Tensions escalated as the election approached, leading many to fear a repeat of 1866. The Klan began to threaten Union veterans and ordered their organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, to stop meeting, and brawls frequently erupted at campaign rallies. Former secessionists, still firmly locked out of the political process, focused much of their fury on freed slaves. Every issue of the Caucasian contained a vicious attack on “niggers.” In July, militia general Montgomery threatened to occupy Lexington again, due to reports that white supremacists were arming. “Even sane men, Radical office holders, say they fear the same thing,” the Caucasian groused; but whites, it noted tersely, had always had the right to arm themselves.41
On September 5, 1868, Jesse James turned twenty-one. In an ordinary time, he would now enter upon the civic responsibilities of adulthood, and could look forward to voting in the November election. But in these bitter postwar years, not even the most lenient registration officer would have allowed him to take the Oath and cast his ballot. He led “a wandering, reckless life,” according to merchant Daniel Conway, “and ever since the war has been regarded as a desperate and dangerous character.”42
In any case, the election offered him little to choose from. The Republican ticket was headed by Ulysses S. Grant, now making his first run for the presidency; Joseph W. McClurg, a former Union officer and three-term congressman, was the party’s candidate for Missouri’s governorship. The state’s Conservatives had now remade themselves as the Democratic Party, dominated by Unionist former Whigs. Near the very top sat Frank Blair, Missouri’s original Unionist and now the Democratic candidate for vice president on a ticket with Horatio Seymour.
Blair gave full voice to his deep-seated racism. He openly called on the president “to declare these [Reconstruction] acts null and void, compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpetbag Southern governments, allow the white people to reorganize their own governments.” On the campaign stump, he attacked “a semi-barbarous race of blacks who are worshippers of fetishes, and poligamists.” If given power, he shouted, they would “subject the white women to their unbridled lust.” Republicans condemned such statements as treason.43
To some of Missouri’s Confederates, on the other hand, his words were sweet honey. Democratic leader James Rollins noted in a letter to Blair that there was “an old rebel element” working within their party, looking forward to the day when they could vote again. But a hard core of secessionists despised Blair. “[In] a little cabin within speaking distance lives two lone widows,” wrote one Missouri rebel on October 25, 1868, “whose husbands fell fighting in the Southern army against Blair’s commands—and now none [are] so true to the South as Frank Preston Blair, Democratic candidate for Vice President.” The South was devastated, he noted bitterly, by “such heaven-forsaken wretches as Blair.”44
All around Jesse James, the things he had fought for fell to a Radical onslaught that seemed to grow with each passing year. Even the party that best represented his cause was dominated by his enemies. He himself was as loyal as ever, but to a diminishing circle of family, old comrades, and Confederate friends. He had nothing but defiance for the outside world, as he rode about, well dressed and reckless, astride an exceptional bay mare named Kate. But in September 1869, he made a strange request of the Mount Olive Baptist Church, in Kearney. He asked that his name be stricken from the rolls, the congregation recorded, because “he believed himself unworthy.”45
AT 12:30 IN the afternoon of December 7, 1869, Jesse James swung to the ground from his saddle, arousing no suspicion among the people of Gallatin, Missouri. He had one companion—apparently Frank—who remained mounted beside him. Then he opened the door to the Daviess County Savings Association.
He stepped into a simple, one-story brick structure that was barely twenty feet wide and perhaps twice as deep. In one corner, he saw William A. McDowell, a lawyer who kept his office in the bank building. At the back he saw the cashier, the man the young bandit had come to see, seated in front of a large safe. Looking carefully at the cashier’s face, Jesse held out a $100 note—probably a bond or old state banknote, which would not pass at face value. He wanted it changed, he said. The banker turned toward the safe as Frank walked in. “If you will write out a receipt,” Frank said, “I will pay you that bill.” The man sat at his desk and began to write as the two brothers stared at him intently.
Jesse reached under his coat, pulled out a revolver, and cocked the hammer. Cox, he said with a curse, thinking he was talking to Samuel P. Cox, caused the death of my brother Bill Anderson, and I am bound to have my revenge. He aimed the barrel at the cashier’s chest and squeezed the trigger. The ear-splitting crack would have echoed in that small room, flame from the slow-burning black powder leaping out of the muzzle as the bullet tore straight through the man’s heart. Before the cashier could topple from his chair, Jesse aimed squarely at his forehead and fired again. A startled McDowell leaped for the door. Jesse wheeled and snapped off two quick shots, one of them tearing through the lawyer’s arm as he darted to safety. His shouts reverberated outside as the brothers snatched up a portfolio on the cashier’s desk and turned to flee.
Out in front of the bank, the brothers quickly mounted and spurred their horses for the edge of town. Already they could hear the townspeople rallying, as they had in Richmond and Russellville, running into the streets with rifles in hand. The first crack of gunfire sounded. Kate, Jesse’s fine bay mare, suddenly reared, throwing Jesse clear out of the saddle, though he still had one foot caught in the stirrup. His horse dragged him thirty or forty feet before he finally cleared his boot. Frank circled back, reached a hand down to his brother, and pulled Jesse up behind him. With the citizens’ shots echoing behind them, they rode hard toward the southwest.
Barely a mile outside of Gallatin, the brothers spotted a good-looking saddle horse tied to a fence on the farm of a Captain Woodruff. They aimed their pistols at the head of its owner, Daniel Smoots, who watched helplessly as Jesse untied the reins and mounted his animal. Then they were off again, an impromptu posse close behind. Perhaps three miles from town, they rode into Honey Creek and apparently splashed up the streambed, its running waters masking their trail. They had safely escaped. When they glanced inside the portfolio, however, they saw only some papers and a few county warrants.
Jesse James was exultant nonetheless. As he and his brother trotted out of the stream toward the town of Kidder, they repeatedly ran across strangers; each time, Jesse could not help gloating that he had taken revenge for the death of Bloody Bill Anderson by killing his slayer, Samuel P. Cox.46
Perhaps the James brothers went to Gallatin only to assassinate Cox. His residence there was quite well known; the bandits spent little time looting after the murder, in contrast to previous holdups; and Jesse boasted of his deed, heedless of the attention he drew. A more likely scenario, however, is that they came simply to rob, but as Jesse—acutely conscious of Cox’s presence in town—stared at the cashier, he saw what he hoped to see, a precious opportunity for revenge. Certainly his reckless bragging along the escape route attests to the sincerity of his belief that he had killed Cox.47
But he hadn’t. The riddled body on the floor of the bank was that of John W. Sheets, who held a place of prominence in Gallatin. As primary owner and sole operator of the Daviess County Savings Association, he was one of the wealthiest men in the community. He was also a local Democratic leader, and had complained bitterly of Radical “mobocracy” in the tumultuous election of 1866.48 The people of Gallatin wept bitterly over their loss. “Should the miscreants be overtaken it is not probable that a jury will be required to try them,” commented the St. Joseph Gazette. “They will be shot down in their tracks, so great is the excitement among the citizens of Daviess and the adjoining counties.”49 When they traced the bay mare that had run away from the killer back to Jesse James, two heavily armed citizens immediately saddled up and rode south.
When they arrived in Liber
ty and explained their mission, Sheriff O. P. Moss turned to deputy John S. Thomason. If any Unionist in Clay County was the equal of young James with the horse and revolver, it was Thomason. His exploits as a wartime militia captain had won him renown; when he joined the Paw Paws, even Radical critics of those rebel-ridden regiments singled him out for praise. “Thomason was the most active officer in the EMM in hunting out bushwhackers and thieves,” Moss had said in 1864, noting the great risks Thomason had taken in singlehandedly tracking guerrillas. Little wonder that Moss now asked him to arrest Jesse.50
“Prompt, fearless, and always ready,” as the newspapers described him, Thomason gathered his son Oscar and the two men from Gallatin, loaded his weapons, and set out for Zerelda’s farm on December 14. At the edge of the property, he dispatched the Gallatin pair to circle through the woods until they had a clear view of the yard. Then he and his son dismounted at the gate and strode directly to the door of the little three-room house.
They were expected. Just as they were about to knock, the door suddenly swung open. Out came thirteen-year-old Ambrose, the servant and ex-slave, who ran to the stable door and threw it open. The stunned Thomason watched as Jesse and Frank James sprinted out “on splendid horses,” as the press reported, “with pistols drawn, and took the lot fence at a swinging gallop.” Immediately the two Gallatin men in the woods opened fire, followed by the deputy sheriff and his son. With the brothers rapidly gaining distance, the party ran to their mounts. Thomason jumped his horse over the fence and gave chase, galloping at top speed.
He soon discovered that he was all alone. The others’ animals had balked at jumping over the fence, forcing the men to dismount in order to remove the top rail. Jesse and Frank, meanwhile, returned fire as they rode on. Suddenly Thomason reined in, jumped down, and took careful aim. He had only two rounds left. He fired—and missed. Even worse, his horse started at the sound and darted ahead without him. The riderless animal caught up to the James brothers; one of them calmly reached out with his revolver and fired, killing the horse. Thomason trudged back to the Samuel farm, where he commandeered a horse and led his party away.
Less than ten minutes later, the fugitives returned home and found that the posse had left. Immediately they galloped into Kearney.51 To all appearances, they arrived in a state of rage. For half an hour they terrorized the town as they cantered through the streets, Frank with five revolvers tucked into a belt outside his coat, Jesse with three revolvers and a Colt’s revolving rifle. They stopped in front of a store owned by a man who would soon become a major figure in their lives, a former Confederate and future sheriff named John Groom. Jesse aimed a pistol at the door and ordered Groom to come out. He declined. They shouted that they had just killed Thomason and his son, and they told Groom to take some men to bury the corpses. Then the brothers left, saying they had nothing to do with the murder in Gallatin. A mile and a half out of town, they terrified two men who were passing along the road, declaring “that they would never be taken alive, and would kill every man who attempted to follow them.” It was the beginning of a long pattern of intimidation of the James brothers’ unfortunate neighbors. When Thomason and a large force returned to the Samuel farm the next morning, Frank and Jesse were not there.52
For the first time in the bloody history of peacetime bushwhacking, Jesse James’s name appeared in the press. But no one who lived near the Samuel farm, it seems, believed that Jesse and his brother were novices in bloodshed. Locally, at least, they “were noted bushwhackers during the war,” the Liberty Tribune reported, “and are regarded as desperate men.” Now they were so noted and so regarded across the entire state. Governor McClurg offered a $500 reward for each of them—$200 more than the customary amount, reflecting the public furor. This came on top of identical rewards posted by Sheets’s widow, his bank, and the people of Gallatin, plus $250 from Daviess County. McClurg telegraphed the Jackson and Platte County sheriffs, ordering each of them to organize a platoon of thirty militiamen to go to Thomason’s aid, should he locate the James boys. The Platte City Reveille made a point of noting that every man in the Platte County unit was a Democrat. “Parenthetically we would observe,” the paper added pessimistically, “that there is not much prospect of this valiant company being put on the warpath.”53
For years, Jesse James had been a follower, known and dreaded only by his immediate neighbors, passing unseen amid the crimes of his bushwhacker fraternity. One by one, his leaders had been killed: Clement, Jones, Burns, Devers, and Shepherd, among others. Their deaths had forced the James brothers to decide whether to give up the guerrilla life, as Dave Pool and the Pence brothers had, or take command for themselves. With the murder in Gallatin, they gave their answer.
Of all the citizens who now discovered the identities of the slayers of Captain Sheets, one swelled with immense satisfaction. He was charmed, delighted, thrilled by their exploits; more than that, he would come to see in them a way to undo a little bit of what the Union army had won four years before. Before long, the life of Jesse James would be inextricably intertwined with that of John Newman Edwards.
* Some reports give “Coleman,” not Colburn; Cole Younger’s full name was Thomas Coleman Younger.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Chivalry of Crime
WHAT BEGAN IN WATER would end in fire. On July 4, 1865, in what must have been the final ceremony of the Civil War, the tattered remnants of the Iron Brigade wrapped their Confederate flag around a stone and hurled it into the Rio Grande. Then General Jo Shelby led his last, loyal horsemen, a few hundred at most, across a makeshift bridge over the gritty current into Mexico. Others rode with him—senators, governors, generals, and soldiers of various regiments who refused to surrender—but the core of these refugees were “Missouri’s orphaned children,” in the words of Shelby’s adjutant, Major John Newman Edwards.1
Edwards rode beside his general, as he had at Westport, Lexington, Pilot Knob, and countless hunting excursions before the war. Just twenty-seven years old, he had barely begun his career as a newspaper editor when the war began. Then, as Shelby’s ever-present aide-de-camp, he had whisked up frothy, romantic reports of the general’s deeds that would make a teenage poet blush. In truth, he worshipped his commander with a thick, Ishmael-for-Queequeg love that raised few eyebrows in the overwrought nineteenth century. Some would later speculate that this entire expedition to Mexico was Edwards’s idea, for it was exactly the kind of desperate, quixotic adventure that best suited his sensibility.
Shelby and his men, however, were not the first Confederates to flee the verdict of Appomattox, nor would they be the last. Soon they would be reunited with such Missourians as Sterling Price and Thomas C. Reynolds, along with Generals Jubal Early, Thomas Hindman, and Edmund Kirby Smith, and other rebel notables. They came because no government had been friendlier to the South than that of Mexico, though it was not exactly a government of Mexico. In 1863, the beleaguered republic had fallen prey to invading French forces, dispatched by Napoleon III—or Louis Napoleon, as he was also known—a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1848, he had won election as president of France, and within four years had installed himself as emperor. The self-made monarch had restlessly asserted his power overseas, launching the Crimean War in 1854, supporting the unification of Italy in 1859, and sending an expedition against China shortly afterward. During the Civil War, he had taken advantage of Washington’s distraction to install Archduke Maximilian of Austria and Princess Carlotta of Belgium as “emperor” and “empress” of Mexico. From the beginning, this Napoleonic regime had quietly supported the Confederacy, welcoming Southern settlers and allowing the transshipment of supplies into Texas.2
As the ragged rebel column crossed the border, it passed from one civil war into another. An insurrection of Juaristas—supporters of deposed president Benito Juárez—was rapidly gaining strength. On July 28, 1865, these guerrillas ambushed the Confederates, though Shelby’s troopers fought their way out. Later the weary Southerners
faced off with a body of French troops that viewed them with intense distrust. Finally they reached Mexico City. On August 16, Maximilian and Carlotta gave an audience to the general and his adjutant; the ersatz empress was particularly warm, winning Edwards’s lasting affection. The rulers cheerfully offered to create colonies for them between Mexico City and Vera Cruz, seizing large tracts of land from their legitimate Mexican owners for the benefit of the expatriates.
The exiles slowly settled into new lives, establishing large plantations under the protection of French troops. Edwards received “500 acres of magnificent land,” as he wrote to his family, and he joined the management of the Mexican Times, an English-language newspaper subsidized by the imperial regime. The restless Shelby experimented with various enterprises, from new settlements to a profitable freighting operation that hauled supplies to imperial military posts.3
As the Confederates mingled with French officers in the hallways of the royal palace or labored in the fields of Carlota—the colony they named in honor of the empress—they did not forget their native land. “I am here as an exile, defeated by the acts of the Southern people themselves,” Shelby wrote angrily on November 1, 1865. “Damn ’em, they were foolish enough to think by laying down their arms they would enjoy all the rights they once had.… I am not one of those to ask forgiveness for that which I believe today is right.”4 Edwards was even more bitter. “It is … only a question of time, I think, before the Radicals triumph and commence their devastating work upon the South,” he wrote to his sister on September 18, 1866. The South, he added, “must either submit to the greatest possible degree of social and political degradation, or appeal again to the sword. The latter I fear will never be done no matter what provocation is offered or what insult given.”5
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