T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  A month before Pinkerton’s letter, in the days immediately following the Younger gun battle, detective L. E. Angell completed his task in Missouri. On March 19, 1874, he arrived in St. Louis with a coffin containing Whicher’s body. During his stopover, he gave a series of angry interviews with the city’s reporters. “How do you suppose it was that he was found out?” one of them asked.

  “He was roughly dressed, but when he got there they must have noticed that he was a sharp, penetrating-looking fellow, and they probably took notice of his soft hands,” Angell replied. “When they searched him and only found a revolver, with no papers or anything else about him to show who he was, they must have tumbled to him, or, if they didn’t, that sharp old mother of theirs did.”

  “Do you suppose anybody gave him away to the James boys?” the journalist asked.

  “It is the common talk down there, around and about Liberty, that that was done by the Sheriff,” the detective answered, referring to Patton, the one-armed Confederate veteran who had grown up with the James brothers. But the problem went deeper than that, Angell thought. “The people there are of the kind that admire men who ride through town flourishing revolvers, and the James boys have established a sort of terrorism throughout the county,” he continued. “But they have a great many friends. They have established the reputation of robbing the rich to give to the poor, and when they have money they fling it around generously.”

  Friendship and fear worked hand in hand to protect Jesse and his brother. “The people there are so afraid they would not tell where they were if they knew,” Angell said. “They would hide themselves, and when they talk about them they assume a mysterious air, talk in low whispers, and you will have to get them into a back room before they will say anything, then they don’t dare tell half they know.”35

  Angell himself was ill-equipped to understand the evidence he had uncovered. Clay, like St. Clair, Lafayette, Jackson, and other counties the bandits frequented, was indeed divided between the fearful and the outlaws’ friends. However, it was no impermanent boundary of temperament or criminal disposition that split this society in two, but rather the tectonic fault of wartime enmities that dated back to the years of Radical rule, back to the days when the MSM and EMM and bushwhacker bands patrolled the countryside, back to the distant era of border ruffians and proslavery mobs. Though innocent of any collusion with Jesse James, Patton was a natural target, as a former Confederate, for the suspicions of local Unionists. And they would have been twice as suspicious had they known that his new wife, now pregnant with their first child, was the former Bettie Scruggs—the girl whom Jesse had once sweetly asked to visit, and had begged to believe him innocent.36

  NOTHING ENRAGED Jesse James like being hunted. Ever since the Rock Island robbery, he had been seized by a grinding suspicion that the Pinkertons were after him, a suspicion that had prompted his search for detectives on the Iron Mountain train. He was wrong, of course, since it was only after Gads Hill that the Chicago agency took up the case. Whicher’s appearance at his mother’s door, however, confirmed his fears, and kindled his anger.

  Immediately following the murder of Whicher in the predawn hours of March 11, 1874, Jesse remained calm. He, Frank, and their unnamed companion rode slowly through Independence, leading the horse that had carried their victim. Not long after daybreak, they crossed the Kansas City bridge over the Missouri River and made their way home. But before the day was out, Jesse had worked himself up into a cold fury. In a replay of his behavior after the gunfight with Thomason in 1869, he galloped into Kearney “and threatened two or three citizens to stop their talking about their (the James boys) doing the robbery,” according to L. E. Angell. Then he reined his horse back in the direction of his mother’s farm, where he made rapid preparations to take to the brush. Sheriff Patton soon arrived with five men, and “saw about the house the tracks of several freshly shod horses,” a local newspaper reported, “and other indications that the gang had been at the place very recently.” But they were gone.37

  They did not go far. After his rage subsided, Jesse decided to end his long-running courtship of his first cousin Zee Mimms with a wedding. The families were already interlinked by marriage: Zee’s brother Robert, the oldest of twelve children, had wed Zerelda’s half-sister, the daughter of Zerelda’s mother and Robert Thomason.38 More to the point, however, was the steady constriction of Jesse’s social sphere. First had come the death of his father, and his mother’s increasingly bitter struggle to regain her farm and family; then came the war, when neighbors turned into foes; then his initiation into the tight-knit and brutal brotherhood of bushwhackers; then the years underground. Whom could he trust—whom could he even speak to openly—other than a member of his own family?39

  Unlike Zerelda, Zee was not the towering sort, either physically or emotionally. Diminutive, dark-haired, and a devout Methodist, she asked Rev. William James, uncle of both Jesse and herself, to preside. He balked, but Zee persisted. After all, she had waited nine years for this day. She was almost twenty-nine now, two years older than her fiancé. “She said Jesse had been lied about and persecuted,” the minister recalled, “and that he was not half so bad as pictured.” Finally he agreed, but only after Jesse himself pleaded his innocence. The minister performed the ceremony at the house of Zee’s sister Lucy Browder in Kearney on April 24, 1874. Only a few family members attended. The rites were briefly interrupted in a panic when someone reported the approach of two detectives. After a madcap dash for the doors, the party sheepishly returned to finish the wedding after the report proved to be a false alarm. The couple left to visit Jesse’s sister Susie, who was now married to former guerrilla Allen Parmer and taught at a high school in the old bushwhacker winter quarters in Sherman, Texas.40

  As might be expected, John Edwards wrote up the story of the romance and marriage of Missouri’s most famous fugitive. He ran an account on the front page of the St. Louis Dispatch. “CAPTURED,” shouted the headline on June 9, 1874; “The Celebrated Jesse W. James Taken at Last. His Captor a Woman, Young, Accomplished, and Beautiful.” It was a light piece, riddled with intentional errors; the wedding date was one day off, for example, and great stress was placed on the couple’s plans to settle in Mexico. “She is a true and consistent Christian, and a member of the M. E. Church, South,” he wrote (using the pseudonym “Ranger”). “The whole courtship, engagement, and final marriage has been a most romantic series of events.” Edwards quoted Jesse as saying, “Her devotion to me has never wavered for a moment,” despite his reputation. “You can say that both of us married for love, and that there cannot be any sort of doubt about our marriage being a happy one.”41

  Edwards’s article was far more than a tribute to his friend and a bit of misdirection for the detectives. It was, in fact, another shot fired between the Democratic Party’s feuding factions. “In 1874 came turmoil,” wrote Walter B. Stevens. As city editor of the St. Louis Dispatch and a friend and colleague of Edwards, he viewed the Democrats’ intramural skirmishing from a privileged position. Of all the divisions within the party—by business interests, by section, by city or countryside—only one, the divide of war, threatened to rip it in half. “Ex-Confederates, disciplined and united by their years of adventuring in secession, were to be reckoned with,” he wrote. “Union and neutral Democrats were not happy over the dominant way in which their erring brethren were coming to the front.”42

  The two sides started to load their muskets as early as February 1874. With an eye on the statewide election in the fall, the influential Unionist-Democratic St. Louis Republican ran an editorial that castigated Kentucky’s Democratic Party for falling into the hands of former rebels. “There is no room in American politics for a Confederate party,” the editors opined. That provoked “a resentful reply,” as the Republican itself reported, from two secessionist standard-bearers, the St. Joseph Gazette and the Kansas City Times. Their angry reaction generated more suspicion in turn from the Republican. “Is there, the
n,” it asked, “a scheme to make the party in this state, too, a Confederate party?”43

  Into this tensely divided camp galloped the James and Younger brothers—figuratively speaking—waving their Gads Hill loot, dragging the bodies of dead Pinkertons, and escaping safely between the tents of the old Confederates. “For ten years past the JAMES brothers and YOUNGER brothers have robbed and murdered in this and adjacent states with absolute impunity,” the Republican stormed.

  They are known to hundreds of persons, and make no effort to conceal their identity. After each marauding expedition, they quietly return to their farms, there to rest and divide the spoils, relying for protection upon the faithfulness of friends and the fears of foes. Judges, sheriffs, constables and the whole machinery of law are either set at defiance by a gang of villains, or bought or frightened into neutrality. If such a condition of affairs existed in central Africa, it might not provoke much surprise, but that it exists in Missouri is a fact as remarkable as it is outrageous.44

  In any other state, this editorial would have passed as conventional wisdom, the kind murmured among like-minded friends. But in war-wounded Missouri, it represented an angry jab in the chest, a virtual challenge to a fight. After two years of editorials by Edwards, friendly stories by his successors at the Kansas City Times, and praise from Peter Donan of the Lexington Caucasian, Jesse James and his companions had emerged as symbols of Confederate pride. Republicans saw this clearly. “They had been for years the heroes of an admiring circle of friends, and are admired by them now,” noted the Radical Kansas City Journal of Commerce. As the newspaper’s editor, former congressman Robert T. Van Horn, observed, the bandits had cultivated this status themselves. “They are not ignorant men, who follow the lawless life they do from want of intelligence to rise above it,” Van Horn said. As he saw it, the outlaws clearly understood their political status. “They cannot fail to appreciate the situation which the public understand—that their immunity comes from friendship, present and of the past, of those who sympathize with them.”45 Respect for the bandits had become virtual dogma among many old rebels. So when the St. Louis Republican criticized the local community for protecting them, it was consciously attacking the Confederate wing of its own party.

  Even as Whicher’s casket was being shipped back to Chicago, Republican state legislators gathered in Jefferson City to plan their strategy for the coming election. The ex-Confederates’ support for the bandits represented an opening, a chance to split off Unionist Democrats—especially the Grangers, who showed an interest in forming an explicitly political movement in February 1874.46 The Republicans passed a resolution that defined their campaign theme: it condemned the Democrats’ “incompetency and misrule which has already depreciated property in the state to one-half its former value, and now threatens, through disorder and lawlessness, to drive away a large part of our best and peaceable citizens.”

  The Republicans had found the Democrats’ weak spot, the St. Louis Republican argued. “There is a good deal of unquestionable truth in that part of the resolution which refers to disorder and lawlessness, at least, and if this charge is pressed home on the Democracy in the canvass, their leaders will have no easy task in replying to it.” If the party was to win the election, the paper wrote, it had to address the bandit problem, even if that meant asking for help from Washington. “Anything is better than this tame submission to systematic brigandage.”47

  Governor Woodson heeded the newspaper’s advice. He had already offered an enormous $2,000 reward* “for the bodies of each one of the robbers” of the Iron Mountain train. Now, two days after the Republican’s stern editorials, he sent an emergency message to both houses of the General Assembly, demanding the authority and the funding for “a secret police force” to catch the famous bandits. Even if the state had “a military force subject to my orders (which we have not),” he complained, there was not “one dollar in the military chest … that can be legitimately used in the suppression of a rebellion or enforcement of obedience to law by force! I suppose that there is not another State in the Union of which the same can be truthfully said.” What the governor did not say, but which every legislator understood, was that the Democrats themselves had brought about this sad state of affairs. Still angry over the Radicals’ use of the militia in 1866, they had subjected the force to malign neglect—at best—after they returned to power.48

  The dominant Unionist faction acted quickly on Woodson’s request. The “extraordinary condition of affairs existing in the state,” argued one state senator, referring to the bandits’ popular support, “would require the use of extraordinary means to suppress the criminal outrages.” In a few days, the General Assembly passed a law establishing a secret service, limited to twenty-five men, with a budget of $10,000, for the purpose of capturing the notorious outlaws. Confederate legislators did manage to block another measure to grant pensions to the families of Daniels and Lull, and to offer thanks to the Pinkertons, voting it down because it explicitly named the James and Younger brothers as outlaws.49

  Woodson’s appeal represented a damaging admission of failure, and the Democrats tried to keep it secret. When Republicans moved to have it printed, state senator Charles H. Hardin protested, saying “it was doubtful whether the message should be made public at all.” But the Unionist St. Louis Republican published a copy under the headline “OUR BANDITTI. A Powerless Governor’s Appeal for Assistance.” It had caused a “sensation,” the newspaper reported; “the reading of the message was listened to with rapt attention.” The editors clearly hoped to back former Confederates into a corner with their coverage. “These depredations have become so frequent,” the article declared, “that they may no longer be hidden for fear the great Democratic party may suffer.”50

  Woodson put the secret-service fund to work almost immediately, hiring his first agent, J. W. Ragsdale, on April 9, 1874.51 But the struggle between Unionist and ex-Confederate Democrats intensified as the party convention approached. Edwards fired off ferocious editorials to rally the rebel faithful, prompting an angry response from William F. Switzler, a Unionist Democratic elder. “There can be no question,” Switzler wrote in his newspaper, the Columbia Missouri Statesman, “we think that the Dispatch and some other Democratic organs desire to conduct the next election chiefly if not wholly—just as far as they dare—in the interest of the confederate Democracy, and upon the hypothesis that Union Democrats are orthodox enough to vote but too heterodox to be voted for.” Tying former rebels directly to the outlaws, Switzler derided Confederates as Democrats of the “Gads Hill type,” who would “divide … defeat and destroy the Democratic party.” Another newspaper accused Edwards of keeping alive “the bitter passions” of the Civil War, “simply to gratify an unreasoning and morbid desire for revenge.”52

  It was amid this shouting match that Edwards unfurled his article about the wedding of Jesse James. Even so simple a story as this was intricately interlaced with Confederate themes. Zee Mimms, he wrote, “had been of immense service to the Southern guerrillas.” He mentioned Jesse’s wounding at the end of the war, and announced that the bandit “declared it to be his full intention to return and take trial when he thought he could get a trial other than at the hands of a mob.” It seemed to be a part of his effort to rally the “Gads Hill type” of Democrats for the party convention; only the day before he had reminded his readers of “when to be a Democrat in Missouri was to be in danger of the shot-gun or the halter [noose].” Despite this “purifying process,” he wrote, the party “needs a little weeding out, and the first day that comes the process should begin.”53

  When the Democratic convention nominated a gubernatorial candidate in August, it turned aside former Confederate general Francis Cockrell in favor of state senator Hardin, a Unionist. (Hardin had attended Governor Jackson’s rump legislature in Neosho in 1861, but had cast the only vote in that meeting against secession.) Old rebels gritted their teeth. “Though ten years have elapsed since the war, no Confed
erate has been nominated by the Democratic party for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, or United States Senator,” the Kansas City Times observed. Secessionists, wrote Walter B. Stevens, “resented the dictation: ‘No ex-Confederates need apply.’ It was about this time that John N. Edwards wrote for the St. Louis Dispatch an editorial which became historic: ‘The boys are crawling out of the brush.’ ”54

  Edwards meant his words as a metaphor for the gathering strength of Confederate voters, but they applied quite literally to Jesse and Frank James. Jesse soon returned from his honeymoon in Texas—where, some have suggested, he held up a series of stagecoaches—and reunited with his older brother, now married to Anna Ralston, as the political debate over their banditry raged. Undoubtedly Jesse appreciated the efforts of secessionist newspapers to defend him, but he must have been amused to read a story in the Kansas City Times on August 19, 1874, that claimed to prove his innocence. A badly wounded robber in Texas named James H. Reed wanted “to let the public know that McCoy and the James and Younger brothers have been persecuted in Missouri,” the paper reported. Just before he died, Reed had confessed to all the crimes laid at their door.55

  The story would have been doubly amusing because Jesse was already planning his next strike, in the very heart of his old hunting grounds. He and Frank had learned that a Parson Jennings of Mayview, Lafayette County, had gone to St. Louis to sell an extremely large lot of hogs, worth some $5,000. Jennings was expected to return through Lexington the evening of August 30. He would step off the train on the northern side of the Missouri River, they believed, then catch an omnibus, a stagecoach, to the ferry to reach Lexington. That was where they would catch him.56