T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

16. Edwards, “A Terrible Quintet”; Yeatman, 77, 83–4; History of Clay, 268; Edwards, Noted Guerrillas, 449; Settle, 31.

  17. Ante Petricevic, Nenad Ilic, Zeljko Mimica, Mirko Petricevic, and Jozo Ivancevic, “War Wounds of the Lungs Treated in Rama, Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Croatian Medical Journal 38, no. 1 (1997); see History of Clay, 268, and the account of Zerelda Mimms’s brother, T. W. Mimms, in the Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce, April 5, 1882.

  18. See, for example, accounts by John Groom, Liberty Tribune, July 22, 1870, and W. H. Ridge and W. J. Courtney, St. Louis Republican, April 7, 1882.

  19. McPherson, 839, 854; Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1863–1877: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 11–8, 66.

  20. Fellman, 242; Foner, 19; for Northern wartime expansion in general, see McPherson, 816–9. The state census of 1864 calculated a loss of 262, 146, a number that certainly grew in the aftermath of Price’s invasion and subsequent Union countermeasures; James Fernando Ellis, The Influence of Environment on the Settlement of Missouri (St. Louis: Webster Publishing, 1929), 144–5.

  21. History of Clay, 255, 265; A. G. Savery to Husband, June 18, 1865, A. G. Savery to Husband, July 1, 1865, Phineas Messenger Savery Papers, Duke; see also P. M. Savery to My Dear Wife, June 10, 1865 (same collection), and Sarah P. Harlan to Brother, April 12, 1865, Bond-Fentriss Family Papers, UNC.

  22. This discussion of Missouri’s late-war and early-postwar politics relies on several sources. Most important is William E. Parrish, Missouri Under Radical Rule, 1865–1870 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1965), 1–12, 45–6. See also Foner, 41–2; Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 285–92; William E. Parrish, Frank Blair: Lincoln’s Conservative (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 230–40; Michael Fellman, “Emancipation in Missouri,” MHR 83, no. 1 (October 1988): 36–56; John Starrett Hughes, “Lafayette County and the Aftermath of Slavery, 1861–1870,” MHR 75, no. 1 (October 1980): 51–63; and Robert M. Crisler, “Republican Areas of Missouri,” MHR 42, no. 4 (July 1948): 299–309. In an important study, Mark Grimsley overlooks the unusual role of civilian politics in shaping Union military policies in Missouri, a result of the large local role in military affairs in the state; see Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 36–52.

  23. William E. Parrish, “Reconstruction Politics in Missouri, 1865–1870,” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States During Reconstruction, ed. Richard O. Curry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 1–35; John H. Reppy, “Thomas Clement Fletcher,” in Shoemaker, 4: 43–52.

  24. Parrish, Radical, 13–8; David D. March, “Charles D. Drake and the Constitutional Convention of 1865,” MHR 47, no. 2 (January 1953): 110–23; Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kremer, and Antonio F. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 88; Sarah McDonald to Dear Children, January 18, 1865, coll. 1012, fold. 1, Charles B. France Papers, WHMC. With tens of thousands of black Missourians still enslaved (a large percentage of them women and children), it is clear that four years of war had badly damaged, but not “virtually destroyed,” slavery in the state, as argued in Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation: 1861–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ser. 1, 2: 551.

  25. Parrish, Radical, 20–33; March, 110–23; Foner, 41–2. Traditionally, Radical Reconstruction in Missouri has been castigated by historians, a local reflection of the scholarly reaction against Reconstruction that followed the late-nineteenth-century triumph of white supremacy. A more balanced view of Missouri’s case began to emerge in the 1960s in Parrish’s work and Fred DeArmond’s “Reconstruction in Missouri,” MHR 61, no. 3 (April 1967): 364–77—still a valuable reappraisal.

  26. Foner, Reconstruction, 32; Parrish, Radical, 18.

  27. Parrish, Radical, 25, 33–6; D. Peterson to Brother, August 7, 1866, Jane Peterson Papers, Duke; Martha Kohl, “Enforcing a Vision of Community: The Role of the Test Oath in Missouri’s Reconstruction,” CWH 40, no. 4 (December 1994): 292–307.

  28. David D. March, “The Campaign for the Ratification of the Constitution of 1865,” MHR 47, no. 3 (April 1953): 223–32; Kohl, 294–301. For a discussion of the free-labor critique of slavery, see chap. 3, and, especially, Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, orig. pub. 1970).

  29. Foner, Reconstruction, 60–1; John Glendower Westover, “The Evolution of the Missouri Militia, 1804–1919” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1948), 171–2; Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce, May 11, 1865; Kohl asserts, quite correctly, “The popularity of the test oath in 1865 among Unionists—especially in rural Missouri where the fighting had been fiercest—cannot be overestimated,” 294.

  30. Joseph Dixon to Hon. Thomas C. Fletcher, March 17, 1865, Thomas C. Fletcher Papers, MSA; Parrish, Radical, 29–33, 45–6; March, “Campaign,” 223–32.

  31. A. G. Savery to Husband, June 18, 1865, Phineas Messenger Savery Papers, Duke.

  32. Lexington Caucasian, May 2, 1866, and October 17, 1866. See also Thomas S. Barclay, The Liberal Republican Movement in Missouri, 1865–1871 (Columbia: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1926), 48–9.

  33. The starting point of the discussion that follows is Michael Fellman’s excellent analysis of postwar violence and enmities in Inside War, 231–47.

  34. S. P. Harlan to Mother and Father, June 9, 1865, Bond-Fentriss Family Papers, UNC; History of Clay, 257.

  35. A. G. Savery to Husband, June 18, 1865, A. G. Savery to Husband, July 1, 1865, Phineas Messenger Savery Papers, Duke.

  36. Fellman, 237; Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 59–62; Joseph G. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 72–9.

  37. George Miller, Missouri’s Memorable Decade, 1860–1870 (Columbia, Mo.: E. W. Stephens, 1898); S. P. Harlan to Sister, June 16, 1866, Bond-Fentriss Family Papers, UNC.

  38. Edith Abbott, “The Civil War and the Crime Wave of 1865–1870,” Social Service Review 1, no. 2 (June 1927): 212–34; Ted Robert Gurr, “On the History of Violent Crime in Europe and America,” in Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979); Lonnie Athens, The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals (London: Routledge, 1989). Richard Rhodes applies Athens’s work to the military setting in Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 286–312. Many veterans may have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, though this concept does not fit Jesse James and his fellow guerrillas; see Eric T. Dean, Jr., “ ‘We Will All Be Lost and Destroyed’: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Civil War,” CWH 37, no. 2 (June 1991): 138–53.

  39. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 350–61; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Dueling,” and Andrew Kevin Frank, “South,” in Violence in America: An Encyclopedia, ed. Ronald Gottesman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999), 1: 445–7, 3: 183–9; Elliot J. Gorn, “ ‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (February 1985): 18–43; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 765–71. In Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2000), Dick Steward shows how dueling was a means of social advancement in antebellum Missouri and influenced other forms of violence, which were
widespread.

  40. T. J. Stiles, ed., Robber Barons and Radicals: Reconstruction and the Origin of Civil Rights (New York: Berkley, 1997), 26; St. Louis Republican, November 10, 1866. As late as 1875, Charles Nordhoff would be startled by the prevalence of arms wearing in the South; Otis A. Stingletary, Negro Militia and Reconstruction (New York: McGraw-Hill/University of Texas Press, 1971), 3. See also Michael Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 377–81. Bellesiles’s research and thesis (arguing that there was no “gun culture” before the Civil War) have been found to be badly flawed at best. But he makes the obvious but important point that revolver production vastly increased as a result of the war. His book should be used with care, but it provides a starting point for further research.

  41. 2nd Lieutenant James B. Burbank to General, October 25, 1866, B 232, Department of the Missouri, Letters Received 1861–1867, entry 2395, RG 393, part 1, NA; Dan to Brother, May 17, 1866, Jane Peterson Papers, Duke. Elliot J. Gorn, “ ‘Gouge,’ ” correctly attributes the decline of rough-and-tumble fighting to the spread of firearms, but incorrectly dates this well before the Civil War. Gun manufacturers began to petition for permission to sell weapons and ammunition in Missouri less than a month after Appomattox (which was granted), O.R. 1: XLVIII, part 2: 322.

  42. Parrish, Radical, 29–33, 45–6; Radical Union Men of Ray County to His Excellency, Thomas C. Fletcher, February 24, 1865, Joseph E. Black and D. P. Whitmer to Col. A. J. Barr, March 18, 1865, and A. J. Barr to His Excellency Governor Thomas C. Fletcher, March 19, 1865, Thomas C. Fletcher Papers, MSA.

  43. History of Clay, 259; Parrish, Radical, 58–61.

  44. Parrish, Radical, 29–33, 45–6, 61–5.

  45. Kohl, 297; Fellman, 233, 237–8; Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce, July 2, 1865; Lexington Caucasian, April 28, 1866.

  46. Foner, Reconstruction, 9, 119–23; see also Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction at the First Session, Thirty-Ninth Congress (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1969, orig. pub. 1866); Barry Crouch, “A Spirit of Lawlessness: White Violence, Texas Blacks, 1865–1868,” in Black Freedom/White Violence, 1865–1900, ed. Donald G. Nieman (New York: Garland, 1994), 51–65. George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), xi, writes that whites “found an outlet for their frustration by attacking those deemed responsible for their suffering: white Republicans and blacks.” Gaines M. Foster, in Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 22–35, argues that the South suffered deep shame and a sense of a loss of manhood, an argument that actually bolsters Rable’s point. For a classic study of the grassroots fight between Fascists and socialists in post–World War I Italy, see Paul Corner, Fascism in Ferrara, 1915–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). For an important study in the German context, see Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  47. Parrish, Radical, 106–7; History III, 152–3; Greene, Kremer, and Holland, 81; Fellman, “Emancipation,” 50; Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate, 285–8. For an excellent brief discussion of the outbreak of violence against freed people in Missouri, see Berlin et al., 562–3.

  48. Rogers quoted in Fellman, 236; O.R. 1: XLVIII, part 1: 239; part 2: 669, 738; Castel and Goodrich, 136; Andrew M. Hamilton to Andrew Johnson, March 1, 1866, in The Papers of Andrew Johnson, ed. Paul H. Bergeron (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 10: 202–3. See also Hughes, 51–63.

  49. Edwards, “A Terrible Quintet”; Yeatman, 77, 83–4; History of Clay, 268; Settle, 31. The presence of a young woman is suggested by both the list of slaves on the farm in 1860 (see chap. 3), and the fact that someone on the farm gave birth to a biracial boy in 1868, at a time when Charlotte was possibly too old to bear a child; see the U.S. Census for Clay County, 1870, 1880, and 1890.

  50. Edwards, “A Terrible Quintet”; in their two-year study, Petricevic et al. found pneumothorax in only 7.8 percent of war wounds of the lung; Yeatman, 71, 80.

  51. St. Louis Republican, April 7, 1882; Liberty Tribune, July 22, 1870.

  52. St. Joseph Gazette, December 17, 1869.

  53. Edwards, Noted Guerrillas, 449; S. P. Harlan to Mother and Father, November 1, 1864, Bond-Fentriss Family Papers, UNC; Proverbs 28: 1.

  54. William A. Pinkerton, Train Robberies, Train Robbers, and the “Holdup” Men (New York: Arno Press, 1974, orig. pub. 1907), 11–16. The History of Clay, 268, notes that the James brothers reunited with their old comrades. James Pool became a candidate for sheriff of Lafayette County in 1866; see next chapter for a full discussion.

  55. Republican Central Committee Meeting, Clay County, January 1, 1866, coll. 970, fold. 161, Clarence W. Alvord and Idress Head Collection, WHMC; Republican Central Committee of Clay County to Governor Thomas C. Fletcher, January 3, 1866, Thomas C. Fletcher Papers, MSA; Liberty Tribune, June 2, 1865; for rebel grumbling, see M. Scruggs to Son, January 30, 1866, Watkins Mill.

  CHAPTER TEN: The Guerrillas Return

  1. On the concentration of Radical Unionists in towns during the war, see Joseph Dixon to Hon. Thomas C. Fletcher, March 17, 1865, Thomas C. Fletcher Papers, MSA, and History of Clay, 252–60.

  2. In addition to Love, Sheriff James M. Jones and county clerk William Brining served as directors. Liberty Tribune, June 18, 1863, June 2, 1865, February 16, 1866, September 24 and October 1, 1869, August 5, 1870; advertisement of E. M. Samuel, commission and forwarding merchant, 106 North 2nd Street, St. Louis, April 24, 1866, coll. 970, fold. 107, Clarence W. Alvord and Idress Head Collection, WHMC; E. M. Samuel to Col. Jos. Dann, Jr., Acting Provost Marshal General, November 29, 1864, record 1209, and E. M. Samuel to Col. Joseph Dann, Jr., December 10, 1864, Provost-1. A list of depositors and borrowers includes many leading Republicans, strongly reinforcing the notion that the bank was a distinctly Radical institution; it also seems to have lent E. M. Samuel $81.72 to establish his business in St. Louis; Greenup Bird, “Clay County Savings Association Robbery Description, 1866,” typed copy, coll. 693, WHMC. The Farmer’s Bank of Missouri was based in Lexington, where it originated as a branch of the State Bank of Missouri; William Young, Young’s History of Lafayette County, Missouri (Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen, 1910), 302–3.

  3. Lewis E. Davids and Timothy W. Hubbard, Banking in Mid-America: A History of Missouri’s Banks (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1969), 97; Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 17. See also Esther Rogoff Taus, Central Banking Functions of the United States Treasury, 1789–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 26–7, for a discussion of discounting. Harry S. Gleick, “Banking in Early Missouri,” parts 1 and 2,MHR 61, no. 4 (July 1967): 427–43, and 62, no. 1 (October 1967): 30–44, discusses antebellum Missouri. The quote from the St. Louis Democrat was in the Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce, April 14, 1873. For a concise, general overview of the changes in American money, see the author’s “As Good as Gold?,” Smithsonian 31, no. 6 (September 2000): 106–17. Note that silver was officially a legal-tender precious metal, but the effects of Gresham’s Law drove it out of circulation.

  4. Herman E. Kroos, ed., Documentary History of Banking and Currency in the United States (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1965), 1315–6. The extent of the government’s role in the suspension of gold payments is disputed by historians, but certainly it played a role; Robert P. Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party: An Economic Study of Civil War and Reconstruction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 15–28; James K. Kindahl, “Economic Factors in Specie Resumption, 1865–1879,” in The Reinterpretation of American Economic History, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert W. Fogel (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 468–79; also Unger, 13–14. Se
e also Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 3–14.

  5. Sharkey, 28–50; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 442–50; John Jay Knox, A History of Banking in the United States (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969, orig. pub. 1903), 91–104. In addition to federal restrictions, the new Missouri constitution of 1865 denied state banks the right to issue notes, and required laws to enable them to reorganize as national banks; see Isidor Loeb, “Constitutions and Constitutional Conventions in Missouri,” MHR 16, no. 2 (January 1922): 189–238.

  6. Davids and Hubbard, 110–12; Richard Sylla, “Federal Policy, Banking Market Structure, and Capital Mobilization in the United States, 1863–1913,” Journal of Economic History 29, no. 4 (December 1969): 657–86; see also H. Peers Brewer, “Eastern Money and Western Mortgages in the 1870s,” Business History Review 50, no. 3 (autumn 1976): 356–80; Allan G. Bogue, “Financing the Prairie Farmer,” in Engerman and Fogel, 301–10; Lance E. Davis, “Capital Mobility and American Growth,” in Engerman and Fogel, 285–300. As of October 1, 1865, only twelve national banks had been organized in Missouri, seven of them in St. Louis; one of them (in Columbia) had already been liquidated; Report of the Comptroller of the Currency, 1865 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1865), 4–5, no. Even if the capital requirements could be met, it was thought such a sum could be more profitably invested in something other than a rural national bank.

  7. Report of the Comptroller, 1865, 4–5; Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 268–74, offers an important review of this disparity in currency circulation, noting that the per capita circulation of national banknotes in the South and border states ran roughly at one-tenth that of the eastern seaboard (see especially map on 270). Taus, 63–4, notes that checking only began to spread widely in the 1880s. The first clearinghouse in St. Louis was not organized until 1868; Howard L. Conard, ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Missouri (New York: Southern History Company, 1901), 2: 23–5.