There can be little doubt that Jesse himself wrote at least part of this letter. His accusation of his accusers was characteristic of later missives that were indisputably his own work. “I have no doubt but the authors of some of those pieces published against Frank and I,” he wrote, “are the perpetrators of the crimes charged against us.”28 But seeping from the letter is political calculation that bears the mark of Edwards’s budding political strategy for Missouri’s ex-Confederates.
In the year since Jesse’s previous letter, Missouri’s politics had passed through a revolution. Not only had the Radicals lost power, but, even more important, secessionists now had the vote. The change had begun within the Republicans’ own councils. Against the weakening opposition of Charles Drake, party elders had agreed to a proposal by the old Planter’s House group to put a referendum on the ballot in 1870 to allow former rebels to vote and serve on juries. The strain of the dispute, however, had split the Republicans in two. The Radical stalwarts had put Governor McClurg back up for reelection, but the Planter’s House forces had created the new Liberal Republican Party, nominating B. Gratz Brown for chief executive.* The Democrats had shrewdly adopted a “possum policy,” declining to post their own gubernatorial candidate. Since the Liberals would reenfranchise tens of thousands of likely Democratic voters, they quietly supported Brown, and let the Republicans destroy themselves.
The Democratic plan succeeded brilliantly. In a desperate play for conservative support, McClurg had let it be known that he would look kindly on a lenient application of the Oath in the voter registration for 1870, but the result was a virtual Democratic sweep in the races for Congress and the state legislature. The removal of restrictions on secessionists had easily passed, and Brown had routed McClurg. “I recognize,” Brown had declared on November 14, 1870, “that my obligations are in the largest measure due to the Democratic party.”29
As a statewide force, the Radicals were dead. Legions of former rebels would return to the ballot box in the next election, 1872, virtually guaranteeing an electoral landslide for the Democrats over the divided Republicans. Ironically, this made it the perfect time for Jesse James’s harshly political attack on the virtually powerless Radicals. The next political struggle loomed within the Democratic Party, between Unionists and old rebels. “The Missouri populace now created a worldview in which race, region, and above all wartime allegiance defined their sense of identity,” writes historian Christopher Phillips. “Out of the anger and betrayal of the wartime experience a Confederate memory was emerging.”30
In cultural terms, Edwards had been fighting for a rebel resurgence since his return from Mexico, starting with Shelby and His Men and continuing with editorials, stories, even poems that exalted Confederates. Now he could open a political front in this campaign. Kentucky had already shown the way. There the Confederates had taken control of the Democratic Party early on, repudiating the values of Reconstruction and turning the state into a model of postwar white supremacy. It was an example that made Missouri’s Unionists increasingly nervous and its secessionists increasingly hopeful.31
The explicitly political phrasing of Jesse’s 1871 letter echoes Edwards’s own editorial language. The year before, the bandit had written in generic language: “I never will surrender to be mobbed by a set of bloodthirsty poltroons.”32 Now he paired the word “mob” with “Radical,” a reminder of the once ubiquitous term for the armed groups that had harassed secessionists in the 1866 campaign. He condemned the Republicans as “degraded,” a white-supremacist code word for those who mixed the races. Most important, he now specifically blamed the Radicals for turning him into a fugitive, for hounding him unjustifiably. And in the midst of these charges, he winked at his audience, saying that he did not care if the Radicals thought he was a robber or not. It was the beginning of a remarkable—and remarkably successful—attempt to foster cognitive dissonance among the secessionist public. He was an innocent martyr, he announced, a victim of Radical vindictiveness; at the same time, he presented himself as a figure of defiance, a dangerous man who would never be taken alive. The old rebels could look at Jesse James and mutter, “You poor, persecuted boy—let those damned Radicals have it.”
It was the beginning of Jesse’s rise from common criminal to symbolic hero, of a legend that resonated with the lives of Missouri’s secessionists. He and Edwards began to project a glorified version of what all the rebels felt they had endured in war and Reconstruction. The mythical Jesse James they created refused to apologize for fighting for a just cause; he refused to lay down his arms and self-respect, and was being persecuted as a result.
As a rising figure in the Democratic Party, Edwards did not want to offend conservatives who had fought for the Federal cause. Instead, he made the Radicals into a proxy for all of Missouri’s Unionists, creating an ideologically safe way to arouse rebel fervor. Edwards wanted to mobilize former secessionists within his party to establish a Confederate identity in a state that had divided against itself.
For Missouri’s ex-Confederates, the Republican Party was still seen as a force of oppression. Political violence by angry Radical organizations still sputtered here and there in the countryside.33 Far more important, the Republicans remained firmly in power in the nation’s capital. From 1870 on, Congress reacted sharply to racial violence in Dixie. It created the Justice Department, for example, and launched a series of Enforcement Acts; in April 1871, it passed the most potent of these measures, the Ku Klux Klan Act. The Grant administration initiated an aggressive new legal offensive against white paramilitary groups, eventually deploying troops in South Carolina to attack the state’s deeply rooted Klan; the same issue of the Richmond Conservator that reprinted Jesse James’s letter also announced the start of such prosecutions in Tennessee. In Missouri, the state that had waged its war-within-a-war, where every wound went unhealed, all these national issues struck home.34
AFTER DEFYING THE crowd in Iowa, the James brothers learned that bravado had its price. Frank had almost certainly caught a blast of heavy buckshot in the gunfight at Civil Bend. He appeared at Jo Shelby’s farm in Lafayette County about that time, barely able to stay in the saddle. “He was bleeding from the lungs,” Shelby later testified, “and Dr. Orear was attending him.… He was at my house some sixty or eighty days.”35 Jesse lived quietly during the succeeding months, as Frank recovered from the wound. While the gang was dispersed, one of them fell into the hands of the law. “Old Mose Miller’s son Clell was hung a few days since for robbing a bank in Iowa,” wrote a Liberty resident on March 8, 1872. “They caught him and he acknowledged the crime, and they hung him on the spot.”36
The reports of Miller’s death were nonsense. He was lured into a trap by a detective “under pretense of engaging with him in stealing some horses,” the Liberty Tribune reported, then was captured, dispatched to Iowa, and tried for the Corydon robbery—but a jury acquitted him.37 It is difficult to know for certain if he was actually guilty. The gang now had even less structure than a wartime band of bushwhackers. Given the long months that separated their raids, the crew took on a somewhat new shape with each robbery, drawing from a small pool of relatives and former guerrillas. And even though the talkative, letter-writing Jesse represented the public face of the bandits, it would be a mistake simply to deem him the leader. When they made a strike, in a group numbering a half-dozen at most, the battle-tested Frank and Jesse and Cole Younger most likely formed a criminal cooperative, with no man issuing orders to the rest.
Not until April 1872 did they gather for their next exploit. Again they selected Kentucky, where they had so many hiding places among family and friends. Their target was a bank in the town of Columbia in Adair County, in precisely the center of the state. With practiced caution, they rode carefully through the countryside, scouting their routes, resting their horses, posing as livestock buyers. The local residents who noticed them remembered five well-dressed men in expensive new saddles, sitting astride unusually fine horses.
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On April 27, three of these men spent the night in Russell Springs, leaving the next morning for the vicinity of Columbia. Two others, representing themselves as brothers, spent Saturday night at a boardinghouse belonging to Jack Webb, fifteen miles from the town. Observers described one of this pair as a tall, sandy-haired fellow who was unusually talkative, riding an excellent sorrel horse; his sibling sported dark hair and a goatee, and was “very erect, carries his head up.” The next morning, a local resident reported, “one of them … was very intently engaged studying a pocket-map, which he carried with him, and which, Mr. Webb says, seemed to have all the roads in the state on it. The other was apparently of a devotional turn of mind, and spent the morning reading Pilgrim’s Progress and talking about Scripture.” With bloodshed only hours away, it appears that the gregarious, outwardly devout Jesse James delved into his father’s favorite author, while his studious brother prepared for the consequences of their impending sins by planning their escape route.38
That night, the five bandits rendezvoused eight miles from Columbia. One of them reported the results of a reconnaissance he had made that day. He had gone into Page’s drugstore, just behind the bank, purchased a few things, and asked to be shown the water closet. From there he had been able to view the rear of the bank building, barely thirty feet away. The next morning, they dressed in their customary finery—the press would describe them as “well-dressed men, in dark frock coats”—saddled their horses, and rode into town. The highway they traveled fed directly into the street where the bank could be found. Jesse and two others reined their horses into an alley adjacent to their target and dismounted. Cole Younger and the remaining outlaw rode on a short distance to the public square and posted themselves on either side of the courthouse, where they had a commanding view.
The trio in the alley tied up their horses, pulled off their saddlebags, and opened the door to the bank. Inside they saw cashier R. A. C. Martin, who leaned against the front of the counter as he conversed with three other men: merchant William H. Hudson, circuit court clerk James T. Page, and state representative James Garnett. “Good evening,” the foremost bandit said politely—then he reached under the saddlebags draped over his left arm, pulled out a revolver, and fired at Martin. The muzzle was so close to the cashier’s chest that the flame from the erupting gunpowder singed his clothing as the bullet tore through his body just below his left armpit. Martin toppled face first to the floor, and his three companions leaped for the door. The shooter whirled and fired at Hudson, who knocked the barrel aside at the last instant, the blast burning his hand as the round went wide.
Outside, Younger and his comrade fired wildly into the air as they ordered everyone off the street. “By this means,” the Louisville Courier-Journal reported, “they conveyed the impression that they were a large number of men, as no one dared to look out and see.” Only one citizen dared to fire at Younger, but the Kentuckian quickly retreated to safety.
In the bank, meanwhile, the three bandits dragged the mortally wounded cashier into the vault and leaned him against the locked burglar-proof safe. Columbia resident W. W. Morris could hear their muffled demands drifting across the narrow space between the bank and Page’s drugstore, where he listened and watched at a window. What Morris could not hear—and what the bandits could not know—was that Martin was keeping a vow he had made years before, when he had heard of the Russellville robbery. If the same thing happened to him, he had told his friends, the robbers would have to cross his dead body to get his bank’s money. As conscientious as he was determined, he had carefully kept the safe sealed at all times, with almost all the cash and the most valuable bonds inside. Now, moments away from death, he stood by his words and refused to open the lock.
Looking down the alley, Morris saw Jesse James—“a sandy-haired man,” as he called him, “seeming very much excited”—run out to his horse and mount. “For God’s sake, hurry,” Jesse shouted to his companions. “Come along and leave the thing.” The two others, having forced open a small iron box and emptied it, came darting out. In a moment they united with their fellows and galloped away. They were seen heading for Bardstown, home of their old comrades, the Pence brothers.
Behind them, the countryside erupted into a panic, as one innocent man after another fell under suspicion and was arrested. From the descriptions, Detective D. G. Bligh of Louisville was convinced that the bandit in the square, described as a “burly fellow” with a “roman nose,” was the same fellow who had led the Russellville raid—Cole Younger. But neither Younger nor any of the other robbers would ever be arrested for what happened that day in Columbia.39
IN KANSAS CITY in September 1872, John Edwards’s headlines and editorials in the Times, like the conversations heard on street corners, in taverns, in barbershops, and on church lawns, revolved around the presidential election less than two months away. For the first time since 1860, Missouri’s secessionists would be able to cast ballots, and the die-hard rebel Edwards urged his readers to vote for a once-hated abolitionist, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, Liberal Republican candidate for president.*
Few bodies have represented the folly of wise men better than the Liberal Republican Party. Born in the Missouri experiment of 1870 that had elected B. Gratz Brown as governor, the party had become a national force in September 1871 after Senator Carl Schurz delivered a pivotal speech in Nashville. The men of the North who flocked to the Liberal standard saw themselves as the “best men.” Educated at Harvard, Yale, and similar schools, the party leaders were men who made investments, who traveled abroad, who read The Nation, the North American Review, and other highbrow journals of public affairs. For the Liberals, elitism was no vice.
“Universal suffrage can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice,” wrote Charles Francis Adams, Jr.—grandson of President John Quincy Adams—in the North American Review in 1869.40 Just what, the Liberals asked, had democracy wrought? A political spoils system that turned public offices into a tool for perpetuating party power, and a federal government that continued to grow at an explosive rate (between 1871 and 1881, the national bureaucracy would double). Federal taxes imposed to fight the Confederacy continued with the peace, and so did attendant graft. The supervisor of internal revenue for upstate New York earned an estimated $500,000 a year in bribes and kickbacks—twenty times the president’s salary—and in 1868, the superintendent of internal revenue in St. Louis was indicted on corruption charges. In 1872, the Crédit Mobilier scandal erupted when it was revealed that this dummy construction company had vastly overcharged the federally subsidized transcontinental railroad as it was built across the West; shares had been given to key congressmen to cover the scheme. Though the operation had ceased after the railroad’s completion in 1869, the scandal tainted Speaker of the House James G. Blaine and Grant’s vice president, Schuyler Colfax.41
Grant had done almost nothing to reform the system. His administration had begun with an episode that left him badly singed, though the president himself had done nothing wrong. In 1869, railroad barons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk had lobbied the new chief executive to keep the greenback cheap against gold. Ever since the introduction of legal-tender paper money, a market in New York had existed to exchange greenbacks for gold. Since gold was the only medium of exchange used in foreign trade, driving up the price of gold would devalue American currency; a cheap greenback would mean more exports of American grain, which would mean more business for the Erie Railroad, which was controlled by Gould and Fisk. The pair had also intended to make a killing through old-fashioned speculation. Since the Treasury Department was the biggest player in the gold market, they recruited Abel Corbin, the president’s brother-in-law, to persuade Grant to stifle government gold sales; they tried to manipulate the chief Treasury official in New York for inside information; they even set up a gold account for First Lady Julia Dent Grant. The president, however, had refused to be a party to their plans, and he finally ordered a large sale of U.S
. gold to stop the wild financial speculation.42 But Grant seemed to draw few lessons from this bitter incident. He proceeded to dole out public offices to political supporters and his wife’s many relations; by the end of 1871, he had named some twenty-three in-laws and relatives to government posts.43
Schurz, Brown, Charles F. Adams, Jr., Henry Adams, and other Liberals thought they knew a better way. They launched their new national party on a platform of civil service reform, free trade, and smaller, less intrusive, more economical government. But their elitism led them down a dark road. Distrusting government power and even democracy itself, they pledged an end to Reconstruction. In a state of self-deceit, they had convinced themselves that white-supremacist violence, as Eric Foner writes, “resulted from the exclusion from government of men of intelligence and culture,” the former slaveowning planters. The Liberals opposed the Ku Klux Klan Act and spoke of restoring “home rule” in the South. “Home rule” was a favorite phrase at the time, masking the fact that the region had too much home rule in the eyes of most whites, because the black population—a majority or near majority in several states—finally had a voice in public affairs.44
Idealists, it seems, will often fall prey to cynics. Ex-Confederate Democrats such as John Edwards quickly seized on the Liberal Republican movement as a means of destroying the nation’s new commitment to racial fairness. The very idea of running Horace Greeley for president had originated with Peter Donan, the rabidly rebel editor of the Lexington Caucasian, who had first suggested it in October 1871. But this pragmatic extension of the “possum policy” ceded nothing in terms of ideology. Donan continued to rail against the “yankonigger bayonet amendments” to the Constitution that had brought freedom and civil rights for African Americans. To undo Reconstruction, he told his readers, he would “stand by the Devil, on a platform of coagulated hell’s scum.” Edwards, on the other hand, like many Southern Democrats, picked up the themes of extravagance and corruption. When the Liberal Republicans held a large meeting in Sedalia, for example, Edwards stressed how the speech makers had attacked Grant’s “corrupt, tyrannical administration” and discussed “the carpet-bag dynasties of the Southern States in all their terrible and tyrannical deformities.”45
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