In reality, the reverse was true. The Democrats were divided on economic issues, but united behind white supremacy. As the election approached, the party press peppered readers with racist reports of “Radical negro attacks” in Louisiana and Mississippi, of a “war of the races” in Georgia, of Republican plans for “mixing negroes and whites in the public schools,” of Senator Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill, which would largely ban segregation and discrimination. Partisan newspapers warned wavering followers that the “cloven foot of Radicalism” had left its hoof-prints in the People’s Party. Even Schurz’s complaint about banditry, claimed the Kansas City Times, “is the same old Radical cry that has been used in all the Southern States as a pretext for keeping Democratic majorities out of power by fair means or foul.” The Liberty Tribune responded to Republican complaints about the James boys by conjuring up “the Bacon Montgomery War in Lafayette County.”76
The strategy worked. Democrats held their coalition together and trounced the People’s Party in November. The sweep was nationwide. Battered by the depression, tired of continually suppressing white-supremacist violence in the South, Northern voters handed the House of Representatives to the Democrats for the first time since the war.77
It had been a good year so far for Jesse James. Just twenty-seven years old, he had achieved a national reputation. He had carried out two high-profile robberies, defeated the Pinkertons and the state authorities, outlasted another sheriff—Democrat John S. Groom now replaced Patton—and married his sweetheart cousin. The hard work he and Edwards had put in over the last two years to transform his bandit crew into Confederate heroes had paid off handsomely, as secessionist newspapers rushed to apologize for—even glorify—them in the political campaign. And everything he loathed—Reconstruction, the Republican Party, even the Democrats’ Unionist faction—showed signs of crumbling. He may have felt invulnerable.
But in the countryside around his mother’s farm, his enemies were gathering, preparing to strike back. No one he had harassed, bullied, or fought in the decade since he first took to the brush had forgotten him: not his Unionist neighbors, not the former militia commanders, not John Groom. And definitely not Allan Pinkerton.
* The standard governor’s reward for fugitives was still $300, often much less.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Persistence of Civil War
ON DECEMBER 2, 1874, a man who knew the James brothers spotted Jesse and one of the Youngers near the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad terminal in Kansas City. As Jesse so often did, he rode a bay mare renowned throughout western Missouri for its speed; he was frequently identified by his striking and well-known horses. On this occasion, it appears that he and Younger were preparing to end the year as it had begun, with a train robbery.1
On the afternoon of December 8, the gang rode west into Kansas. They were headed to Muncie, a remote flag station on the Kansas Pacific Railroad perhaps a dozen miles west of Kansas City, a place that resembled, in some ways, the village of Gads Hill: a mere blink of a railroad stop sitting beneath a high hill, with little more to it than a general store that doubled as the post office, a blacksmith shop, and a few small houses. A dense growth of trees, a newspaper reported, “almost hide it from the eye of man.”2 When the bandits arrived, a few section men—railroad maintenance workers—toiled nearby; otherwise the area was nearly deserted.
The five men divided up. Three rounded up the Kansas Pacific laborers and ordered them to pile spare railroad ties on the tracks. The other two walked into the store and took its occupants prisoner. “When they heard the train coming,” reported the store’s owner, John Purtee, “they made me go out and flag it, one man covering me with a revolver.”3 The locomotive slowed sharply. As it drew close, the masked men fired a shot or two in the air and ran up to it. They pulled the engineer and the fireman to the ground, and ordered them to uncouple the baggage car. The railroad men dutifully unhitched it from the coal tender. The bandits pondered this rather pointless act, then realized that they had made a mistake. One hastily ordered the railroad workers to uncouple the baggage car from the passenger coaches, and then get back in the engine and pull it to where the ties were piled, about one hundred yards up the tracks.4
Inside the baggage car, messenger Frank D. Webster of Wells Fargo Express soon found himself under the control of two well-armed men. “Once inside, one placed a revolver to my head while the other levelled a Henry [Winchester] rifle on the other side, and I was told to unlock the safe,” Webster recalled.
I readily obeyed, and at their order handed out the contents. One of them took a mail-bag, and as I handed out the packages the other threw them into the bag. I took out $18,000 in currency, $5,000 in gold and all the packages of money in the safe. They said they did not want a silver brick that was there, and also gave me back my watch, saying they did not want my personal property. After having got all there was in the safe without touching anything else they ordered me to get out on the ground. While one guarded me the other took the money and got on his horse. The other left me and the others rode away to the north, going over a hill.5
Before departing, the bandits forced a passerby to exchange his fresh horse for one of their own worn-out mounts. Then they waved to the train crew. “Good-bye, boys, no hard feelings,” they shouted. “We have taken nothing from you.” After passing over the high hill to the north, they circled back to the south. Shortly after dark, they made camp for the night near the Kaw River. Sitting around the fire, they slit open the express packages and pulled out cash and jewelry, littering the ground with papers, envelopes, an empty pocketbook, small bills, a $20 Confederate note, and one of their masks. The loot came to almost $30,000—finally, the sort of haul they had expected in their previous express robberies. After dividing it up, they slept a few hours, then escaped undetected.6
News of the robbery reached Kansas City that same evening. “In ten minutes after the first rumor,” the Kansas City Times reported, “the multitudes which just before had been pressing the thoroughfares, many on their return home from business, others just starting out for amusement, were bunched together upon the corners, under the gaslight, hearing and relating news and indulging in many curious speculations, and then turning to other assemblages hoping to learn something additional.”7
The governor of Kansas offered $2,500 for each of the robbers, which was matched by $5,000 from the Kansas Pacific Railroad. But it was the express company, as always, that had suffered the actual loss and took the strongest interest in capturing the gang. Wells, Fargo & Co. posted a $5,000 reward for the return of the stolen property, and $1,000 for each outlaw. In the coming weeks, it would cooperate closely with the state of Missouri in tracking the outlaws. While railway journals ignored the attack, Our Expressman devoted a heartfelt column to it. “Messengers all, be on your guard,” it cried. “Some day you will get the chance to distinguish yourselves, and be assured your courage and vigor and fidelity will not go unnoticed nor unrewarded.”8
The long-suffering Governor Woodson immediately telegraphed the sheriff’s office in Independence. “Let them have no shelter in Jackson county or any other county in this state,” he ordered.9 How Woodson must have pitied himself. To his very last days in office, Missouri’s invincible bandits plagued him. On January 6, 1875, he used his last message to the General Assembly to address the problem. “The law hangs upon the will of the people,” he pleaded, and he cited English law from the reign of Elizabeth—including the mass punishment of the residents near that medieval highwaymen’s haunt of Gad’s Hill—to make his point. Six days later, Governor Hardin picked up the same theme in his inaugural address. “The character of our State and people has been most violently assailed as being wanting in sentiment and efficiency for the maintenance of law and order,” he grieved. To restore Missouri’s battered reputation, he appealed to “the better sentiments of the community in active support of the law.”10
The underlying problem, as the new governor understood, w
as the way the outlaws catalyzed the resentments of Confederate Democrats. The feud between the two wings of the party had never ceased, nor had secessionist anger toward the Republicans diminished. The increasingly influential John Edwards did his best to stoke the bitterness. On December 15, 1874, the St. Louis Dispatch printed a letter from “Justitia”—apparently Edwards—complaining of how Radical newspapers “relentlessly cudgel” the James and Younger brothers, who were powerless to defend themselves against “an incessant tirade of abuse.” The letter recited a long list of the persecutions they had suffered in the war; afterward, the writer declared, “these ill-starred men [were] … driven into the bush to avoid the cowardly punishment threatened them by a crazed and clamorous mob.” The writer ended with the claim that “these outraged citizens appeal for amnesty. Governor Hardin cannot more grandly celebrate his inauguration day than by granting their request.”11
The shrewder Republicans grasped the outlaws’ place in the politics of Confederate memory. It was the rebel-Democratic press, argued Robert T. Van Horn in the Radical Kansas City Journal of Commerce, “that gives them a political character.” Along with a symbolic role came practical political connections. “That they had powerful friends everybody knew … and it was a matter of notoriety that [Arthur] McCoy [of the James-Younger gang] spent several days in Jefferson City during the sitting of the legislature, appearing in the lobby, and known to members on the floor—passing under an alias.” The ex-Confederates maintained a double standard toward violence, Van Horn claimed, applauding attacks by their own kind, particularly against Republicans.12
He had a point. The Lexington Caucasian declared that the bandits’ Muncie loot was “just as honestly earned as the riches of many a highly distinguished political leader or railroad job manipulator.” But the newspaper applied a different standard to Mississippi, a state with a relatively honest government, acclaimed Union general Adelbert Ames as chief executive, and hundreds of earnest black officeholders. The Caucasian denounced Ames as “Grant’s bayonet governor,” and referred to its black legislators and public officials as “a dirty brood of nigger barbers, boot-blacks, and plantation chattels.”13 As long as any kind of racial equity held sway in the South, former Confederates such as the Caucasian’s staff and audience refused to believe the Civil War was over, and they refused to condemn the former Confederate guerrillas in the James-Younger band.
Then a strange thing happened: the police caught one of the outlaws. A Kansas City officer named Collopy arrested William “Bud” McDaniel, son of a Kansas City saloon owner and a comrade of the Jameses, shortly after the raid. When the officer patted down the inexperienced bandit, he found four revolvers, six dozen cartridges, $1,035.25, and some jewelry that had been taken from the Wells Fargo safe. McDaniel was soon sent to Kansas to stand trial.14
The capture of McDaniel should have been good news for the new Missouri governor. It wasn’t. As Jackson County judge T. H. Brougham explained during a meeting in Jefferson City, the arrest by Officer Collopy was a freak accident. The Kansas City chief of police was reputedly a friend of the James boys, and had been seen drinking with McDaniel on the day the robber was caught. Even worse was the terror the James brothers inflicted on the community. Shortly after returning home, Brougham sent Hardin a clipping from the Kansas City Evening News reporting that a gunman had been spotted on the streets, late at night, apparently hunting for Collopy. “They will kill him if they get half a chance,” Brougham wrote, “as they will have revenge in every particular.… It is a fact that any person who becomes obnoxious to the desperadoes is not safe in this part of the state.”15
IT TOOK TEN years of peace to reveal the true scale of the Civil War. Not the grand scale—that was obvious, perhaps too obvious. The massive clash of armies had created the misleading impression that this was a conventional war between two sovereign governments. The immensity of it masked the smallness of the scale on which the war was truly fought. Only the political struggles that came after revealed how intimate a conflict it had been all along.
In the Reconstruction South—particularly in the black majority states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—the enfranchisement of African Americans drove this point home. As blacks joined the Republican Party en masse, whites had to face the fact that they not only lived side by side with people who had worked to defeat them during the war, but that these people opposed their political plans as well. The conflict was no longer one of distant battles, but of grassroots struggles over town councils and county courthouses. White-supremacist violence became increasingly systematic as the 1870s progressed, coinciding with the rising assertiveness and self-confidence of black voters and officeholders. In Louisiana in early 1873, white paramilitaries attacked the tiny village of Colfax after a disputed election; a force of black men held the town for three weeks before they were forced to surrender. The attackers rounded them up and executed at least fifty of them. In Warren County, Mississippi, the white minority tried to oust the black sheriff in 1874; on December 7, a well-armed force of whites ambushed the sheriff and his supporters, killing as many as three hundred African Americans in the days that followed.16
In Missouri, the Civil War had been a personal matter from the beginning. Confederate support had been concentrated in certain regions, of course, particularly along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, but even there, communities had divided among themselves, household by household.* After a full decade of peace, people still remembered what their neighbors had done.
These memories burned with new life as Jesse James and his comrades seized headlines. In November 1874, for example, a man approached the circuit clerk of Daviess County, offering to identify the James brothers in the still-open murder case of John W. Sheets. The would-be witness was Frank Cooley, the old Radical Unionist from Lexington who had been a central figure in the 1866 affair that led to the death of Archie Clement. His offer was a hint that Jesse James had been present on that occasion, still bitterly remembered by partisans on both sides.17
In Clay County, fear intensified after the murder of Joseph W. Whicher. “You cannot get a word of information,” wrote Van Horn after a visit to Clay in early 1875, “save upon the condition that you religiously keep the name of your informer a secret—this being the prerequisite confidence to any conversation.” The terror stemmed not from the James brothers alone, but from the continuing division of society along wartime lines. “The ‘James boys’ have a very large acquaintance in the county, many of whom became their associates and partisans during the guerrilla and bushwhacking times of the war,” Van Horn explained. “They are ‘just as good friends of the boys’ now as before.”18
“The business in Clay Co., Mo., is troubling me badly,” Allan Pinkerton wrote shortly after the assassination of Whicher. But no one was more discouraged by the deaths of Pinkerton’s agents than William B. Dins-more, president of the Adams Express Company, and he knew when to cut his losses. “Concluding that the robbers had been frightened enough to make them behave,” as William Pinkerton sarcastically put it, Dinsmore “withdrew from the prosecution of the case. Allan Pinkerton then took up the matter and expended $10,000 of his own money trying to bring the marauders to justice.” For the elder Pinkerton, detective work was always a matter of passion as much as profits; he was, after all, an old abolitionist, a man who had risked much to help the underground railroad and John Brown. He took the murders of Whicher and Lull personally, and he wanted revenge.19
As Allan Pinkerton pursued the case—more quietly now, with greater respect for his opponents—he discovered that Clay County’s wartime enmities could work in his favor. As the months progressed, he made contact with a succession of old Unionists who were eager to wipe out Jesse and Frank James. First he encountered Samuel Hardwicke, a forty-year-old native of Clay and a leading attorney in Liberty. One contemporary called Hardwicke “a man of unusually quiet manners … more given to the study of his books and to reflection than to the enjoyment of society
.” Though he carried no arms during the Civil War, he had belonged to the Unionist establishment and had helped organize a loyalist mass meeting to honor Lincoln after his assassination.20 Inconspicuous, well connected, and, above all, a staunch Union man, Hardwicke would be the perfect local coordinator for the detective’s plans.
Hardwicke agreed to work for Pinkerton in April or early May 1874. Shortly afterward, he recruited another local Union man, Daniel H. Askew, a former militiaman and—unlike Hardwicke—a staunch Radical Republican. Askew brought to Pinkerton’s burgeoning network an absolutely essential ingredient: a base. He owned a 210-acre farm directly adjacent to Zerelda’s homestead.21
Through the end of the year, Hardwicke sent telegrams to Chicago, coded in a simple word-substitution cipher, keeping Pinkerton informed of the James brothers’ movements. Meanwhile, Pinkerton slowly infiltrated men into Clay County. Jack Ladd, for example, showed up on Askew’s farm halfway through the year, posing as a laborer. In light of Whicher’s murder, Pinkerton intended to hide the budding conspiracy from then-sheriff George E. Patton. He failed. Hardwicke, Patton later explained to his brother-in-law, “had but one confidant here [in Liberty], and that man was my confidant.… I have known his operations for the last four months [i.e., since October 1874], but never breathed a word to any living being. They knew nothing of my being posted to their movements, and they never shall, on either side.” Indeed, neither Pinkerton nor Jesse James ever did.22
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