T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  * During General William T. Sherman’s march to the sea during the Civil War, the destructive foragers on the edges of his force were called “bummers.”

  * In 1875, Stilson Hutchins started the St. Louis Times, and Edwards joined him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Anabasis

  THE YEAR OF CRISIS had arrived. In 1876, Americans could see the central issues in the life of the republic swelling into towering conflicts, like a storm front boiling in the distance. In February, the question of political reform crystallized in the St. Louis trial of Orville Babcock, President Grant’s private secretary, who was accused of profiting from the illicit Whiskey Ring. In March, the nation’s westward expansion hung in the balance as the army marched out against the last Indians who still possessed unceded territory. And a tempestuous presidential campaign loomed—the election in November promised to be a national referendum on Republican control of the White House, on the staggering economic depression, and on the continued enforcement of Reconstruction in the South.

  As if propelled by some dramatic force, each struggle was destined to end in a personal confrontation. Before the year was out, Grant would sit down with his reforming enemies to give a deposition for the Babcock trial, Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer would meet Crazy Horse by the Little Bighorn River, and the political parties would select two champions for the presidential election. And the battle over Reconstruction would lead Jesse James into the unlikeliest confrontation of all.

  Jesse would strike out at Adelbert Ames, a man who represented the opposite of everything Jesse stood for. He was a New England Yankee, a Union war hero, the intellectual product of Eastern cosmopolitan culture, and a leader of the Radical effort to remake the South. Like the opposing poles of a magnet, James and Ames would be pulled together by their very differences, traveling down paths that revealed the two sides of the badly divided nation. And when they met, one of them would be left shattered beyond recovery.

  In early May 1876, Ames launched himself toward that rendezvous by boarding a train in Washington, D.C., on the first leg of a long journey to Minnesota. He carried himself with the dignified air of the West Point graduate he was, with a rifle-straight posture and a direct, forthright manner. His features have been described as aristocratic: the high dome of his head crested in a swath of thinning brown hair; his lips were concealed under the great drooping horseshoe of a mustache that pointed to either side of his chin; his somewhat sunken eyes stared thoughtfully from under his overhanging brow.1

  During the trip, Ames had much to think about. The journey to Minnesota was spiritual as much as physical: a passage from agony into relief, from hope into regret, from a daylight-clear sense of purpose into dim uncertainty. His time in the South, the region that had consumed the last fifteen years of his life, was coming to a close.

  He had been in Washington as a witness called to testify before a Senate committee. There, he had described the path that took him South, and the crimes that drove him out again.2 His appearance reminded the senators—and many knew him well—that he, as much as any man, embodied the best America had to offer. Son of a sea captain from Rockland, Maine, he had spent much of his boyhood wandering the ocean on the deck of a sailing ship. Yet he had found time to excel in the sciences and the arts, mastering mathematics and painting alike, graduating near the top of his West Point class in 1861.

  From the first day of the Civil War until the last, he had served under fire, rising from leader of a single artillery battery at the first battle of Bull Run through a battlefield promotion at Gettysburg to head of a division, to further division commands in South Carolina, at Petersburg, and the final assault on Fort Fisher.3 Lee’s surrender had brought him new labors. “I am still at my duties,” he wrote from South Carolina, more than a year after Appomattox, “which consist in little more than aiding the agents of the Treasury Department and the Freedmen’s Bureau in trying white men for killing negroes, of which work we have more than we can well do.”

  As the nation struggled with the question of how to deal with the defeated South, Ames found few answers, for the country or himself. On August 2, 1866, he took an extended leave and departed for a tour of Europe. There he watched Gladstone and Disraeli debate in Parliament; attended a reading by Charles Dickens; met the Prince of Wales and Emperor Napoleon III. Once he might have been thrilled by such company; now, after four years of war, all he saw was its “hollowness.” One day he encountered an old friend, a happy but obscure painter. “I, on the other hand, have accomplished much—but to what end?” Ames mused. “Instead of having that which gives peace and contentment, I am adrift, seeking for what God only knows. I do not. Thus far my life has been with me one severe struggle and now that a time of rest is upon me, I am lost to find my position.”4

  In April 1867, he reported for duty in Vicksburg, Mississippi. There he joined the military administration that would govern the state under the Reconstruction Act, until the voters ratified a new constitution that enfranchised black men. In one of his first tasks, he presided over the trial of white men accused of murdering a group of African Americans and burning their homes. No one was willing to testify. “Thus I was taught,” he observed bitterly, “in the equal rights of a free people.”5

  His metamorphosis from soldier to statesman had begun. In 1868, he fell in love with Blanche Butler, a much-admired darling of Washington and daughter of Benjamin F. Butler. Her father had a reputation in the capital as one of the Union army’s worst generals and one of the Republican Party’s most powerful congressmen. Portly, bug-eyed, balding, Butler stood second only to Thaddeus Stevens in influence with the Radical faction in the House of Representatives—and in devotion to racial equality. He already knew Ames well, having served as his commander during the war. As Ames courted Butler’s daughter, the congressman increasingly influenced Ames’s thinking. He soon showed how far he had traveled in both passion and politics by sitting with Blanche at the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. But it would be the couple’s last meeting for nearly two years.6

  On June 15, 1868, Ames received orders to take over as provisional military governor of Mississippi. His political vision was now growing clearer by the day, but his task was nearly impossible. To set the state on its new path, he had to face the Ku Klux Klan, led in most places by prominent local planters; subordinates who openly sympathized with white supremacists; and the obstructionism of President Johnson, who continued to hamstring the civil rights acts. More and more, Ames found himself driven to the Radical position by the suffering and determination of African Americans. The New Englander moved forcefully, appointing new public officials at every level, including Mississippi’s first black officeholders. “General Ames’s knife cut deep,” wrote one white Republican, “but … Ames’s surgery was courageous and skilled.”7

  He had settled on his purpose, and, along with it, a new path, one that led straight into a political jungle. “I found, when I was military governor there,” he later told a Senate committee, “that the negroes had no rights whatever.” After two years in Mississippi, he strongly identified with their struggle. “I believed that I could render them great service. I felt that I had a mission to perform in their interest, and I hesitatingly consented to represent them, and unite my fortune with theirs.”8 When he next saw Blanche, it was as a U.S. senator, newly elected by the Republican, multiracial legislature of Mississippi.* Soon he traded quiet vows with her in marriage, but he shouted on Capitol Hill for federal action against the Ku Klux Klan. When a conservative faction threatened to tear apart the party in Mississippi, he returned in 1873 to run for governor, taking his place as leader of the Radical wing. With nearly universal black support, he swept the election.

  Ames was honest, courageous, and intelligent, his administration notable for its frugality and fairness. But the Republican Party’s national troubles, beginning with the depression of 1873, darkened Ames’s future. The year after he won the gubernatorial election in M
ississippi, white Democrats struck in Alabama, securing a victory at the polls by terrorizing black electors. Racial terror erupted in Louisiana as well, and in the countryside around Vicksburg. It filled him with despair, he wrote, but also the desire “to buckle on my armor anew that I may better fight the battle of the poor and oppressed colored man.”9

  In 1875, he learned that unarmed nobility was no match for brutality. In what became known as the Mississippi Plan, the Democratic Party reorganized its county chapters into paramilitary squads. Heavily armed columns of the party faithful wound through the state, storming Republican rallies and assassinating black activists. In some towns, the Democratic Party formed a virtual army of occupation, complete with patrols, checkpoints, and military encampments in the streets.10 As Ames stood in the governor’s mansion, receiving hourly telegrams of murders and military maneuvers, and as he watched the streets of Jackson fill with refugees from the countryside, he carefully thought through the consequences of his actions. He knew he could not trust his white militiamen, but he feared the outbreak of even greater racial violence if he relied only on black units. He needed an outside force, one that Southerners respected: he needed the U.S. Army.11

  The governor requested federal troops—and was stunned by the response. “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South,” wrote Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont, “and the great majority are ready to condemn any further interference on the part of the government.” With the black vote almost completely suppressed, and with whites unified through racism or terror, the Democrats won control of the new legislature. In early 1876 they immediately began impeachment proceedings against Ames on concocted charges. In the end, Blanche thought up a face-saving compromise: he would resign, and the legislature would dismiss the trumped-up impeachment. But no sooner had he stepped down than the Democrats published the charges, implying that guilt drove him away.12

  And so Ames, on the morning of May 11, 1876, found himself at the end of his journey from Washington, stepping off the train in Northfield, a small community in the farmland of southern Minnesota, where his father, Jesse, waited for him. The aging captain had long since given up the sea; now he lived in this landlocked village, where the only water was the calm Cannon River. Jesse, together with his other son, John, owned a flour mill on the Cannon’s banks. The business prospered, he told Adelbert, but he complained of getting old. At the house, the whole family turned out for a grand welcome. The gathering made Ames think of his own wife, Blanche, and his two children, whom he had left in Massachusetts with her parents.

  “My folks are very kind and considerate,” he wrote, “only as loving relatives can be.” But running through the reunion was an undercurrent of the tragedy that had left his future in ruins. So his parents now spoke of his joining the family business. “I see that Father expects me to buy,” he added, “and that all expect me to settle here. I have said neither yes nor no.”

  Despite his qualms, he threw himself into work at the mill. “I was running to and fro all day,” he observed to his wife, “and when night came I was quite tired and glad enough to go to bed.… Thus our life line begins. I hardly realize that I am here to make money. I have not yet become impregnated with that thought.… Speaking more accurately, I should have said I have not grown to a business frame of mind—an occupation.”13 With no real alternative, his resistance to making a permanent commitment to his father’s business slackened. “As yet I have not talked about buying,” he wrote to Blanche, “although Father has no doubt I will.” His astute wife wrote back promptly: “I think it better, Del, that your Father does wish you to buy the mill. There is nothing here in which you could invest your money so well.” Adelbert accepted her judgment. In May, he busied himself with the arrangements. Almost immediately, he began to make modest reforms. “I believe I shall be a better business man,” he told Blanche, “than I was a sailor, soldier, or politician.”

  But politics continued to haunt him. When a chest of documents arrived from his house in the South, he stayed up late poring through the papers, looking for items to send to the Senate committee that was investigating the Mississippi rebellion. At the end of May, he accompanied his brother, John, to St. Paul, where John served as a delegate to the state Republican convention. The presidential election was approaching, and everyone knew it would be the most bitterly contested, and the most momentous, since Lincoln squeaked into the White House in 1860. Even here, in prosperous, remote Northfield, far from the bloody fields of Mississippi, Ames must have suspected that he could not escape the knife edge of partisan hate.14

  • • •

  AT THE BEGINNING of July 1876, Jesse James stood beside his horse along a road in western Missouri. In just a day or two, every city and village in the country would celebrate the nation’s centennial; Jesse, however, had anything but patriotism on his mind. He and Frank were arguing with Cole and Bob Younger. A short distance away, a young man named Hobbs Kerry strained to hear their words. After listening for some time, he heard the hulking Cole shrug off the debate. “You fellows suggested this,” he said to the James brothers, “and I am just going with you.”15

  Kerry was a new recruit, as were two other men who also stood to the side. Actually, they were less recruits than volunteers, for Kerry and his friends had eagerly sought out the famous bandits over the previous weeks. A friend of the Youngers’ uncle Bruce, Kerry had cooked up a scheme during the preceding winter to rob the Granby Mining and Smelting Company.16 In May, he had met two acquaintances of the James and Younger brothers—Kansan Samuel Wells, known as Charlie Pitts, and William Stiles,* a native of Monticello, Minnesota, who went by the name of Bill Chadwell—and they had agreed to ask the James and Younger brothers to help them carry out Kerry’s plan.17

  “They [the bandits] think that it may be that we are fixing some trap to grab them, as it has been tried so often,” Kerry wrote on June 9. “They are afraid of everybody. Charlie says he will fix that all right when they get to see me and talk to them, and it will be all right.… Bill says they are red hot to do something, and you bet when I get to see them that I will convince them that Granby is the best place.” Subsequent attempts to contact the outlaws led to a tense confrontation with a suspicious Frank James, but Pitts and Chadwell put his mind at ease, and soon Jesse and the Youngers allowed the trio to join them. But not for the Granby robbery. Jesse was indeed “red hot to do something,” but that something was far bigger than anything contemplated by Kerry. He envisioned a complex, far-reaching operation, the topic of his discussion with Cole and Bob Younger.

  After Cole’s abrupt gesture of resignation, they all mounted again—the two James and two Younger brothers, Kerry, Pitts, and Chadwell, plus Clell Miller, making eight in all—and rode east across central Missouri in two parties. On Independence Day they reunited at a sympathizer’s house just north of California, Missouri. A pelting rain began that night. They spent the next day indoors, watching the water pound the earth outside into mud. On July 6, they broke up into two groups again, meeting once more at around 2 p.m. the next day. The location was an isolated stretch of the Missouri Pacific Railroad about two miles east of the Lamine River, in an excavation known as the Rocky Cut. It was much like the scene of their previous railway robberies: remote, contained by natural obstacles, well suited to the capture and control of a crowded train.18

  As the sun began to disappear behind the heavy timber that bracketed the tracks, the eight men mounted and rode toward the Lamine bridge, where a water tank stood. In short order, they took the watchman at the pump house prisoner, threw a few railroad ties across the tracks, and placed the blindfolded watchman between the rails, facing west. At about 10 p.m., the distinctive groaning chug of an approaching locomotive rolled through the woods. Wave your lantern, they told their prisoner. The train’s air brakes hissed loudly as the Number 4 Express responded to the signal, the cow catcher just plowing up onto the obstructing ties as the engine eased to a halt in th
e clear moonlight. Chadwell sprinted behind the last car and tossed a few rails across the tracks to block a retreat. The others ran to the engine and express car. Behind them, the watchman pulled his blindfold up over one eye, saw that no one was looking, and raced for the woods.19

  The man the bandits wanted to see was J. B. Bushnell, a veteran messenger for the United States Express Company. At his post in the baggage and express car, he stood guard over not only his own firm’s safe (for which he had a key), but also one belonging to the Adams Express that had been brought aboard, already locked, when the train had stopped at Sedalia to take on passengers and another baggage car from the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad. Despite Bushnell’s long service, the robbery caught him by surprise. “I was standing in the doorway when the train stopped suddenly,” he recalled. Peering into the darkness, he heard someone shout, “Shoot the son of a gun!” A bullet smacked into the door frame. Immediately he darted back through all three coaches and the two sleepers until he found the brakeman, who agreed to hide the key to the safe. The railroad man slipped it in his shoe and took a seat, pretending to be a passenger, as Bushnell started forward again.

  Back in the baggage and express car, three men hauled themselves up through the side door, each with a mask over his face—except for the leader. One witness described him in terms that matched Jesse James: a tall, sunburnt man with a striped linen coat, dark pants, and hat, “with light, straw-colored hair.” Baggage master Peter Conkling, who was in the car at the time, noticed that he had “blue eyes, and blinky eyes,” the kind often attributed to Jesse. Indeed, Conkling would always be convinced that Jesse was the very man who now shoved a revolver in his face and demanded the safe key. Conkling did not have it, of course, so the outlaw spun him around and prodded him ahead with his pistol. Point out the messenger, he said.20