T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Amid this political tumult, the second annual Industrial Exposition started in Kansas City on September 23. Tens of thousands of people crowded into the city on horses, in carriages, in tightly packed trains. They pushed through the gate, paying fifty cents each to attend the grandest of some forty-four town and county fairs that sprouted each fall in Missouri. Those who braved the gale-force winds that tore off hats and rippled skirts on the first two days could crowd into the Main Hall, or walk appreciatively through the Fine Art Hall, shout over the drone of engines in the Power Hall, bask in the perfume of the Floral Hall, or flock to the track, where horses thudded around the dust-blown course in race after race.46

  By the fourth day, Thursday, the weather was splendid, and the town virtually shut down by noon. Only businesses serving food remained open as train after train disgorged passengers from St. Louis, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, even Texas. “Between the crowded sidewalks,” reported Edwards’s newspaper, “rushed hither and thither saddle horses, carriages, omnibuses, buggies, sulkies, phaetons, drags, and every imaginable variety of vehicle, drawn by every imaginable variety of horseflesh.” The publication declared, with only slight exaggeration, that sixty thousand people pushed through the gates that day.

  As the sun began to set, three mounted men guided their horses through the dense crowd that surged out of the Twelfth Street gate. They wore masks of checked cloth pulled up under their eyes. The largest of the men dismounted, strode to the ticket window, and seized the cash box as his comrades warned away the startled crowd. The big man crammed the money into his pockets and returned to his horse; then the ticket seller impulsively darted out and grabbed him. One of the mounted bandits leveled his pistol and fired, wounding a little girl in the calf. The man with the cash swung back up into the saddle, and the three men spurred toward the woods east of town. They carried away $978; if they had arrived thirty minutes earlier, before the fair treasurer had collected the booth’s funds, they would have garnered some $12,000.47

  It was a remarkable crime, especially considering the large special police force that guarded the fairgrounds. But the deed itself could not compare with Edwards’s front-page story about it in the Kansas City Times. The frothing editor devoted most of the article to high-pitched hyperbole. “It was one of those exhibitions of superb daring that chills the blood and transfixes the muscles of the looker-on with a mingling of amazement, admiration, and horror,” he wrote. “It was one of those rare instances when it seems as though Death stood in the panoply of the flesh and exhaled a PETRIFYING TERROR from his garments. It was a deed so high-handed, so diabolically daring and so utterly in contempt of fear that we are bound to admire it and revere its perpetrators for the very enormity of their outlawry.”48

  Edwards’s enthusiasm was not entirely unique. Most newspapers, even those with little sympathy for the bandits, habitually described their deeds as “daring” crimes, conducted with “cool audacity” that “has never been surpassed,” no matter how many had come before.49 In fact, armed robbery remained quite rare, despite the flood of pistols that clattered across the county after the Civil War. Bankers worried about burglars, not gunmen, and with good reason. The professional safecracker and confidence man dominated both press reports and popular literature about crime. As late as 1876, noted detective Phil Farley declared that violence went against the nature of the American criminal. Most outlaws, it seems, lacked the peculiar training for organized holdups that the Missourians had received in guerrilla warfare.50

  But only Edwards would have called on the public to “revere” the bandits. His vehemence on the subject strongly suggests that he already knew who had carried out the crime, and that their names were Younger and James. Indeed, his initial story on the robbery marked the first stage of a multipart effort to depict the outlaws as Confederate heroes, an effort that became increasingly political as the election approached.

  The second phase came just two days later, with one of the most famous pieces Edwards would ever write. In an editorial titled “The Chivalry of Crime,” Edwards drew a sharp distinction between armed robbery and skulking crimes such as burglary. But where most Americans snapped up books about the professional thief and scorned the gunman, Edwards exalted the holdup man. “There are things done for money and for revenge of which the daring of the act is the picture and the crime is the frame it may be set in,” he wrote. “A feat of stupendous nerve and fearlessness that makes one’s hair rise to think of it, with a condiment of crime to season it, becomes chivalric; poetic; superb.”

  His premise established, he now placed a name on these “chivalric” bandits: bushwhackers. “There are men in Jackson, Cass, and Clay—a few there are left—who learned to dare when there was no such word as quarter in the dictionary of the Border,” he continued. “Men who have carried their lives in their hands so long that they do not know how to commit them over into the keeping of the laws and regulations that exist now. And these men sometimes rob. But it is always in the glare of day and in the teeth of the multitude.” Guerrilla-bandits such as this belonged to another time, he wrote. “The nineteenth century with its Sybaric civilization is not the social soil for men who might have sat with ARTHUR at the Round Table, ridden at tourney with Sir LAUNCELOT or worn the colors of GUINEVERE.”51 The medieval touches reflected Edwards’s romantic temperament, of course, but they were also well suited to the canvas of his times. Secessionists often imagined themselves in such courtly colors. After the war, for example, Southern relief societies in Missouri hosted chivalric tournaments as fund-raising events.52 By painting the outlaws as knights, Edwards presented them as the embodiments of the Confederate ideal.

  For two weeks, Edwards tapped out a steady drumbeat of partisan political stories, mixing support for Greeley with calls to old rebels to mobilize come November. The Radicals still plotted to use the registration laws where they could, he warned; Democrats must remain ready.53 Then, on October 15, he unleashed the third wave in his glorification—and politicization—of the Kansas City fair outlaws. It came in the form of a letter—one strikingly reminiscent of Jesse James’s notes—from one of the bandits. It openly adopted Edwards’s themes. “Some editors call us thieves. We are not thieves—we are bold robbers,” the anonymous author wrote. “I am proud of the name, for Alexander the Great was a bold robber, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte.” He added that he and his crew “rob the rich and give to the poor,” and he signed off as Jack Shepherd, Dick Turpin, and Claude Duval—all famous bandits of European folklore, mentioned in Edwards’s previous writings.

  In later decades, the romantic aspects of the letter would draw the attention of scholars and popular writers. Here one of the outlaws—most likely Jesse James—is casting himself as Robin Hood, a bandit who was a great man, who righted the upended scales of justice. But the attention would be somewhat misplaced. This famous note was, in fact, most remarkable for its vicious ruthlessness and its explicit political content. “We never kill,” the author wrote, “only in self-defense.… But a man who is a d——d enough fool to refuse to open a safe or a vault when he is covered with a pistol ought to die. There is no use for a man to try to do anything when an experienced robber gets the go on him. If he gives the alarm, or resists, or refuses to unlock, he gets killed.” The writer devoted much of his space to a thundering denunciation of the Republican Party and administration: “Just let a party of men commit a bold robbery, and the cry is hang them, but Grant and his party can steal millions, and it is all right.… It hurts me very much to be called a thief. It makes me feel like they were trying to put me on a par with Grant and his party.” Placed in full context, the Robin Hood passage turns out to be a partisan attack. “Please rank me with [Alexander the Great and Napoleon] and not with the Grantites. Grant’s party has no respect for any one. They rob the poor and rich, and we rob the rich and give to the poor.… I will close by hoping that Horace Greeley will defeat Grant, and then I can make an honest living, and then I will not have to r
ob, as taxes will not be so heavy.”54

  In this, the climax of the bandit-glorification campaign, Jesse James (we presume) endorsed Greeley for president. It was a masterful conclusion to a skillfully conducted propaganda effort. First came the dramatic deed, then the steady buildup of the outlaws as noble exemplars of Confederate manhood, and finally an explicit partisan call from the bandit leader to mobilize the rebel vote. He even excused his actions with a line torn straight from Democratic speeches, blaming Republican corruption and government extravagance for his bandit career.* October 15, 1872, marked the maturation of Jesse James into a self-conscious political symbol.

  No direct proof exists that Jesse was the author. This letter, however, appeared right in the middle of a series of notes he wrote for publication in Edwards’s newspapers, beginning in 1870 and continuing for years to come. Time would show that it was he, of all the outlaws, who was most obsessed with his public image, who sought to push himself into the news. “He read the newspapers constantly,” one relative later noted, “and frequently wrote letters. He would dash off a letter without pausing once.” And more than one of his confederates would observe that he planned robberies with an eye on the public reaction.55

  After Jesse’s previous crimes and missives to the press, the public quickly connected him to the robbery at the fair. Suspicion grew into general belief when Jim Chiles, a former guerrilla, casually mentioned in Liberty that he had seen Jesse, along with Cole Younger and his brother John, outside Kansas City on the day of the crime. This led to the denouement of Edwards’s publicity effort: the creation of cognitive dissonance, so that the outlaws would be admired as skilled and desperate men, yet considered innocent of any specific charge. On October 20, 1872, the Kansas City Times published a letter from Jesse, signed in his own name, in which he once again claimed that he could prove his whereabouts at the time of the robbery. He specifically cited Chiles as an accusing witness and warned him to retract his statements. Five days later, Chiles’s denial duly appeared in the Times. “I should not have appeared in print,” he wrote, sounding distinctly nervous. “I am engaged in attending to my own business.”56

  Edwards and the James brothers would take the details of their alliance to their graves. None of them would ever reveal if Edwards wrote any of the lines in Jesse’s letters, or if they told him of their robberies in advance, or how specific their goals were when they waged a coordinated publicity campaign like the one in 1872. But they clearly had an alliance, and its politics and importance could not be mistaken. It if were not for Edwards, Jesse James would probably have passed into obscurity with hundreds of other criminals; and were it not for Jesse James, Edwards’s burgeoning role as a Confederate spokesman within the Democratic Party would never have loomed so large.

  Under the influence of Edwards, age, and notoriety, Jesse James had grown in sophistication and ambition, both criminal and political. In the aftermath of the Kansas City fair, Jesse and his comrades would make a dramatic new departure, and strike at the very arteries of the Union: the railroads.

  * Under the constitution of 1865, the governor’s term had been reduced to two years.

  * Missouri governor B. Gratz Brown was the Liberal candidate for vice president.

  * This was the essence of the “New Departure” criticism of Reconstruction, an approach developed by some Democrats to shift attention away from racial violence in the South; see Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1863–1877: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 415.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Invisible Empires

  NOW FAMOUS BUT FEARED, Jesse James could no longer live like other men. With each headline, he became more and more isolated. Old neighbors thought of him differently now, and it irked him, especially when the neighbors were young, single women. “By the way, what do you think of Jesse’s letter? Would like to see me and wants me to write,” scribbled Bettie A. Scruggs to her brother on April 3, 1873. “Oughtn’t he to be hanged? He says the time is not far off when he can prove to the world that those charges against him are false, and that he is neither a robber or a murderer. What can he have in mind? I guess he can make his demonstrations when I write.” Clearly Scruggs believed the worst about the local boy, though she was flattered by his attention.1

  Jesse’s little-known correspondence with her reflects his penchant for letter writing—more evidence that John Edwards had not been the sole creator of the bandits’ press campaign, and had not authored Jesse’s published letters (though he may have edited them). But Jesse’s private note reveals something else about him: in the wake of the Kansas City fair robbery, he had internalized his public persona. Ultimately it was the grandiosity of the image he projected that left Scruggs puzzled and amused.

  But, in fact, a sense of meaning had crept back into his life, an echo of the purpose he had felt during the war, until the death of Archie Clement. By 1873, it appears that Edwards’s editorials rang in Jesse’s ears as he plunged deeper into his underground life. He seems to have truly believed that he was “chivalric; poetic; superb,” that his crimes were “for money and for revenge.”* Call it rationalization, call it empty self-justification, but Missouri’s former rebels had suffered twelve years of military defeat and political repression, and many craved revenge of any kind.

  In the months leading up to the election of 1872, Edwards had pounded the rebel war drums in the Kansas City Times. He devoted front-page stories to convicted Ku Klux Klansmen, calling them “Victims of Grant’s Bayonet Law.”2 He railed against Republican congressional candidate and editor of the rival Kansas City Journal of Commerce Robert T. Van Horn, deriding Horn’s followers as “that coterie of militia officers.”3 On election day itself, he howled in an apocalyptic frenzy about the need to unseat President Grant. “Without victory, the cause of humanity is set back for twenty years. The work of imperialism and centralization goes on unchecked,” he raged. “Democrats of Jackson county … show to the world how you remember tyranny and how you revenge yourselves upon your oppressors.… Run up the black flag. Give no quarter. Strike, that the world may know how Democratic vengeance lingers yet in the bosoms of Missourians.”4

  Grant, of course, won, which was a matter of great distress to the white South and Southern-minded Missourians. But the Democrats swept the state elections. Having used the Liberal Republicans to defeat the Radicals two years earlier, they discarded their now-useless allies. Democrat Silas Woodson went to Jefferson City as governor, and his party took firm control of the legislature. It was a moment savored by all the old rebels, who had voted in their first election since 1860. Secessionist newspapers, including the Lexington Caucasian and the Cass County Courier, demanded that a Confederate veteran be named to the U.S. Senate; they even suggested that secessionist legislators abandon the party caucus and unite with Liberals to defeat the Democrats’ dominant Unionist faction. The enthusiasm was so exuberant that it began to make even Edwards worry that the party would fall apart.5

  On the morning of May 27, 1873, four men held up the Ste. Genevieve Savings Association in southeastern Missouri. The old French town of Ste. Genevieve was located near the most important stronghold of the Missouri Ku Klux Klan.6 The robbers had rebel politics on their minds that day: as they galloped off, they fired in the air and shouted, “Hurrah for Hildebrand!”—a tribute to Samuel S. Hildebrand, a Confederate guerrilla as notorious in this section of the state as Quantrill was on the western border. On June 3, 1865, Governor Fletcher had proclaimed a $300 reward for his capture, but the old bushwhacker had lived long enough to publish his memoirs in 1870. A few months before the Ste. Genevieve robbery, however, Hildebrand had been shot to death by an Illinois lawman, who duly received the long-standing reward.7

  The St. Louis police would soon identify the James and Younger brothers as the perpetrators.8 The evidence would never be publicly known, but the cool professionalism and raw daring of the crime pointed to the increasingly famous bandits. On their way out of town, for
example, they stopped a traveler headed in the opposite direction and asked him to pick up a box they had left on the road and return it to the bank.9 Perhaps most telling, however, was the Confederate sloganeering that marked their departure from town.

  Symbolism increasingly infused Jesse James’s thinking in the months after “The Chivalry of Crime.” He never put appearances above plunder, of course, but he and his fellows thought more and more about ways to use their raids to “shake up the country,” as Jesse would later put it.10 And in the summer of 1873, the bandits found a target that equally suited their tastes for booty and bravado: the railroads.

  In terms of cash alone, the decision to strike the railroads was ingenious, revealing a knowledge of how money moved through the economy. The nation’s financial structure after the Civil War resembled a vast watershed. In the interior were the catchpools—rural banks that collected the capital of farmers and merchants. Country bankers sent much of this money to larger cities, where they placed a large portion of their funds in interest-bearing accounts with other institutions; despite the low return, they were often seen as safer investments than anything to be found in the countryside. This process was mandatory for national banks, which were required by law to maintain reserve accounts with banks in designated cities. In turn, banks in these reserve cities had to maintain accounts with banks in New York. As the nation’s money supply poured into the great financial basin of lower Manhattan, bankers there invested much of it in very-short-term, high-interest call loans to brokers, tying the fortunes of the most remote rural communities to the fate of the stock market. The connection worked both ways. In the late fall, country banks drew down their reserve-city deposits as farmers and rural merchants made withdrawals for the flurry of transactions associated with the harvest and its shipment to cities and seaports. This annual drain on the money market in New York inevitably led to a shortage of financing on Wall Street; almost every panic on the stock market in the nineteenth century occurred in autumn, during the “moving of the crops,” as the process was called.