T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  18. Trexler, 37; Scarpino, part 2, 268; Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 265; Greene, 33; Rawick, 157, 330–2.

  19. Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 103–30; Miles W. Eaton, “The Development and Later Decline of the Hemp Industry in Missouri,” MHR 43, no. 4 (July 1949): 344–59; Greene, 25–9; Robert James Probate Records.

  20. Robert James Probate Records.

  21. Hurt, “Planters and Slavery,” 411; U.S. Census, 1860.

  22. Rawick, 140, 324; Jane W. Gill to Beloved Mother and Sister, June 15, 1846, and E. Carter to My Ever Dear Mother and Sisters, November 25, 1847, Watkins Mill; Scarpino, parts 1 and 2, comments effectively on the contradictory mind-set of slaveowners in Little Dixie; later evidence shows that Charlotte never left the Samuel farm, even after emancipation.

  23. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: Penguin, 1968), 103; “Address to the British People,” May 12, 1846, reprinted in T. J. Stiles, ed., The Citizen’s Handbook (New York: Berkley, 1993), 97.

  24. Rawick, 281.

  25. Rawick, 146, 176, 322–3. Slaveholders’ latent fear of their servants is generally accepted; see David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 32; quote from History of Clay, 179.

  26. Benjamin G. Merkel, “The Underground Railroad and the Missouri Borders, 1840–1860,” MHR 37, no. 4 (July 1943): 271–85. McGettigan, part 2, 277.

  27. McCandless, 57–8; Hurt, 247, 259; Greene, 39; Rawick, 96, 281. Genovese provides the general context of Southern laws controlling slaves, 25–49; John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), argue that patrols were ineffective in actual practice, 150–6.

  28. Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 247–59; Greene, 46.

  29. Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 258–9. Merkel claims that outsiders were essential to escape attempts, 285.

  30. Trexler, “Value and Sale,” 68–72; McGettigan, part 2, 285; Greene, 28, 47–9; Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 254.

  31. Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 254; Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 180–5. The specific political context, and repercussions, of this growing paranoia is discussed below; for a general discussion, see Davis, 32–61. For a thorough discussion of antebellum mob action throughout the South, see David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 100–34. Grimsted shows that the suppression of dissent was widespread in the region, and increased in the late 1850s.

  32. Liberty Tribune, October 5, 1855; History of Clay, 174.

  33. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 54; Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 273–5; Freehling, 432–3; William E. Parrish, David Rice Atchison of Missouri: Border Politician (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1961), 86–9, 98, 112–16; Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of a Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 170; Shalhope, 217–82; Benjamin G. Merkel, “The Slavery Issue and the Political Decline of Thomas Hart Benton, 1846–1856,” MHR 38, no. 4 (July 1944): 388–407; McCandless, 241–55; James C. Malin, “The Proslavery Background of the Kansas Struggle,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 10, no. 3 (December 1923): 285–305. Little Dixie politicians dominated the legislature, due in part to constitutional inequities in representation, enhanced by the legislative reapportionment of 1849.

  34. Parrish, 98, 112–16; Merkel, “Benton,” 388–407; Hurt, 273–5; McCandless, 241–55; Malin, 286; McPherson, 78–86.

  35. Parrish, vii–16, 92, 115–16, 151; McPherson, 81; Malin, 286.

  36. Parrish, 121–4, 149; Floyd C. Shoemaker, “Missouri’s Pro-Slavery Fight for Kansas, 1854–1855,” part 1, MHR 48, no. 2 (January 1954): 221–36; Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 275; Malin, 290–1.

  37. Parrish, 139–151; McPherson, 121–3; Malin, 290.

  38. Davis, 38–41.

  39. Foner, 90–3. Foner’s classic study is the basis for this review of Northern views of the South.

  40. Foner, 42–3; Davis, 53, 56; Freehling, 558–60; McPherson, 54–5.

  41. Foner, 57; McPherson, 55.

  42. Foner, 94, 116; McPherson, 123–6.

  43. Shoemaker, 226–7; Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 82–4.

  44. Parrish, 162–3; Atchison quoted in James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1969), 81.

  45. Parrish, 162–3; History of Clay, 168; Milton E. Bierbaum, “Frederick Starr: A Missouri Border Abolitionist: The Making of a Martyr,” MHR 58, no. 3 (April 1964): 309–25; Lester B. Baltimore, “Benjamin F. Stringfellow: The Fight for Slavery on the Missouri Border,” MHR 62, no. 1 (October 1967): 14–29. Parrish gives the date as July 29; I am following Bierbaum.

  46. Parrish, 162; History of Clay, 170; Thomas Goodrich, War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas 1854–1861 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1998), 27–8.

  47. David Rice Atchison to Jefferson Davis, September 24, 1854, David Rice Atchison Papers, WHMC. Ironically, Atchison had helped quiet attacks on the Mormons during the crisis of the 1830s.

  48. Oates, 84–9; quote in Thomas Goodrich, War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas 1854–1861, (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1998), 49.

  49. Fellman, 291–3; Baltimore, 22; Jay Monaghan, The Civil War on the Western Border (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), 18–9; Floyd C. Shoemaker, “Missouri’s Pro-Slavery Fight for Kansas, 1854–1855,” part 2, MHR 48, no. 3 (April 1954): 325–40.

  50. Parrish, 175–80; Monaghan, 24–33.

  51. History of Clay, 174–7; Hurt, 289.

  52. Parrish, 200–1; McPherson, 148–9.

  53. McPherson, 149–52, 155–7; Rawley, 160–1.

  54. Parrish, 203–7; McPherson, 161; Rawley, 159–60.

  55. Phillips, 181–205, in his argument that Missourians considered themselves part of the border West, not South, underplays the internal conflict created by proslavery extremism, which was a central element of the secessionist struggle in Missouri. Michael Fellman has painted a vivid portrait of how the Kansas conflict shaped Northern views of proslavery Missourians, but he, too, overlooks Missouri’s internal battle; see Michael Fellman, “Rehearsal for the Civil War: Antislavery and Proslavery at the Fighting Point in Kansas, 1854–1856,” in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, ed. Michael Fellman and Lewis Perry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 287–307. Grimsted, 246–65, offers a fine summary of the fighting in Kansas, but he also misses the role of the border ruffians inside Missouri.

  56. Parrish, 162; Bierbaum, 318–25; Baltimore, 22; Shoemaker, part 2, 325–40; Roy G. Magers, “The Raid on the Parkville Industrial Luminary,” MHR 30, no. 1 (October 1935): 39–46; History of Clay, 171–2.

  57. Liberty Tribune, February 21, 1855, and November 11, 1854; Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 276–8.

  58. Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 290–1. This is a modification (but an essential one) of Phillips’s argument (see, for example, 185).

  59. History of Clay, 160–3.

  60. Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 279–84; Magers, 39–46; Bierbaum, 324.

  61. History of Clay, 171–2, 177; Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 279–84.

  62. Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 284–9; Shalhope, 217–82.

  63. Rawley, x–xi; Merkel, “Underground Railroad,” 278–80; Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery, 273–4. George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 31–49, shows how Southern women emerged as “defenders of the faith” regarding slavery.

  PART TWO: FIRE

  CHAPTER FOUR: Rebels

  1. Liberty
Tribune, May 10, 1861; Yeatman, 30; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 273–4, 317; History of Clay, 190–202. The anonymous author of the History of Clay discusses the unprecedented role of women in the secession debate (lending credence to the notion that Zerelda may have attended this meeting). Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of a Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 240–1, argues that Missouri neutralism was sincere, a product of the border mentality of the state. He has an excellent point, but this was one of the most strongly secessionist sections of the state. War had already erupted, animating pro-Southern partisans, who clearly influenced the document’s language.

  2. McPherson, 198; Robert V. Bruce, “The Shadow of the Coming War,” in Lincoln the War President, ed. Gabor S. Borrit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3–28; see also Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Penguin, 1995), 99.

  3. William E. Parrish, David Rice Atchison: Border Politician (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1961), 208–10; Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 270–1, 288–93; McPherson, 149, 162–9.

  4. Benjamin G. Merkel, “The Underground Railroad and the Missouri Borders, 1840–1860,” MHR 37, no. 4 (July 1943): 271–85; Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 254, 261–5; Floyd C. Shoemaker, “Missouriana: John Brown’s Missouri Raid,” MHR 26, no. 1 (October 1931): 78–83; McPherson, 202–13; Philip T. Tucker, “ ‘Ho, for Kansas’: The Southwest Expedition of 1860,” MHR 86, no. 1 (October 1991): 22–36.

  5. McPherson, 213–21.

  6. T. M. Scruggs to M. B. R. Williams, August 1860, Watkins Mill; John N. Edwards, “A Terrible Quintet,” special supplement to the St. Louis Dispatch, November 23, 1873, Walter B. Stevens Scrapbook, vol. 34, coll. 1424, WHMC; History of Clay, 184–6.

  7. McPherson, 212, 224–5, 229.

  8. History III, 1–5; Christopher Phillips, “Calculated Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Strategy for Secession in Missouri,” MHR 94, no. 4 (July 2000): 389–414; T. M. Scruggs to M. B. R. Williams, August 1860, Watkins Mill; McPherson, 232–5.

  9. R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 298–300; History of Clay, 187–8; History III, 8. Attempts to gauge Missouri’s bias toward disunion have usually rested on election results (see, for example, William Boed, “Secessionist Strength in Missouri,” MHR 72, no. 4 [July 1978]: 412–23), but the state did not yet use the secret ballot, making voters susceptible to public pressure.

  10. History of Clay, 191–2; History III, 5, 79–80; John W. Luke to Mary W. Handy, February 11, 1861, Watkins Mill.

  11. History III, 1–6; Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 235–8; Christopher Phillips, Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 133; Thomas L. Snead, “The First Year of the War in Missouri,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, ed. Clarence Clough Buel and Robert Underwood Johnson (New York: Century Co., 1887), 1: 262; William E. Parrish, Frank Blair: Lincoln’s Conservative (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 90–2; William E. Parrish, Turbulent Partnership: Missouri and the Union, 1861–1865 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963), 4–8; Robert E. Miller, “ ‘One of the Ruling Class,’ Thomas Caute Reynolds: Second Confederate Governor of Missouri,” MHR 80, no. 4 (July 1986): 442-8.

  12. History III, 1–9; Parrish, Frank Blair, 90–5; Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 7–17; Phillips, Damned Yankee, 129–30, 135–49; Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 238–40; History of Clay, 192–3.

  13. Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 245–9; Phillips, Damned Yankee, 156-7; History III, 10–2; Parrish, Frank Blair, 95–6; Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 17, 20–1; O. R., 1: I: 684, 690; History of Clay, 195–7.

  14. Phillips, Damned Yankee, 163–5, 177–82; Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 251; Miller, 427–9; History of Clay, 197–8. The people of Missouri, like most Americans, were unprepared for war; no matter how well armed the population may have been with hunting rifles and shotguns, the existing supply of specifically military weapons was insufficient, and Missouri’s military institutions were almost nonexistent. John Glendower Westover discusses the near abandonment of the militia after the Mexican War in “The Evolution of the Missouri Militia, 1804–1919” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1948), chaps. 2 and 3; he notes, 119, that only 1,464 men were in the militia in 1861, most of them in St. Louis. See also the testimony of O. P. Moss, Militia Report, 388, who referred to his service in the “cornstalk militia,” a common phrase across America that alluded to the lack of military arms. This characterization of Clay County is drawn from History of Clay, 200–3, and the testimony of E. M. Samuel, F. R. Long, James M. Jones, J. H. Moss, and O. P. Moss, Militia Report, 381–404.

  15. Phillips, Damned Yankee, 180–93; Memoirs of General William T. Sherman (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984), 172–74; Albert Castel, General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 12–3; Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 23–4.

  16. Phillips, Damned Yankee, 157, 190–3; Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 252–3; History of Clay, 199–203; Castel, 14–5; for an earlier view of these events, see Jonas Viles, “Sections and Sectionalism in a Border State,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 21, no. 1 (June 1934): 3–22. Phillips is quite critical of Lyon, as is Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 36–7.

  17. Phillips, Damned Yankee, 204–14; Castel, 18–9; Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 25–31; History of Clay, 203.

  18. Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 256–7; Castel, 16–21; Parrish, Frank Blair, 108; see also Snead, in Buel and Johnson, 267; Thomas L. Snead, The Fight for Missouri (New York: Scribner’s, 1886), 196–7; History III, 17–23. Kansas had been accepted as a free state in 1861. This version of Lyon’s quote appeared in the press only a few weeks after the conference; Snead’s book offers a much-cited later variant.

  19. Castel, 35, 28–9; Snead, in Buel and Johnson, 270.

  20. History of Clay, 203–5; Castel, 25–30; Snead, in Buel and Johnson, 267–73; O.R. 1: III: 734–6, VII: 496–7, LIII: 696. The difficulties in communication with Price’s army are amply demonstrated in the 1861 letters of T. M. Scruggs, Watkins Mill.

  21. Phillips, Damned Yankee, 215–57; McPherson, 350–2; Castel, 31–49.

  22. McPherson, 317–24; Militia Report, 408.

  23. Chase spoke on August 7, 1863, quoted in Fellman, 56–7, second quote dated July 1864, 47.

  24. Militia Report, 368; Stephen Z. Starr, Jennison’s Jayhawkers: A Civil War Cavalry Regiment and Its Commander (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 41–2, 60, 99–102; Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 30.

  25. Edward Samuel denied any relationship with Reuben Samuel; see E. M. Samuel to General Samuel Bassett, August 9, 1864, Provost-1.

  26. History of Clay, 205–7, 220; Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 66–7; Militia Report, 381–3, 386–9, 395–404.

  27. Richard S. Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 31; Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 54; History III, 60; Albert Castel, “Quantrill’s Bushwhackers: A Case Study in Partisan Warfare,” in Winning and Losing the Civil War: Essays and Stories, ed. Albert Castel (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 135. Fellman also blames the Kansans (see, for example, 35), but he also writes that “communities were usually divided and fought among themselves,” 38, which he amply illustrates. Don R. Bowen argues that “the uprising, from the microcosm of Jackson County, was a defensive war against an intruding external
world”; Don R. Bowen, “Counterrevolutionary Guerrilla War: Missouri, 1861–1865,” Conflict 8, no. 1 (1988): 69–78. Bowen’s analysis of the social status of Jackson County insurrectionists is most useful, though his conclusions about the rebellion’s source are incorrect.

  28. History of Clay, 203–21; Phillips, Damned Yankee, 263; Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 256; Grimsley, 35–52. Starr’s excellent study of Jennison’s regiment illustrates the cooperation between Kansas forces and local Unionists, demonstrating that Jennison did not think all Missourians were rebels. In 1864, James M. Jones, a Clay County court judge, reported that only three raids from Kansas had penetrated the county since the war began, Militia Report, 396.

  29. Militia Report, 409, 448.

  30. The importance of prewar mobilization over Kansas lies in three areas: the foundations it built for paramilitary organization; the internal divisions it fostered in an otherwise relatively politically homogenous region; and the ideological basis it established for secessionism, with regard to the threat seen against slavery-based society. The 1850s, then, provided the “incubation period” for guerrilla warfare identified by Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction, 1998), 392–3.

  31. See chap. 3; Kansas City Times, December 3, 1872; History III, 88–9; Don R. Bowen, “Guerrilla War in Western Missouri, 1862–1865: Historical Extensions of the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19, no. 1 (January 1977): 30–51; Bowen, “Counterrevolutionary Guerrilla War”; see also David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969). I am arguing directly against the idea expressed by Brownlee, that the state had “good prospects for peace” until Union troops destroyed them, 52. The slavery struggle has been mistakenly slighted as a cause for rebellion; see, for example, Bowen, “Counterrevolutionary Guerrilla War”; Castel, “Quantrill’s Bushwhackers,” 137, and Edward E. Leslie, The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 85–6n.