T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  27. Hurt, 99, 102, 108–9. The total number of slaves is often erroneously given as seven, following an error by Settle. A careful review of probate and census records shows that six was the correct number in 1850.

  28. Potts, 265–6; Tabitha Gill to ?, May 17, 1846, Jane W. Gill to My Dear Mother & Sisters, March 29, 1846, and Jane W. Gill to Beloved Mother & Sisters, June 15, 1846, Watkins Mill. See William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), for a discussion of the tense ambivalence over slavery in the border South in the 1840s.

  29. Loveland, 186–218; Heyrman, 92, 138; McCandless, 215; Tabitha Gill to ?, May 17, 1846, Jane W. Gill to My Dear Mother & Sisters, March 29, 1846, Watkins Mill. Controversies such as this one show that challenges to a border-state identity occurred earlier than allowed for by Phillips.

  30. Jane W. Gill to Beloved Mother & Sisters, June 15, 1846, Watkins Mill; see Loveland, 187–8. For an influential perspective on the complex response of Southern churchmen to slavery, see Eugene D. Genovese’s collection of lectures, A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).

  31. Freehling, 353–452; quote from Adams appears on 413.

  32. Joseph G. Dawson, III, Doniphan’s Epic March: The 1st Missouri Volunteers in the Mexican War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 28–30; William E. Parrish, David Rice Atchison of Missouri: Border Politician (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1961), 38–64; Freehling, 353–456; McPherson, 47–9; McCandless, 232–45; Hurt, 270–6; Jane W. Gill to Beloved Mother & Sister, June 15, 1846, Watkins Mill.

  33. Beamis and Pullen, 58–59.

  34. Nadine Hodges and Mrs. Howard W. Woodruff, eds., Genealogical Notes from the Liberty Tribune (Liberty, Mo.: n.p., 1975), 15, 28–9; Beamis and Pullen, 58, put the wedding date at December 23, 1846; M. L. Lawson, “Founding and Location of William Jewell College,” Missouri Historical Society Collections 4, no. 3 (1914): 275–89. Hurt, 196–7; New Hope Congregation pledge, April 19, 1851, written on the back of J. C. Minter to Dear Cousin, September 9, 1847, Watkins Mill; Settle, 7.

  35. Yeatman, 26, claims Robert James owned 275 acres, but the careful inventory of the estate in the Robert James Probate Records indicates otherwise (though it is possible that James himself rented the eighty acres indicated); Settle, 6–7; Jane W. Gill to Beloved Mother & Sisters, June 15, 1846, Watkins Mill; Seventh Census of the United States (September 16, 1850). Settle, 7–8, discusses folklore that Robert might not have been the father of Jesse; as he notes, however, there is no evidence for this.

  36. Liberty Tribune, October 25, 1850; Carter to Dear Mother and Sisters, August 7, 1849, Watkins Mill; Potts, 263–6; see also History of Clay, 504–5, and Loveland, 67–83. Zerelda claimed to her granddaughter-in-law that she had been present with Jesse; see Stella James, In the Shadow of Jesse James (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Dragon Books, 1990), 38.

  37. Kate L. Gregg, “Missourians in the Gold Rush,” MHR 39, no. 1 (October 1944): 137–54; Hurt, 96–9, 127–8; Gregg, 150–3.

  38. Jane W. Gill to My Dear Sisters, April 14, 1850, Watkins Mill; Settle, 7. See Hurt, 79.

  39. Kansas City Times, April 14, 1882; Kansas City Journal, April 6, 1882.

  40. History of Clay, 152–53; Robert James Probate Records indicate he advanced at least $32.45 for his travel partnership.

  41. Clay County Probate Records; Settle, 7–8. Zerelda often repeated the story to reporters in later years.

  CHAPTER TWO: The Widow

  1. Wright submitted a detailed invoice to the administrator of James’s estate in an attempt to collect the remaining $26.30 he was owed; see Robert James Probate Records, Clay County Archives, Liberty, Missouri. Usually James’s death is placed in August 1850; this may be true, but Wright’s bill for Dr. Newman’s services suggests that he died in the first two weeks of September.

  2. Liberty Tribune, February 2, 1851, and October 25, 1850.

  3. Jane W. Gill to My Dear Sisters, April 14, 1850, Watkins Mill; Robert James Probate Records.

  4. Kansas City Times, April 4, 1882; St. Louis Republican, April 7, 1882; Stella F. James, In the Shadow of Jesse James (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Dragon Books, 1990), 58–62; Moss quoted in Settle, 60.

  5. Robert James Probate Records. The idea that Zerelda was not always so fierce is bolstered by Catherine Clinton’s argument that women who did not display a culturally acceptable feminine softness lost respectability; see The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 147–8.

  6. George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 23–4. All information presented here regarding the administration of the estate can be found in the sixty-page Robert James Probate Records. This file is exceptionally detailed, including invoices, receipts, inventories, and bills of sale.

  7. Robert James Probate Records; New Hope church subscription, April 19, 1851, written on the back of J. C. Minter to Dear Cousin, September 9, 1847, Watkins Mill.

  8. Robert James Probate Records.

  9. Rable, 25–30, has found that few widows in the South owned property, and what they had tended to dissipate; Settle, 6–7; Perry McCandless, A History of Missouri, vol. 2, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972), 191–2; R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 102, 203, 207; Jane W. Gill to My Dear Mother and Sisters, March 29, 1846, Jane W. Gill to Beloved Mother and Sisters, June 15, 1846, and Jane W. Gill to My Dear Sisters, April 14, 1850, Watkins Mill. The 1850 census noted that Frank had attended school during the previous year; by 1860, both boys were in school, apparently a typical makeshift country school; see the Seventh and Eighth Census of the United States, 1850 and 1860, and History of Clay, 266–7.

  10. E. Carter to Dear Mother and Sister, August 7, 1849, E. A. Carter to My Dear Sisters, August 30, 1850, and E. A. Carter to Dear Brother and Sister, July 31, 1851, Watkins Mill; McCandless, 219–20; Hurt, 75.

  11. Robert James Probate Records. See George F. Lemmer, “Farm Machinery in Ante-Bellum Missouri,” MHR 40, no. 4 (July 1946): 467–80, for a discussion of the slowness of Missouri farmers in adopting labor-saving devices and new farm equipment; Hurt, 109, however, points out that hemp farming, unlike corn or wheat cultivation, did not lend itself to mechanization. Clinton, 166–7, demonstrates the importance of female social networks in women’s lives, clearly seen in Zerelda’s dependence on the Wests.

  12. See Milton F. Perry’s appendix to Stella James, 127–8; also Jane W. Gill to Beloved Mother & Sister, June 15, 1846, Watkins Mill; Nanon Lucile Carr, ed., Marriage Records of Clay County, Missouri, 1822—1852 (privately printed: 1957); Katherine Gentry Bushman, ed., Index of the First Plat Book of Clay County, Missouri, 1819—1875 (n.p., n.d.), 82.

  13. Kansas City Times, April 4, 1882; History of Clay, 266; Milton Perry in Stella James, 127–8.

  14. History of Clay, 266; Elizabeth Carter to Martha James and Mother, June 12, 1853, Watkins Mill.

  15. Robert James Probate Records; Clay County Court Book, vol. 12, 21, and vol. 13, 116–17, Clay County Archives, Liberty, Missouri; Liberty Tribune, October 5, 1855.

  16. Stella James, 129, 59; E. M. Samuel to General Samuel Bassett, August 9, 1864, Provost-1. Clinton, 40–53, 147–8, discusses the “cult of domesticity” that circumscribed women’s lives; at the same time, being a wedded wife gave Zerelda social standing and expansive responsibilities she would have lacked as a widowed mother.

  17. County Court Book, vol. 13, 116–17, Clay County Archives; Yeatman, 27–8. See Clarence Hite’s confession in St. Louis Republican, November 12, 1883; Kansas City Times, April 4, 1882. On prenuptial agreements (and their limitations), see Rable, 22–3; see also Clinton, 40–53, 147–8.

  18. McCandless, 215–18; Barbara Oliver Korner and Carla Waal, eds., Hardsh
ip and Hope: Missouri Women Writing About Their Lives, 1820–1920 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 150; Hurt, 208, 211–12; see also Robert C. Fuller, Alternative Medicine and American Religious Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  19. Joan M. Beamis and William E. Pullen, Background of a Bandit: The Ancestry of Jesse James (n.p.: 1970), 60.

  20. See Zerelda’s comments about Jesse and Frank’s youth, Kansas City Times, April 4, 1882.

  21. Westport Border Star quoted on 426 in Janet Bruce, “Of Sugar and Salt and Things in the Cellar and Sun: Food Preservation in Jackson County in the 1850s,” MHR 75, no. 4 (July 1981): 417–47. On July 11, 1870, Reuben Samuel spoke of assisting his brother-in-law Jesse Cole in slaughtering hogs in the month of December; Liberty Tribune, July 22, 1870. For a broader discussion, see Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 42–75.

  22. Quoted in Bruce, 430.

  23. An icehouse is mentioned in the St. Louis Republican, February 4, 1875; it was standard in the 1850s.

  24. Contemporary references to “six weeks’ want” in Bruce, 423; see also Hurt, 157–8.

  25. Quoted in Bruce, 438.

  26. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Clay County, Missouri.

  27. See, for example, Margaret Kelso’s story in Korner and Waal, 149–50.

  28. Hurt, xiii, 243, persuasively argues that commercial farming dominated Little Dixie. Quote from R. Douglas Hurt, “Planters and Slavery in Little Dixie,” MHR 88, no. 4 (July 1994): 397–415.

  29. This discussion of hemp markets is based largely on Hurt’s excellent overview, Agriculture and Slavery, 103–30, and Miles W. Eaton, “The Development and Later Decline of the Hemp Industry in Missouri,” MHR 43, no. 4 (July 1949): 344–59.

  30. Liberty Tribune, October 22, 1858.

  31. As will be shown, contemporaries saw a stark increase during and after the Civil War in revolver wearing and use. Also note the controversial work of Michael Bellesiles, “The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760–1865,” Journal of American History 83, no. 2 (September 1996): 425–55, and Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000): 369–87. His work can only be a starting point for research; it has been found to be badly flawed at best, and a Bancroft Prize he won was rescinded.

  32. History of Clay, 451, 504; Robert James Probate Records; Hurt, 210–11, 220; McCandless, 151, 188, 197; Korner and Waal, 86; Elbert R. Bowen, “The Circus in Early Rural Missouri,” and “Negro Minstrels in Early Rural Missouri,” MHR 47, no. 1 (October 1952); 1–17 and 103–9; see also Lewis A. Atherton, The Frontier Merchant in Mid-America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 9–58.

  33. Kansas City Times, January 28, 1875; St. Louis Republican, February 5, 1875; W. B. Kemper, Assistant Provost Marshal, to Col. Joseph Dann, Acting Provost Marshal General, December 2, 1864, file 13681, Provost-2.

  CHAPTER THREE: The Slaves

  1. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850: Slave Schedules, Clay County, Missouri (to be cited as U.S. Census, 1850); Eighth Census of the United States, 1860: Slave Schedules, Clay County, Missouri, 1860 (to be cited as U.S. Census, 1860); the slave codes were amended in 1847 to forbid the education of slaves in reading and writing, Perry McCandless, A History of Missouri, vol. 2, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972), 58; Fellman, 7; R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 219. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 1, Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 540, makes the colonial New York comparison.

  2. Fellman, 8; McCandless, 39–41, 135; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 121; Hurt, x–xii; Freehling, 538–41. Note that Freehling’s map, 539, showing slave population percentages in Missouri, is inaccurate; compare to Hurt, 218–22.

  3. For an excellent discussion of the divisions within Missouri, see Jonas Viles, “Sections and Sectionalism in a Border State,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 21, no. 1 (June 1934): 3–22. Viles, like most historians of his era, mistakenly assumes that large-scale plantation agriculture was a necessary component for the survival of slavery and a Southern identity.

  4. Hurt, 218–23; the percentage of slaves in Clay County’s population in 1850 and 1860 was 27 percent. The case for slavery’s minimal importance is made by Fellman, 7, and Freehling, 541, though I have adapted Hurt’s numbers. R. Douglas Hurt, “Planters and Slavery in Little Dixie,” MHR 88, no. 4 (July 1994): 397–415.

  5. McCandless, 48, 200–4; Robert E. Shalhope, “Eugene Genovese, the Missouri Elite, and Civil War Historiography,” part 1, Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 26, no. 4 (July 1970): 217–82. Only 17 of 113 counties had farmland worth $4,000,000 or more; most abutted the Missouri River.

  6. The antebellum belief in slave labor as efficient, indeed necessary, is stressed by every recent study of Little Dixie. See especially James William McGettigan, Jr., “Boone County Slaves: Sales, Estate Divisions, and Families, 1820–1855,” part 1, MHR 72, no. 2 (January 1978): 176–97, and part 2, MHR 72, no. 3 (April 1978): 271–95; Philip V. Scarpino, “Slavery in Callaway County, Missouri: 1845–1855,” part 1, MHR 71, no. 1 (October 1976): 22–43, and part 2, MHR 71, no. 3 (April 1977): 266–83; Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 123, believes that slavery was necessary for hemp cultivation especially, and, 181, records that the labor price in the 1850s was “unprecedented”; see also Hurt, “Planters and Slavery”; Frank Blair, Jr., made his comments in 1855, quoted by Harrison A. Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 1804–1865 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1914), 55. Slave traders were active in every important Little Dixie town, but there were no signs of a large-scale sell-off to the Deep South. Trexler relies on politically stilted newspaper commentary to claim that a major sell-off began around 1860, but contradicts himself with harder evidence that slave prices remained high right up to the outbreak of the Civil War; see Harrison A. Trexler, “The Value and the Sale of the Missouri Slave,” MHR 8, no. 1 (January 1914): 69–85. McGettigan, part 1, and Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 223, show that slave traders experienced great difficulty buying slaves for the Deep South market, and that the demand for slaves within Missouri actually grew through 1860.

  7. Hurt, “Planters and Slavery,” 412–14; McGettigan, part 1, 176–97, part 2, 271–95; Scarpino, part 1, 22–43, part 2, 266–83. It should be noted that a skilled slave would more likely be sold privately, rather than in auction.

  8. Robert James Probate Records, Clay County Archives, Liberty, Missouri.

  9. Stella F. James, In the Shadow of Jesse James (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Dragon Books, 1990), 59; U.S. Census, 1850; U.S. Census, 1860; Leeann Whites, “The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3–21; see also Jane W. Gill to Beloved Mother and Sisters, June 15, 1846, Watkins Mill. An informative if irritatingly written overview of slave-master relations is in Freehling, 59–97; Eugene Genovese discusses the language of family, and some of the problems carried within it, in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 74–5.

  10. Elizabeth Carter to My Dear Sisters, August 30, 1850, Watkins Mill. McCandless finds that slaves were usually allowed some social life and local freedom of movement, 63–4, but McGettigan’s study of Boone County (part 2), cautions that slaves were not allowed to travel great distances, 284.

  11. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 206–44; Hurt, “Planters and Slavery,” 409–11. For a discussion about the debate over whether matriarchal households predominated in slave families, see Deborah Gray White, “Female Slaves: Sex Roles and S
tatus in the Antebellum South,” in Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past, ed. Catherine Clinton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 56–75. As Stevenson shows, the small number of slaves per household in the border states appears to have led to greater instability in bond servant families, as compared to large plantations in the Deep South.

  12. McGettigan, “Boone,” part 2, 285. The precariousness of slave marriages is underscored by every study cited so far. But Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kremer, and Antonio F. Holland argue, “The slave family, although often separated by sale and death, was the stabilizing unit of the slave community”; Missouri’s Black Heritage, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 35–6.

  13. U.S. Census, 1850; Robert James Probate Records. The census, taken only three months before the probate inventory, mistakenly records the youngest child as male; the more thorough inventory lists not only the girl’s sex, but her name as well. Stevenson’s study of the ratio of women to children in Virginia suggests that adult female slaves averaged two children each, under fourteen, at any given time; see 248.

  14. Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 225–36, 262–4; McGettigan conducted a careful survey that bolsters these points, “Boone,” part 1, 193–7; Trexler in 1914 wrote of “quite a local negro exchange” in Little Dixie, saying a “golden age of slave values” began in the 1850s, MHR, 69–78.

  15. Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 233; Hurt, “Planters and Slavery,” 409.

  16. George Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), 11: 342; Greene, 29–32. After the Civil War, the black “servants” on the farm slept in the kitchen during the winter; Kansas City Times, January 28, 1875.

  17. Rawick, 258; Greene, 32; McGettigan, part 2, 276.