T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Jesse moved compulsively from crime to crime. After he and his men returned to the Hite farm from Dovey’s store, Ryan departed for Nashville in a buggy with Clarence Hite, Wood’s younger brother. But Jesse wanted to test his luck again. He took Liddil into the country to hold up a stagecoach. Along the way, they encountered two mounted men on a country lane, and Jesse decided to rob them. The intended victims, however, immediately drew their own revolvers, and both sides opened fire. A brief, indecisive skirmish ensued. The resistance discouraged the bandits, who gave up their plans and returned home.4

  The robberies and plans for robberies continued, interspersed with revelry. In Nashville, Jesse and Liddil attended the horse races. Then they traveled to Atlanta in late October for more of the same. Jesse may have been running his own colt, which he owned in partnership with Jonas Taylor; the horse won nine of twenty-one races during this period, earning a handsome $5,350. But Jesse soon returned home and sold the animal to merchant Jim Greener, then boarded a train for Missouri in November. There he tried to organize another strike as he moved between the homes of his mother and such sympathizers as Martha Bolton, in Ray County, and Bob Hudspeth, in Jackson. After idling with the Ford brothers, Ryan, and Cummins, Jesse abandoned his plans. He took Ryan, Cummins, and Liddil on the return trip, riding stolen horses, and arrived in Nashville about December 1, 1880.

  Amid this wandering and restless life, a forbidding aspect of Jesse’s personality asserted itself: he became increasingly suspicious. Before departing for Missouri, he had shifted his family to a boardinghouse in Nashville. As soon as he returned, he moved again, renting a house in suburban Edgefield, where he had once lived. Over the next several weeks, as he made forays into the countryside to scout fresh targets, Jesse began to doubt Cummins’s loyalty. Frank, who considered this would-be bandit “an apprehensive, nervous sort of chap,” said that “his fidgetting and restlessness attracted Jesse’s attention, and he became suspicious that Jim was nerving himself up to betray us.” Convinced of his duplicity, Jesse decided to act first. “While living at Edgefield,” Liddil recalled, “Jesse tried to get us to agree to have Cummins killed, but I would not agree to it.” Soon afterward, in early 1881, Cummins disappeared. Convinced that he had gone to the authorities, the outlaws quickly relocated within the city.5

  It turned out that Jesse was wrong, though he never admitted it to himself. Indeed, outright paranoia had begun to sink its roots into him. Sometime in 1880, he had focused his worries on Ed Miller. The two argued, “and they bravely agreed to settle it by fighting it out,” wrote a journalist who interviewed George Hite, Jr. According to Clarence Hite, the duel took place in Jackson or Lafayette County, Missouri. “They were in a fuss about stopping to get some tobacco,” he said, “and after riding some distance, Ed shot at Jesse and shot a hole through his hat and then Jesse turned and shot him off his horse.”6

  Having disposed of these distractions, Jesse resumed his relentless cascade of holdups. In early 1881, he set out with Ryan and another man, probably Wood Hite. He had discovered a particularly inviting target: a remote army engineering crew working on the Muscle Shoals canal in northern Alabama. At ten o’clock on March 11, 1881, Jesse led his two followers to Thomas H. Peden’s saloon, just one hundred yards from the canal. The innkeeper’s recollections were riddled with inaccuracies, but he did notice that one man had something wrong with a finger. This fellow was “very correct & intelligent in conversation, quick spoken, and to all appearances the leader of the crowd,” Peden said. “He talked politics most of the time, remarking he was well acquainted with Secretaries Windom & Lincoln.” (This was a reference to William Windom and Robert Todd Lincoln, the newly designated heads of the Treasury and War Departments, respectively.) Jesse seemed particularly interested in the incoming president, James A. Garfield. He also inquired in detail about whether “the negroes in slavery” had been harder to “manage” than they were now.7

  Jesse seemed to have regained his old form, chatting about race and politics before a potentially lethal confrontation—just like the lunch at North-field—and mischievously claiming to know Abraham Lincoln’s son. Indeed, everything ran smoothly that day. Combining excellent intelligence with good luck, the three bandits caught Alexander G. Smith, the receiver of materials for the Bluewater division of the canal project, as he returned from the bank in the town of Florence with a month’s payroll. They stole $5,240.18—some in gold and silver coin, some in greenbacks and national banknotes—but hesitated at a small sum in Smith’s vest pocket. “The robber inquired if the money was government money or my own money,” Smith recalled. “I told them it was mine, meaning that it would form a part of my salary. The robber told me, he did not want it, neither did they take my watch. They said, they only wanted government money.”8

  The outlaws ordered Smith to follow them as they rode north. Shortly before nightfall, Jesse halted the group as they emerged from the woods onto a road and asked directions from a farmer. The fellow he spoke to, E. N. Hartsfield, proved to be that rarest kind of man—an accurate witness. Hartsfield described Jesse as having “light complexion, sandy hair, full face, keen blue eyes and riding a fine bay horse.” Jesse peppered Hartsfield with questions about the distance to Tennessee and other points, and asked if any “still houses” were nearby. The local man said No to the last question. Jesse smiled and rode off, heading toward a spot where an illicit distillery had recently stood. That night he let Smith go. The army engineers dispatched an agent named Daniel Comer to hunt the bandits down, but they escaped safely.9

  Muscle Shoals was a perfect robbery—but its aftermath was a disaster. On March 25, 1881, Ryan, passing under the name of Thomas Hill, departed for the Hite farm in Kentucky. A few miles north of Nashville, he decided to stop for a drink at a store on the White’s Creek turnpike. Before long he was drunk. Turning to W. L. Earthman, he roared in his distinctive Irish accent that “he was an outlaw against State, county and the Federal Government, and was now acting as a government detective.” Unfortunately for Ryan, Earthman was Justice Earthman, of Davidson County. In short order Earthman had Ryan under arrest. On patting him down, he found two revolvers and some $1,400. Five days later, Smith walked into the Nashville jail to see the prisoner, and immediately recognized him as one of the three Muscle Shoals bandits.10

  The day after Ryan’s arrest was a Saturday. Liddil was at Jesse James’s house that afternoon. Since Jesse thought it best to stay inside so soon after a robbery, Liddil went into Nashville for him to collect money from the sale of some of Jesse’s furniture. “I got an evening paper,” Liddil recalled, “and saw from the description [of the arrested man] that it was Ryan. I went over and told Jesse and Frank.” For the increasingly edgy Jesse, the capture must have conjured up the ghost of Hobbs Kerry. Ryan, too, was a non-bushwhacker recruit who had been caught because of his reckless behavior. In this case, however, the danger stemmed not only from the imprisoned bandit, but from the man who made the arrest. The two James brothers knew W. L. Earthman personally, having met him at a racetrack in 1879. It would not take him long to connect Ryan to the man he knew as J. D. Howard.11

  Both brothers decided to flee Nashville immediately. That same day they set out for the Hite farm with Liddil. Jesse sent Zee and the children on to Donny Pence’s home, in Nelson County, Kentucky, and Frank hurried Annie and little Robert on to Kansas City by train. While they were resting at the Hite house, Clarence—a tall, stoop-shouldered young man—ran in with the news that three heavily armed men were riding up the road. Startled, they snatched up their rifles and shotguns and took defensive positions—Frank at the parlor window, Jesse at the front door, Liddil in the hallway behind him. They watched as the suspicious party approached the house, then slowly rode past without firing a shot.

  After the tension lifted, Liddil, Frank, and Jesse joined Zee at Pence’s home. She and the children went to Louisville with Clarence to catch the train back to Kearney. Just before she “took the cars,” in the express
ion of the time, she reportedly raised some $70 by renting a horse and buggy, then selling both to a pair of unsuspecting gentlemen. A week later, Liddil and Jesse took the same route. The two men rode stolen horses all the way to the depot; indeed, Jesse was a chronic and indiscriminate horse thief.12

  Frank lingered in Kentucky another week before reluctantly departing for Missouri. His life had been upended overnight, and it left him depressed. “Try as we might to break off from our Bohemian life, something would always occur to drive us back,” he reflected sadly a year and a half after the escape from Nashville. “It was with a sense of despair that I drove away from our little home … and again became a wanderer.”13 He blamed the reckless Ryan for his troubles, but he must have seen that the real cause was closer at hand. No matter how hard he worked, no matter what choices he made, his fate was lashed tight to his younger brother’s impulsive decisions. What he could not know was how soon that would end.

  AS THE DRAMA of the James brothers played out in their secret strongholds, another story unfolded among their enemies—a story of will and a lack of will. In the wake of the Muscle Shoals robbery and Ryan’s capture, U.S. deputy marshal W. S. Overton tracked the James brothers and Liddil on their flight from Tennessee. With two hired guns, James B. Murphy and A. J. Sullivan, Overton followed their trail into Kentucky, to the Hite house; it was Overton and his men who rode past while Frank and Jesse waited at the windows, weapons ready. But Overton was well out of his northern Alabama jurisdiction, so he applied to the local sheriff to make the actual arrest. The sheriff declined, according to Overton and Sullivan, “saying it would be unsafe for him, for the James boys’ friends would kill him, that they had large connections in that county, that he knew that they had been making Hite’s their headquarters for the last three or four years.” Sullivan suggested that he be appointed a deputy, but the sheriff refused to have anything to do with the matter.*

  Overton turned to the federal commissioner, a low-ranking judicial officer, in Russellville. “He refused to issue a warrant,” Overton complained, “[explaining] that he would have to read the warrant to the parties, and then they would find out who issued it, and their friends would kill him.” Thoroughly stymied, Overton went back to Major W. R. King of the army engineers; King promptly applied to Washington for troops to make the arrest. The matter landed on the desk of President Garfield himself, who referred it to the attorney general—who said that no soldiers would be forthcoming. He cited the Posse Comitatus Act of June 18, 1878 (actually a rider attached to an army appropriations bill). Passed at the insistence of resurgent, anti-Reconstruction Democrats, the act prohibited the use of the military in law enforcement, except in cases of insurrection. The law largely stripped the federal government of its police powers.14

  As the officials in Kentucky and Washington, D.C., took refuge in legalities and outright fear, a more courageous set stepped forward in Missouri. In Clay County, former bushwhacker James Timberlake succeeded John Groom as sheriff. “The people of that section speak of him as a man utterly devoid of fear, strictly upright and conscientious,” one reporter noted. Despite his former affiliation with the James brothers, Timberlake was determined to stop them; indeed, he offered proof that, though all their sympathizers were former rebels, not all former rebels were sympathizers.15

  More evidence of this came in 1880 with William H. Wallace’s campaign for the post of Jackson County prosecutor. The son of a slaveowning family, Wallace had been forced to flee under General Order No. 11 during the war, but he detested the James gang, and he loudly pledged to wipe it out. The Democratic Party saw this as an attack on Confederates in general and denied him the nomination, so Wallace ran as an independent. “I made my campaign alone on horseback throughout the country part of the county,” he recalled, “speaking in storerooms or country churches or school houses, usually at night. I charged specifically and by name that Jesse James, Frank James, Ed Miller, Dick Liddil, William Ryan … were committing the train robberies, bank robberies, and murders throughout the State.… My foolhardiness—for such, indeed, it was—occasioned astonishment, and intense excitement.” Despite death threats and Democratic ridicule, Wallace won.16

  And then there was the new governor, Thomas T. Crittenden, the man who would emerge as Jesse James’s most prominent foe in the days to come. Like his three predecessors, he was a Unionist Democrat. As a lieutenant colonel in the Missouri State Militia, he had personally battled guerrillas during the war. But his nomination, in 1880, reflected in part the growing harmony within the statewide party; he had been the law partner of Francis M. Cockrell, the former Confederate general who now served as a U.S. senator. (Crittenden himself served two terms in the House in the 1870s.) Indeed, former rebels were now so powerful within the party that Republicans could plausibly attack the Democrats “for their abject servile submission to the dictates of the confederate wing of their party.”17

  In light of the coming conflict between Crittenden and the outlaws, the new governor would later be called “the candidate of the railroad companies and their political friends.”18 This is a mistake. He favored immigration and economic development, true, but in that he was identical to every other governor in the country. As the press observed, Crittenden was a liberal in the classical sense—a believer in laissez faire, intending to protect the railways from excessive regulation while denying them government aid. He would actually prove far less of an ally of corporate interests than the Democratic regimes of the post-Reconstruction South. The second most important battle he would wage as governor would be against the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, which still owed interest on an antebellum loan from the state.19

  His most important battle would be against Jesse James. On January 10, 1881, Crittenden devoted much of his inaugural address to a virtual declaration of war on the outlaws. “Missouri cannot be the home and abiding place of lawlessness of any character. No political affiliations shall ever be evoked as the means of concealment of any class of law-breakers,” he announced. The most startling aspect of this speech was its stern recognition of the political nature of the bandits’ support. “I confess there was a large element of my own party who had more sympathy with such outlaws than with my undertaking to suppress them,” he later mused. “If not in full sympathy with them, giving the glad hand of welcome day and night, they acquiesced in their acts with suppressed joy, with eyes half closed on their crimes as those of a medieval saint upon the sins of the devotees.”20 And yet, the very fact that he confronted such sympathy so openly showed how it had weakened since the fall of Reconstruction.21

  Even with forceful officials and a newly favorable political environment, the war against the outlaws required luck—and luck soon came. William Wallace had been in office barely three months when the Kansas City police received a telegram from Nashville describing a desperado arrested on the outskirts of the city on March 25, 1881. Some thought it might be Ryan, known to be an associate of Jesse James. “I had known Ryan well at Independence before he became an outlaw,” Wallace recalled, “and I went at once to police headquarters to see the description. I was sure it was Ryan.” Wallace asked Crittenden to request extradition, which was promptly done. Then he went to the state penitentiary to see Tucker Bassham. The novice at crime had been captured in July 1880, charged with the Glendale robbery, and imprisoned after pleading guilty. Wallace convinced him to testify against Ryan in return for a pardon, which Crittenden happily agreed to provide.22

  On the evening of July 15, 1881, the governor’s burgeoning war on banditry seemed to be progressing smoothly. Wallace was deep in his preparations for the Ryan trial, and Jesse James had not struck in Missouri for almost two years. Before the clock ticked past midnight, however, the wires carried the news that a Rock Island train had been robbed that very night near the village of Winston.

  Upon returning to Missouri in April, Jesse had boldly settled his family right in Kansas City. Then he had gathered his recruits for yet another train robbery
. Frank had agreed to help—reluctantly, perhaps, after his years of peaceful labor—joining his cousins Wood and Clarence Hite, along with Dick Liddil. But Jesse had developed an infected tooth, abruptly terminating their plans. During his recovery, he had heard the news that the president had been shot. Jesse, now sporting a full beard, dyed black, had spent July 4 in a Kansas City newspaper office, fascinated by the fast-arriving bulletins on the attempted assassination. Only recently inaugurated, the mortally wounded Garfield would linger until September 19.23

  On the night of July 14, the gang gathered again east of Winston. They tied up their horses too far from the railroad tracks, however, and missed the train they intended to rob. The next evening they decided to be more careful. After leaving their mounts in the woods, they walked west into town, then boarded the train. “Jesse was our captain,” reported his young cousin, Clarence. The James brothers and Wood took seats in the smoking car; Clarence and Liddil stepped onto the front platform of the express car. The robbery began as Jesse rose from his seat and commenced firing a terrifying fusillade, killing the conductor, William Westfall, and a passenger named Frank McMillan. The bandits emptied the express safe, stopped the train near their horses, then mounted and rode into the Crooked River basin that the James brothers had haunted during the war. “Jesse and Frank said they knew the country,” Clarence recalled. “We went down the river five or six miles and stopped on a bluff.” The loot came to roughly $600—just $120 each.