T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  To the neighbors, J. D. Howard appeared to be a silent, distrusting figure. He frequented the faro games in and around the city, playing with an almost wrathful intensity. Whenever he returned from his extended trips, he immediately fired his house servant and hired a new one. And he kept two exceptionally fine horses, a rather unusual custom for a grain buyer. All this aroused some murmuring in the community—not enough to arouse any official attention, but sufficient to drive the couple deeper into isolation.9

  Even with Jesse gone, Missouri continued to suffer. First came a raging flood on the Missouri River. “Acre upon acre of the most fertile and well improved farms are melting away like frost under a noonday sun,” wrote the Richmond Conservator in late April. Then came locusts. “Now is undoubtedly the darkest hour in the history of Western Missouri,” mourned another newspaper. “The grasshopper plague is upon us, and as it is generally believed that they will devastate and make desolate the whole country.” On May 25, fifteen barrels of grasshoppers—each barrel weighing two hundred pounds—were hauled away from the base of the courthouse in Independence. Residents wrote of vast clouds passing overhead for days at a time. Next door to the Samuel farm, Waltus Watkins lost almost three hundred acres of various crops to the swarming insects. “They sometimes take large fields in a few hours,” he grieved. “This is the darkest time that I have ever seen.” Governor Hardin proclaimed a day of fasting and prayer. Within a month, the plague lifted.10

  ISOLATION CAN CHANGE a man. Sometimes it leads to insight, a new understanding of himself; sometimes it warps his perspective. By moving to distant Edgefield, Jesse had separated himself from all the things that had shaped his life: his mother, his mentor John Edwards, his friends and enemies, the familiar trails through the paw-paw bushes of the creekbeds and river bottoms. It got his restless mind moving again. It tempted him to pick up his neglected pen. And it seems to have stoked the deeper, darker fires of his personality—his recklessness, his sense of persecution, and, most of all, his desire for revenge.

  After moving to Tennessee, he often visited his uncle’s farm in Kentucky, where the naturally loquacious outlaw was able to speak freely with his young cousin, George Hite, Jr. “He wanted to quit the business,” Hite recalled, “but he said he had to make a living, and as the whole world seemed to be pitted against him, and he couldn’t do anything else, he kept on with it.” He quoted Jesse as saying, “They wouldn’t let me stay at home, and what else can I do?”

  Along with a belief in his own martyrdom came a burning rage for retribution. Hite recalled that his famous cousin went to Chicago for a few months in order to kill Allan Pinkerton. “I want him to know who did it,” Jesse told him. “It would do me no good if I couldn’t tell him about it before he died. I had a dozen chances to shoot him when he didn’t know it. I wanted to give him a fair chance, but the opportunity never came.” Whether a fantasy, an excuse, or a true story, the idea of killing Pinkerton clearly ate away at him. Hite said Jesse often repeated the refrain, “I know God will some day deliver Allan Pinkerton into my hands.”11

  And yet, moving to Tennessee ended one kind of isolation: his life underground, with its midnight travels between friendly farms and the constant lookout for pursuers. As J. D. Howard, he once again lived in daily contact with the community. And not just any community—this was the heart of his cherished South, a Confederate state that had long since rolled back Reconstruction and reinstated white supremacy. Here, his perspective changed, his horizons broadened, and with it all came a distressing realization. As he devoured the local newspapers, he discovered that he was seen merely as a curiosity, not a subject of serious discussion. For a man who had dominated the headlines and politics of Missouri for at least two years, this was unbearable.

  On July 11, 1875, the Nashville Republican Banner (a Democratic publication, despite the name) printed a letter from Jesse, purporting to come from Missouri. Not since December 29, 1873, had he written to a newspaper, but he had not needed to. After more than a year of deliberate symbolism and mythmaking—from the Kansas City fair robbery, in 1872, to the Gads Hill raid, in January 1874—his place in Missouri’s politics and popular culture had been firmly established. Now, he desperately wanted the same status in the rest of the South.

  The ostensible occasion for his (error-riddled) correspondence was the publication of reports that he, Frank, and the Younger brothers had been spotted in Kentucky. “I have never been out of Missouri since the Amnesty bill was introduced in the Mo. Legislatur last March, asking for pardon for the James and Younger Boys,” he wrote, helpfully bringing his new neighbors up to date on his political career. He blamed detective D. T. “Yankee” Bligh of Louisville for the rumors—and here he began to make the real point of his missive. First he dismissed Bligh as a “Sherman bummer”;* then he explained that he was a political martyr and a Confederate hero. “For 10 years the Radical papers in Missouri and other states have charged nearly every darring robbery in America to the James and Youngers. It is enough persecution in Northern papers to persecute us without the papers in the South, persecuting us, the land we fought for for four years to save from northern tyranny, to be persecuted by papers claiming to be Democratic, is against reason. The people of the south have heard only one side of the report.”12

  The letter appeared to be genuine, containing much of Jesse’s established rhetoric. (He accused his accusers of carrying out the robberies, for example.) The spelling and grammar attracted some skepticism, but, judging from archives of contemporary correspondence, it was no worse than the typical letter of the day, and those who had seen other examples of his unpolished prose agreed that it was authentic. “His spelling was imperfect,” Jesse’s brother-in-law noted later. “He would dash off a letter without pausing once, and would never read it over.” The outlaw concluded the note by describing the bombing of his mother’s house (by more “bummers”) and expressing his thanks to Dr. Paul Eve, a Nashville doctor who, he claimed, had treated his lung wound in 1867.13

  Jesse blamed Allan Pinkerton’s son William for leading the bombing raid, and William made the mistake of responding. On July 28, the Nashville Republican Banner published his angry reply, stating that he was in court in Chicago on the day in question. It was exactly what Jesse must have hoped for: a public controversy, a platform where he could stand and beat the Confederate war drum. On August 4, 1875, he drafted his response to Pinkerton’s reply, and mailed it to the Banner with a cover letter. The newspaper printed both items.

  “They is no doubt about Pinkerton’s force committing the crime & it is the duty of the press to denounce him,” he wrote in his introductory note.

  The St. Louis Times & Dispatch. and many other Democrat papers in Mo. have stood up faithfully for us (the James & Youngers) and last winter when the Amnesty bill was before the Legislature every Ex-confederate in the Legislature voted for our pardon. among the number were Gen. Shields, Gen Jones who forwarded the bill & Col. Stichan Hutchens Editor of the St. Louis Times* … It is only a question of time about us being granted a full amnesty our friends will forward the Amnesty bill again this winter in the 29th assembly of the Mo Legislature.… Major Jno N Edwards of the St. Louis Dispatch is at the present time writing the history of Quantrell and his men, which gives the history of the lives of the James & Youngers.

  Clearly Jesse remained in contact with his old mentor, who was indeed writing a book about the guerrillas. He concluded with a poke in his old enemy’s eye, and a partisan appeal. “Pinkerton has gained great notariety as a Detective, but we have so easily baffled him. & he has got his best men killed by him sending them after us … & he wants to poison the minds of all Democrats against us.”

  All this was simply the cover letter. In the item intended for publication, he offered a detailed alibi for many of his robberies, and went to great lengths to depict his battle with the Pinkertons as a struggle between North and South. “As to Pinkertons proveing he was in Chicago at the time he committed the outrage at mot
hers I do not doubt,” he wrote.

  Pinkerton can prove in Chicago that Black is white and white is Blac so can Gen Wm T Sherman prove in Chicago that Jeff Davisse had Lincoln assassinated & that the brave and gallant [Confederate] Gen Wade Hampton burnt Columbia, S.C. all this can be proven in Chicago, if people in the South didn’t know that Chicago was the home of Phil Sheridan and filled with Shermans Bummers it might have some effect for Pinkerton to say what he can prove in Chicago.

  The outlaw continued with increasing fury, swelling with his sense of righteousness and divinely ordained importance. “Providence saved the house from being burnt,” he wrote. Pinkerton, he added,

  better never dare to show his Scottish face again in Western Mo. and let him know he is here, or he will meet the fate his comrades, Capt. Lull & Witcher, meet.… Justice is slow but sure, and they is a just God that will bring all to justice. Pinkerton, I hope and pray that our Heavenly Father may deliver you into my hands, & I believe he will, for his merciful and protecting arm has ever been with me, and Shielded me, and during all my persecution he has watched over me & protected me from workers of blood money who are trying to seeak my life, and I have hope and faith in him & believe he will ever protect me as long as I serve him.

  These letters dripped with an odd mixture of an unhindered, expanding, almost maniacal ego and an astute understanding of politics and the press. Jesse had worked hard to make himself a public figure. An intense partisan and a voracious reader of the newspapers, he crafted his correspondence for deliberate effect. He went out of his way, for example, to praise the current and former sheriffs of Clay County as fellow rebels. “George E. Patton,” he wrote, “is a relative of Gen Frank Cheatham, of Tennessee, and a one-armed Confederate, and one of the noblest and bravest officers that ever was in Missouri.” Of Groom he wrote, “a more conscientius, braver and honorable officer never lived.” Thus he positioned himself carefully on the political landscape: his enemies were not other Confederates, even those in power, but rather vindictive Yankees and Radicals.14

  All this correspondence conjures up an image of an intense and obsessive Jesse James—and a lonely one. The miserable spelling and grammar demonstrate his isolation from both Edwards and his much-better-educated brother, the probable editors of his previous letters. The family’s dispersion affected Frank as well. In the summer of 1875, the Richmond Conservator reported, he was recognized near Zerelda’s farm, “careworn, haggard, and faded in appearance generally, and seemed only to desire that he should learn the whereabouts and condition of many friends, and be let alone.”15 Still, life went on. On August 31, Zee gave birth to a boy, her first child, who was christened Jesse Edwards James. Jesse wanted to honor John N. Edwards—and, of course, himself.16

  • • •

  A MYSTERY SURROUNDS Jesse James in the fall of 1875. On September 6, four men robbed the Bank of Huntington in the West Virginia town of the same name, not far from the eastern border of Kentucky. They carried out the raid with quiet, even polite professionalism. One matched the descriptions of Cole Younger. Another, wounded and captured on September 14, was Tom McDaniel, brother of the late William and a friend of the James brothers. On September 27, another man believed to have links to them, Thomas J. Webb, was arrested in Fentress County, Tennessee, while carrying $4,000. But no one ever identified the fourth Huntington bandit.17

  Was Jesse involved, or was he with his wife and newborn son outside of Nashville? Zee later claimed that the family suddenly moved to Baltimore for a short period after the Huntington raid. Though unconfirmed by other sources, the story raises the possibility that Webb’s capture in Tennessee prompted them to flee. And then there was a letter from Jesse, published in the Nashville Daily American a few days before Webb’s arrest. Over his career, his public denials correlated strongly with his actual crimes, though he had good reason to mock the detective fraternity. Before Tom McDaniel’s name was finally confirmed, Tom had been identified with great certainty as Cole Younger, then as Jesse James. “Instead of my being shot and captured,” Jesse wrote, “I am in St. Louis with friends, well, and feeling better than I have for years.” He derided Detective Bligh, who led the hunt, as “the incompetent detective of Louisville,” and claimed that he was glad one of the Huntington bandits had been captured. “The world can now see that neither one of the Jameses and Youngers are the men shot and captured.” He added, repeating the alibi Younger had previously offered, “I and Cole Younger are not friends, but I know he is innocent of the Huntington robbery, and I feel it my duty to defend him and his innocent and persecuted brothers from the false and slanderous reports circulated about them.” Given the highly specific dishonesty of his previous letters, this one suggests that he and Cole were closer than ever, and that the two of them had jointly led the raid.18

  The open question of Jesse’s involvement in the Huntington robbery is significant because it brings us tantalizingly close to understanding a shift in his personality. The long-distance strike into West Virginia had been the most daring operation, geographically speaking, ever attempted by the bandits. If we knew for a fact that it was his doing, it would complete the emerging picture of the outlaw’s expanding ambition.

  In all of Jesse’s writings, in his attention-getting crimes, in his alliance with John Edwards, he had shown himself to be both a believer and an actor in the Confederate project for Missouri. He reveled in his fame and influence, which he closely followed in the press (as seen by his analysis of the vote on the amnesty bill). But by the time he turned twenty-eight, on September 5, 1875, most of his dreams for his home state had been fulfilled. All summer long, the constitutional convention had labored on a new basic law to replace the constitution of 1865. The body itself signaled the triumph of the old rebels: fully half of the delegates were former Confederates or secessionist sympathizers, while only 28 percent were clearly identified Unionists—despite the fact that two-thirds of the state’s population had taken the Federal side during the war. And the document they drew up represented a profound rejection of the Radical legacy: it segregated the schools, banned interracial marriages, strictly limited taxation, and mandated regulation of the railroads. More remarkably, the delegates decided to bar serving soldiers and sailors, who had formed a bastion of Radical support during the war, from voting in state elections. They also included something for the outlaws: a provision granting amnesty for all wartime actions taken under Union or Confederate authority. Astonishingly, they set the end date for this immunity at August 20, 1866. This covered many of the depredations of the bushwhackers under Archie Clement during that tumultuous year, but not the occupation of Lexington by Bacon Montgomery’s militia unit.19

  The legislature followed suit with its own present for the James brothers: it limited the governor’s reward offers to $300. Only four times since 1865 had the governor offered more than that; and during the entire period since the Radicals lost control of the governorship, the James brothers had been the only individuals singled out for rewards larger than $300. The statutory limitation, then, specifically protected them.20

  Jesse’s long struggle had clearly succeeded. Thanks in part to his status as a rebel martyr and avenger, deftly elaborated by Edwards and others, Missouri had begun to acquire a Confederate identity that it had never had during the conflict itself. But by this time, as Jesse’s cousin George Hite testified, Jesse truly believed that he was unjustly persecuted, that his enemies would never let him rest, that he carried his life in his own hands. The myth that he had labored so hard to create had finally taken control of him: he truly believed he was doomed to a life of crime.

  Self-obsessed, craving attention, certain that he was seized by fate, Jesse probably would have developed wider horizons even if he had not moved away. With Missouri thoroughly redeemed—to use the term coined by white-supremacist Democrats—it would have been natural for him to turn his attention toward the rest of the South, “the land we fought for for four years to save from northern tyranny,” as he pu
t it. His 1875 press campaign offers evidence of that. And if he did indeed take part in the Huntington raid, it would suggest that this expanding ambition infected his banditry as well.

  Such enthusiasm was understandable. For former Confederates, this was a momentous time. As the year ended, almost every Southern state had been redeemed. With the Grant administration weakened by revelations of corruption and influence peddling among tax collectors in St. Louis—a group known as the “Whiskey Ring”—and with the House of Representatives out of Republican hands, Southern Democrats became bolder in their plans to recapture the last states where African Americans still voted and held public office. In 1875, they focused on Mississippi, where the black majority faced a wave of violence that overshadowed anything seen in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. “Nearly all the Democratic clubs in the state were converted into armed military companies,” wrote Congressman John R. Lynch, a former slave who had become one of the most important politicians in the state. “Funds with which to purchase arms were believed to have been contributed by the national Democratic organization. Nearly every Republican meeting was attended by one or more of these clubs or companies.” An insurrection broke out, turning the entire state, as one sheriff reported, into “one vast camp of armed white leaguers.” As the November election approached, the killing began in earnest.21

  This was revolution—a brutal assault on the ideals that had emerged out of the Civil War and the years that followed. It was a revolution that captured the imagination of Jesse James, who wrote and spoke of little but the war, politics, and his own persecution. In the presidential election year of 1876, this revolution would rise to the national level, carrying with it the inflating ambition of the guerrilla-turned-outlaw, which would soar toward a fatal climax.