T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Both the arrests and the fruitless search afterward threatened to turn the entire affair into a farce. George James, for example, was a mere boy, and not a terribly bright one at that. Bettie Patton called his incarceration “the gayest thing of the season.” She sent a copy of the press report to her brother and sister, writing, “I think you both would appreciate it knowing Geo. so well. The idea of his not knowing he was arrested until he was nearly to Kearney, was the part that amused me so much.” George Patton sarcastically observed that Groom and Courtney had “immortalized themselves.” As proprietor of the new Liberty Advance, “I could make a big thing out of this,” he added. “Many of my friends have begged me to do it, but it won’t never do.… I am dependent on some of the very parties whom I would delight so much to ventilate before the eyes of the world.” But Groom did find Jesse’s famous mare in the barn, suggesting that he had come close to capturing the outlaw.43

  Word of the attack spread across the western Missouri landscape within hours of the explosion. In Kansas City the next afternoon, one reporter learned of it from a breathless stranger on the street. “Have you heard the news?” he asked. “There has been a fight over in Clay county at the home of the James boys; they have been captured and their mother killed in her efforts to defend their lives, and a little boy aged eight years also killed.” The journalist caught the next train to Kearney. “On his way to the depot he met numerous persons who stopped and repeated the news,” he reported, writing in the third person. “Once at the depot, he was again surrounded by an eager throng, who questioned him as to the truth of the rumor.”44

  Across the river in Clay, people could speak of little else. “The county,” scribbled Bettie Patton, “is in perfect commotion over this James affair.” Neighbors wrote of the “shocking affair” and the “tragedy.” George Patton could not conceal his disgust. “The grand move,” as he called it, “has made hundreds of friends for the James boys, when they had but few.”45

  The sensation rapidly spread to the entire state—indeed, the nation at large—as the press poured out dozens of often contradictory stories. Reporters scoured the countryside looking for details, particularly information about the special train that had carried the attackers. They learned that it had proceeded to Kansas City after dropping off the raiders, then had returned to pick them up in the early hours of the morning. “Now as to the ‘mysterious car’ which conveyed the attacking party,” offered the Kansas City Journal of Commerce,

  it has been followed carefully, and is found in Brookfield [the Linn County depot where the raiders likely started their journey]. Arriving there, the mysterious men, who conducted and shaped the course of this mysterious car, caused it to be switched off and taken from the main track. It was visited by a citizen of Brookfield, who was seen to take from it a very considerable number of guns and pistols.… The inmates, while at Brookfield, preserved the greatest reticence, and all their conversation was carried on in slang peculiar to detectives.

  According to the St. Louis Republican, one fellow asked the returning men, “What success?” The reply was grim: “Don’t ask us; don’t say anything about it.” At Brookfield, they packed up their firearms and shipped them east by express; then, the press reported, they departed for Illinois.46

  No one seems to have doubted the identity of the mysterious attackers. “Universal report charges this deed of hell upon Pinkerton’s Chicago Detectives,” declared the Lexington Caucasian, “in revenge for the supposed killing of two or three of their number by Frank and Jesse James.” Indeed, virtually every report blamed Allan Pinkerton and his agency. When a loaded revolver was found near the barn, with the initials “P. G. G.” filed into the barrel, the press seized on this as direct evidence. First the letters were said to stand for “Pinkerton’s Grand Guard,” then “Pinkerton’s Government Guard.” The newspapers overlooked the fact that the agency had apparently never been known by either name, even during the Civil War. The letters were probably the owner’s initials.47

  Similar overenthusiastic reporting surrounded the raid itself. Initially it was said—incorrectly—that a wild gunfight had broken out, and that the Pinkertons had succeeded in capturing the outlaws. “But anybody that knows anything about Jesse,” wrote Bettie Patton, “knows that whenever he’s captured, a black box will suit him better than chains.” Another neighbor thought it “useless to conjecture who are the perpetrators of so horrible a crime, but I have no doubt but the ‘James brothers’ will make a desperate attempt to find out.” When they did, Patton added, “Jesse & Frank would make it pretty warm for those men.”48

  WHEN JOHN EDWARDS learned of the attack, while the fate of the James brothers was still unclear, he penned perhaps the most ferocious editorial of his fire-eating career to date. “Men of Missouri, you who fought under Anderson, Quantrell, Todd, Poole … recall your woodcraft and give up these scoundrels to the Henry rifle and the Colt’s revolver,” he wrote in the St. Louis Dispatch. He wasted no ink on railroad corporations, government corruption, or the market economy—instead, he appealed purely to wartime loyalties. “It is not for the robberies they are accused of that Pinkerton hates the James brothers. It is because like you they were at Lawrence, and Centralia … and wherever else the black flag floated and men neither knew nor wanted quarter.”

  “The language of the Dispatch is remarkable,” responded Robert Van Horn, in the Kansas City Journal of Commerce. “It does not invoke the proper authority of the state to defend its honor … but invokes a lawlessness worse than anything alleged against” the James boys. “It were sickening in any case,” he wrote, “but more especially as coming from the official organ of the dominant party, as the sentiment of that party.” Van Horn’s trenchant editorial zeroed in on the latter point—the most explosive feature of Edwards’s editorial, and of the situation in general. “The most unfortunate fact connected with this affair is the political aspect the treatment of the Democratic press attaches to it,” he wrote. His fellow Republicans had “somewhat flippantly” accused the Democrats of fostering the James brothers’ banditry, he argued, but “the treatment of the affair by the papers which represent the controlling elements of that party fully warrant that charge.… The Dispatch, it is sad to say, is owned by the master spirit of the Missouri Democracy, and for some time has been regarded as containing the official utterances of the party.”49

  The faction Van Horn spoke of was the ex-Confederate wing, which was indeed represented by the St. Louis Dispatch, owned by state legislator Stilson Hutchins. But Van Horn went too far in declaring the former rebels the “ruling element” and Edwards’s shoot-them-dead essay the party’s official opinion. “The editorial in the St. Louis Dispatch has excited considerable unfavorable comment” among Democratic legislators, a journalist reported from the floor of the General Assembly, “and the general expression is that it is a very indiscreet article.” In reply, the St. Louis Republican offered the opinion of the Unionist faction of Democrats. “The amount of damage the James boys and their gang have done directly,” the paper argued, “is nothing compared to the mischief they do in keeping up the impression abroad that lawlessness is … encouraged by people who are members of society in the South and Southwest. In other words, the political mischief of which they are the cause is vastly more insufferable than the crimes themselves which they commit.”50

  In fact, Hutchins and Edwards were seizing this very moment to lift the former Confederates to supremacy within the party. The public was outraged by the attack; Edwards and his employer were sincerely outraged as well, but they knew how to turn the situation to their advantage. On January 30, 1875, Hutchins offered a resolution in the state House of Representatives, demanding that the governor look into the affair. In both the document itself and his comments on the floor, Hutchins picked up the language of the anti-Reconstruction Redeemers of the Deep South. “This State has been invaded without authority of law,” he thundered. “The peace and dignity of the State have been violated, its s
overeignty offensively encroached upon.” The resolution silenced Unionist Democrats; given the general outrage, they could scarcely disagree with it in public. When it went to the state senate, “the most peculiar feature of the discussion,” the St. Louis Republican reported, was that the Democrats made “several uncomplimentary allusions” to their Unionist governor and his predecessor, while only Republicans defended them.

  There was a political purpose behind this entire exercise: “to excite the public mind,” as one Republican senator put it, for the benefit of ex-Confederate Democrats. “It seemed that after these highwaymen had committed crimes that stamped them outlaws and murderers,” he said, “there yet existed a sympathy for them, and that sympathy was now to be excused by the legislature.” Shortly afterward, the Republicans offered their own resolution, “requesting the Governor to inquire into the depredations of the James brothers,” and asking for advice on special legislation to catch them. The attempt failed under the bitter attacks of Hutchins and his ally Jefferson F. Jones of firmly secessionist Callaway County.51

  All this was pure political posturing. The day before Hutchins offered his resolution—which easily passed in both houses—Governor Hardin had already asked Adjutant General (and noted artist) George Caleb Bingham to go to the scene of the attack and report back. Hardin presented Bingham’s report to the General Assembly on February 4, prefaced by a message that confirmed that men from another state had carried out the raid and that promised to requisition their return to Missouri for trial once they were properly identified. But when Bingham’s thorough findings finally appeared in print, all references to the Pinkertons were carefully deleted.52

  Confederate Democrats were unsatisfied. The attack on the Samuel farm appeared at a propitious moment for them. Across the South, Reconstruction was trembling toward collapse, as Grant and his cabinet lost their will to intervene with federal troops to protect the rights of black citizens. And in Missouri itself, the final assault had begun on the last vestige of the Radical legacy: the constitution of 1865. In the 1874 election, voters had narrowly approved a convention to draw up a new governing document; delegates had been elected in January 1875 and would meet in May. The resentments of former rebels drove this movement: they wished to delegitimize the suppression of their insurrection, to sanctify their cause, and to retroactively humiliate their opponents. At times, it seemed as if they were still fighting the war itself. On February 12, 1875, with the ink on Bingham’s report barely dry, the General Assembly demanded that Governor Hardin report on “the military relation … between this State and the general government.” 53

  John Edwards, meanwhile, used the public outrage to build sympathy for the James and Younger brothers—which he used, in turn, to give added force to the politics of the Lost Cause. The focus for this two-headed campaign was a demand that the bandits receive amnesty. In late February, an article by an anonymous Missouri correspondent appeared in the Democratic Chicago Times—an article that matches Edwards’s florid style—and was reprinted by the St. Louis Dispatch. “There is a growing sentiment here on the part of the legislature in favor of extending amnesty to the James boys and the Younger brothers,” the piece began. “Your correspondent has the news on good authority that a bill to this effect will within a day or two be introduced.” The lengthy article focused exclusively on the Civil War, depicting Missouri as a Southern state invaded by the outside forces of abolitionist Kansas jayhawkers and Radical Republicans. The James and Younger families suffered terrible abuses, the writer claimed, and the boys had no choice but to fight back. For that, they were persecuted by Radicals even after the peace. “They are outlaws through no fault or crime other than participating in a civil war that was not successful,” the writer argued, and were “now so wantonly and unjustly hunted and denounced by all who have partisan passions to gratify.”54

  Edwards continued the campaign throughout March. First he penned an editorial that presented the case for amnesty and discussed the constitutional issues involved. (A governor could only issue a pardon after a conviction.) Then he went to Jefferson City in person at the end of the month to help coordinate the effort. By now, he had emerged as one of the most influential newspaper editors in the state. “For his fame and real worth,” wrote a Lexington Caucasian correspondent who spotted him on the General Assembly floor, “I must not fail to mention John Edwards.… He is one of the oddest and best of men.… Noble, generous, childlike in simplicity, but great in mind, a journalist, historian, and altogether one of Missouri’s most illustrious sons.”55

  Edwards himself, it appears, crafted an amnesty bill that Representative Jefferson Jones submitted, only to have it declared unconstitutional by the attorney general. Together Edwards and Jones worked up a new version that would pass muster, which Jones offered as a joint and concurrent resolution on March 17. Given the restrictions of the constitution, it would do little in practical terms to protect the James and Younger brothers; it would simply pardon them for wartime offenses and guarantee them a fair trial for crimes committed since. But as a political document it was astounding. In a lengthy preamble that—as contemporaries noted—bore all the marks of Edwards’s pen, the bill would have the legislature express frank admiration for the outlaws and endorse an explicitly Confederate version of the state’s history. An excerpt:

  WHEREAS, under the outlawry pronounced against Jesse W. James, Frank James, Coleman Younger, Robert Younger, and others, who gallantly periled their lives and their all in the defence of their principles, they are of necessity made desperate, driven as they are from the fields of honest industry, from their friends, their families, their homes, and their country, they can know no law but the law of self-preservation, can have no respect for and feel no allegiance to a government which forces them to the very acts it professes to deprecate, and then offer a bounty for their apprehension and arms foreign mercenaries with power to capture and kill; and

  WHEREAS, believing these men too brave to be mean, too generous to be revengeful, and too gallant and honorable to betray a friend or break a promise; and believing further that most, if not all the offences with which they are charged have been committed by others …; that the return of these men to their homes and friends would have the effect of greatly lessening crime in our State by turning public attention to the real criminals, and that common justice, sound policy, and true statesmanship alike demand that amnesty should be extended to all alike of both parties for all acts done or charged to have been done during the war …

  In Kansas City, the Journal of Commerce published the resolution under the headline “An Excellent Campaign Document for Republicans.” Editor Van Horn dissected the proceeding in a lengthy essay. “The whole premise is false,” he argued. The Radical constitution had not outlawed the James and Younger brothers, or any former rebels. “Hundreds of those confederated and associated with them during the war returned to their homes at its close and have never been molested,” he wrote. “Such is the barbarous depth to which this legislature has descended, that brigands, whose bloody deeds have shocked humanity and made them a terror to this and neighboring states, are to be made the special objects of its protection.… It is, we believe, the first instance in all history where a government proposed by a solemn act, to take the side of brigands against society.” Van Horn saw the amnesty bill as a part of the reaction against Reconstruction. It was “coupled with” the legislature’s cuts in funding for public schools and charitable institutions, attempts to repudiate railroad bonds, and the leasing of convicts as laborers,* which led him to dub the General Assembly “the brigand conclave.”56

  The Unionists in the legislature managed—just barely—to sink the amnesty bill. On March 20, Representative James Shields, a former Federal general, substituted a quieter version that sheared off the jaw-dropping preamble. Then enough Democrats voted with the Republicans to prevent it from passing with the two-thirds majority required for a concurrent resolution. (The House vote was fifty-eight to thirt
y-nine, with fifty-six Democrats and two Republicans in favor, and twenty Democrats and nineteen Republicans against.) Half of the bolting Democrats hailed from the fiercely Unionist southwestern section of the state.57

  The failure of the resolution, however, was almost beside the point.

  Edwards and his allies had finally succeeded in sanctifying Jesse James and his comrades as Confederate martyrs. Even the Jefferson City People’s Tribune, which considered itself the official Democratic organ, wrote that “recent occurrences have had the effect, in a large measure, to change public sentiment in regard to these men.” The rebel faction had cunningly exploited this feeling to reshape Missouri’s historical memory and lift itself to dominance within the Democratic Party. “This matter ought not to be made a political question,” grumbled the Kansas City Journal of Commerce, “but the [Confederate Democrats’] manifestation of sympathy forces it into that attitude, and it will have to be so considered and treated.”58

  AS THE LEGISLATURE refought the Civil War with words, Samuel Hardwicke feared a reenactment with live ammunition. Almost immediately after the raid, word of his role leaked to the press, with both the Kansas City Times and the St. Louis Republican identifying him by name. Fearful, he took quarters directly on the town square, reported Susie James Parmer. “So anxious was he,” she added, “that he paid a month’s rent for a man in order to get him to move out.”59

  In Chicago, Allan Pinkerton returned to his office from various engagements to find two letters from the jittery Hardwicke. Pinkerton must have sighed heavily at the sight of them. “I must say, I am considerably disheartened,” he had confessed two days after the botched raid. “It’s rather heavy on me spending money continually and not finding them. It’s too much for me, and I may probably withdraw.” His failure had human consequences, however, which Pinkerton acknowledged to himself as he read Hardwicke’s letters. “Your two letters are duly received,” he wrote back. “I will meet you wherever you please, say at Quincy, Springfield, Joliet, or Chicago, whichever one you think is best.”