, at Jesse’s insistence.

  The women had help as they cared for Zerelda’s many offspring: Charlotte—Charlotte Samuel, now—was still there, nearly fifty. She was illiterate, alone, without relatives, without special skills, and here, at least, was security and perhaps the closest thing she had to a family. But the grim abuse inflicted on women under slavery still haunted her life. In September 1868, someone on the farm—either Charlotte or, more likely, the young woman recorded as an eighteen-year-old slave in the 1860 census—gave birth to a biracial boy, Perry. His white father was never named, though three obvious candidates—Reuben, Frank, and Jesse—lived on the farm. If the mother was the younger woman, then she soon fled and left the child in Charlotte’s care.

  From the beginning, Perry was reared to serve the Samuel family, alongside Ambrose, another former family slave, who was twelve when Perry was born. The two never went to school, never learned skills or trades; they simply worked for the Samuels all through their childhoods and adult years. When Ambrose turned eighteen, he would still be an illiterate worker living on the farm, and the 1880 census would list Perry as a member of Reuben’s household, giving the eleven-year-old’s occupation as “servant.” One might easily have wondered if the news of emancipation had reached Zerelda’s farm.30

  But just beyond Zerelda’s reach, the slow-paced life of hemp and tobacco farming, of muddy roads and chugging steamboats, was dying. In its place rose a new economy, closely resembling that of the North, linked to the rest of the country by a spreading rail network. A mania for rail construction erupted, sparked by the Radicals’ devotion to economic progress and kindled by simple self-interest. County governments issued millions of dollars’ worth of bonds to finance local railroad extensions, though the constitution of 1865 prohibited state aid. The craze crossed party lines; even the Lexington Caucasian called for a local railway link, noting that it “will benefit every man in the county who owns a foot of land, or who raises or makes anything for sale.”31

  Construction boomed in 1867. In Clay County, a line connecting the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad junction at Cameron to Kansas City marched steadily south, built by a rowdy crew of Irish laborers; by the end of September, it had reached the neighborhood of Centerville. “I believe the railroad is engaging the attention of a great many people at this time,” wrote Sarah Harlan from nearby Haynesville. “There is a great part of the population of this wooded country that had never seen a car,” she added. “The ladies go out by the dozen from town to see them and ride. The engineer had nothing better to do with the greater part of his time but to take the ladies on a pleasure ride.” A new depot town named Kearney rose on the line in 1867, absorbing the old village of Centerville.32

  The new rivers of iron, however, were a mere undercurrent in the tsunami unleashed by the Union victory. A flood of people deluged the countryside, as Radical plans to remake Missouri fortuitously met an epic tide of migration. In the first four months of 1866, private individuals acquired almost 250,000 acres of public land in the state, often through the Homestead Act. In 1867, the state Board of Immigration began to advertise for immigrants on a large scale, though the real work was done by county boards, which competed for settlers. Many battered, war-weary residents were only too happy to sell out. The wave crested against the very edge of the Samuel farm, as neighbor and entrepreneur Waltus Watkins purchased six thousand acres of land and resold them to newcomers at low prices. “I can buy first rate improved land here in Missouri from 5 to 10 dollars per acre,” wrote A. J. Spease from Lexington in April 1868.33

  “There are a great many that are thronging the railroad stations, exceedingly anxious to sell lands,” wrote Daniel Fogle on August 8, 1867. Like so many others, he came to St. Louis to scout the state for settlement. “We find numbers at the stations on the same errand we are on. We see them from all parts, some from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, etc., etc. The excitement is not overrated.” More than three-quarters of these immigrants came from the North. By 1870, the number of Missourians born in the original free states had increased from 155,000 ten years earlier to 345,000. By contrast, the number born in the old slave states remained virtually the same, the immigrants barely replacing those who fled the war. By 1870, Yankee-born residents had become a majority of the non-native population, though natives predominated overall.34

  The Southern character of Missouri was increasingly challenged by land-hungry Union veterans. But as Daniel Fogle wandered across the state on his mission, he learned that this peaceful invasion was stirring the still-burning fire of wartime enmities. Many of the tracts offered to immigrants had been seized by county governments for nonpayment of taxes; millions of acres went up for auction. “These lands sell for near nothing—but it is considered very hazardous to buy and occupy them,” Fogle observed, “as they mostly belong to men who went into the Southern army and dare not return, and there is a large band of them sworn together, and unknown to the authorities, who will and do kill every man who attempts to occupy their former homes.”35

  In many respects, these changes and conflicts reflected a national transformation, as the Republican Congress crafted a dramatic program to remake the South. After launching the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, Congress had passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 over the president’s veto, dividing the old Confederacy into five districts and placing it under army jurisdiction. Each rebel state except Tennessee was now ruled by a military governor, and would be until it ratified a constitution that gave black men the vote. The Republicans had acted on their vision of a South where slavery’s legacy would be crushed and the economy would blossom along Northern lines. “My dream is of a model republic, extending equal protection and rights to all men,” declared one. “The wilderness shall vanish, the church and school-house will appear … the whole land will revive under the magic touch of free labor.”36

  All of this had leaped away from the past in breathtaking ways. Never before had the federal government intervened at the individual level; never before had black suffrage been an issue, let alone a demand placed on state governments; never before had martial law been established in peacetime. As recently as 1865, the congressional Republicans themselves would never have imagined taking these remarkable steps. But the brutality directed toward the African Americans in the South, and the president’s own intransigence, radicalized even moderates. In early 1868, Johnson’s continuing resistance led to the first impeachment of a chief executive; he escaped conviction and removal from office by one vote.37

  Radical Reconstruction set off an explosion of political activity among freed slaves. “By the end of 1867,”
writes Eric Foner, “it seemed virtually every black voter in the South had enrolled in the Union League or some equivalent local political organization.” Necessarily lacking experience in government—and usually lacking literacy as well—they allied themselves with white Northerners who had arrived since the war, already derided by native whites as “carpetbaggers.” Union army veteran Albert T. Morgan, for example, was asked by a delegation of black voters in Yazoo County, Mississippi, to run for the state’s constitutional convention on a ticket with an African-American blacksmith. He agreed, and went on to become an able and articulate spokesman for his black constituents.38

  The white South struck back. Squads of heavily armed Confederate veterans terrorized politically active blacks and Northern immigrants. In the first four months of 1868, white terrorist bands across the South rapidly adopted the guise and ritual of the Ku Klux Klan, a hitherto obscure body that had originated in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. Often led by the most prominent local citizens, wearing a vast array of disguises, Klansmen broke up Union League meetings, terrorized teachers of black schoolchildren, and murdered opponents. Even Kentucky, a state unaffected by the Reconstruction Act, became the scene of devastating political violence. As 1868 progressed, the terrorism became “systematic,” in the words of one historian. In ill-fated Russellville, five Unionists were killed, along with a U.S. marshal.39

  As the nation bled, so bled Missouri. Throughout the Mississippi and Missouri River counties, former Confederates adopted the KKK model as they lashed out at black activists. Secessionist newspapers, especially the St. Joseph Vindicator and Lexington Caucasian, eagerly promoted the bloody campaign. On November 30, 1867, the Caucasian published a letter from Thomas G. Graves, who had just learned that a party of African Americans had been holding Union League meetings at a house he had rented out. “Now this won’t do,” he wrote. “I wish to give you a word of advice, that is, do not rent any of your land to a nigger.… Thar is a party of men, I among the rest, who have swarn if you do, not to leave a hat nor board nor rail standing.” By mid-1868, the Klan had begun to operate openly in Lafayette County. “It is the Ku Klux Klan that has scared the Radical fraternity into fits,” the Caucasian noted on May 2. The editors were cheered that the Radical St. Louis Democrat was “terribly alarmed” about “the Ku-Klux design to assassinate ‘Union’ men.”40