T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  60. Brownlee, 242; Missouri Valley Register, December 20, 1866; Statement of J. M. Turley, box 1, fold. 37, William Connelly Collection, Denver Public Library; First Lieutenant James R. Kelly to Bvt. Brig. General C. McKeever, December 12, 1866, Department of the Missouri, Letters Received 1861–1867, entry 2395, RG 393, part 1, NA; Lexington Caucasian, February 23, 1867. Some writers (e.g., Brownlee) mistakenly state that enlistment at this time was mandatory. Under General Order No. 7, it was voluntary; see Kansas City Daily Journal of Commerce, December 14, 1866.

  61. Brownlee, 242–3; Missouri Valley Register, December 20, 1866; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 24, 1876. Most details from the fight in the City Hotel and the chase up the street are taken from mutually supporting statements from Moses and Turley in the Connelly Collection, cited previously

  62. Richd. C. Vaughan to Major General Hancock, December 13, 1866, Robert Nugent to General, December 20, 1866, and Richard C. Vaughan to Major General Hancock, December 23, 1866, Department of the Missouri, Letters Received 1861–1867, entry 2395, RG 393, part 1, NA; Lexington Caucasian, January 9 and February 23, 1867. Moses identified Turley as the leader of the raid on the newspaper. Montgomery’s trial was heavily covered in the Lexington Caucasian, but through the assistance of Timothy Rives of the National Archives facility in Kansas City, I have been unable to find any evidence that he was indicted on criminal charges. Since criminal trial outcomes in the federal district court for central Missouri were all recorded, this almost certainly indicates that Montgomery faced a civil lawsuit.

  63. Lexington Caucasian, January 9 and 16, February 2, 9, 16, and 23, 1867; St. Louis Republican, March 27, 1867. Adjutant General Samuel Simpson ordered the militia force that occupied Lexington mustered out of service on February 6, 1867; Samuel Simpson to Brig. General Bacon Montgomery, February 6, 1867, Letterbook, Dec. 17, 1866 to Jan. 22, 1869, Office of the Adjutant General, MSA.

  64. Kansas City Times, August 23, 1876. To grasp his sincerity, contrast these words with John N. Edwards, Noted Guerrillas, or the Warfare of the Border (St. Louis: H. W. Brand & Co., 1879), 365–6.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Death of Captain Sheets

  1. Fears of a renewed outbreak of fighting were not limited to Missouri; see William A. Ross, Jr., “Was There Danger of a Second Civil War During Reconstruction?,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 25, no. 1 (June 1938): 39–58.

  2. It is important to note that the leading Conservatives of Lexington were Unionists (though they had family ties to rebels, as in the case of James M. Pool). In fact, one of U.S. assessor Richard C. Vaughan’s complaints about the militia, in his suit against Bacon Montgomery, was that he had enlisted Confederate bushwhackers. This Unionism must be kept in mind when reading the Conservatives’ strident anti-Radical rhetoric. (Frank Blair, for example, declared that Governor Fletcher had “declared war” on the people of Lafayette and Jackson Counties.) See the Lexington Caucasian, January 9, 1867. On March 4, 1867, Governor Fletcher wrote to inform Major Reeves Leonard that there were no more militiamen on duty in the state; coll. 1013, fold. 494, Abiel Leonard Papers, WHMC.

  3. L. M. Matz to Cousin, February 13, 1867, William Dunlap Simpson Papers, Duke.

  4. Captain W. E. Chester to Thomas C. Fletcher, December 27, 1866, coll. 970, fold. 376, Clarence W. Alvord and Idress Head Collection, WHMC; Chester remained with his company near Warrensburg as late as February 12, 1867; Adjutant General to Bacon Montgomery, February 12, 1867, Letterbook, Dec. 17, 1866 to Jan. 22, 1869, Office of the Adjutant General, MSA.

  5. Settle, 31–2, notes that the guerrillas themselves provoked a hostile reaction from postwar society, but he largely misses the political frenzy of 1865–67 that framed their emergence as bandits. Albert Castel, William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times (New York: Frederick Fell, 1962), 221–2, comes closer, though he misses the complexities of postwar violence. It appears incorrect, or at least insufficient, to say that the bushwhackers suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, as their postwar violence was organized and purposeful, not merely compulsive; 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.

  6. For a study of the social background of the guerrilla gangs centered in Jackson County, see 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.

  7. William E. Parrish, Missouri Under Radical Rule, 1865–1870 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1965), 100–1; Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1863–1877: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 261–71; Kansas City Journal of Commerce, November 16, 1866.

  8. In an important study, Walter Laqueur repeatedly notes, “There is in fact no clear dividing line between guerrilla warfare, terror and brigandage”; Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998), 93–8, 384–7. Part of what divides banditry from guerrilla warfare, he writes, is the “political incentive” of the guerrilla; as this book shows, that ingredient was present in the postwar bushwhackers, making the distinction between their crimes and irregular warfare or terrorism even more indistinct.

  9. St. Louis Republican, May 23, 28, and 29, 1867; Liberty Tribune, May 15 and 31, 1867; Richmond Conservator, June 1, 1867; History III, 233.

  10. A link between the Savannah robbers and the bushwhackers associated with the James brothers has been disputed. Contemporary newspaper reports do not identify any known guerrillas (St. Louis Republican, March 3, 1867; Liberty Tribune, November 23, 1866, March 8 and 29, 1867), and Robert J. Wybrow’s careful review casts doubt on any connection; see his “ ‘Ravenous Monsters of Society’: The Early Exploits of the James Gang,” Brand Book 27, no. 2 (summer 1990), published by the English Westerners’ Society, 1–24. However, Governor Fletcher issued a reward offer on March 15, 1867, for Jim White, a bushwhacker who would also be a suspect in the events described below; Shoemaker, 4: 306–9. The Banker’s Magazine and Statistical Register, May 1867, attributed the Savannah robbery to “a band of desperadoes, under notorious bushwhackers.” The evidence is at best inconclusive. For the Titus brothers, see Shoemaker, 4: 315–16, and W. M. Paxton, Annals of Platte County, Missouri (Kansas City: Hudson-Kimberly Publishing, 1897), 426.

  11. Richmond Conservator, May 24, 1867; for references to the “exceedingly rough weather” of March, see the St. Louis Republican, March 28, 1867.

  12. Portrait and Biographical Record of Clay, Ray, Carroll, Chariton, and Linn Counties, Missouri (Chicago: Chapman Brothers, 1893), 428, 708–9.

  13. Richmond Conservator, May 25, 1867; Biographical Record, 191; Wybrow, “Ravenous Monsters,” 11–12. Deputy Sheriff Tom Reyburn was probably a relative of Sheriff Adam K. Reyburn, a leading Radical; see Ray County Petition to His Excellency Thomas C. Fletcher, February 24, 1865, Thomas C. Fletcher Papers, MSA. The gunfight was also reported in the Liberty Tribune, May 31, 1867.

  14. Liberty Tribune, May 31, 1867; St. Louis Republican, May 30, 1867. Wasson informed the Tribune that $4,000 had been stolen, a figure later amended to $3,500. The smaller take, relative to Liberty, may be due to the fact that Richmond had a less active economy, and that Hughes & Wasson engaged primarily in small, short-term loans, and may not have kept much cash on hand; see the discount book, 1859–1881, J. S. Hughes & Co., vol. 3, coll. 277, WHMC.

  15. Richard S. Brownlee, Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 253–61.

  16. Kansas City Journal of Commerce, May 28, 1867.

  17. Liberty Tribune, May 24 and 31, 1867; St. Louis Republican, May 31, 1867. The killing of one of the Hulse clan by the militia in 1866 had prompted President Johnson to dispatch General William T. Sherman to confer with Governor Fletcher; Thomas C. Ready to Andrew Johnson, July 24, 1866, Paul H. Bergeron, ed., The
Papers of Andrew Johnson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 10: 727–9. The rumors about Bradley’s involvement were alluded to in the St. Louis Republican, May 28, 1867; Wybrow, “Ravenous Monsters,” 12–3. Reyburn personally offered a $500 reward for the capture of the bandits; Richmond Conservator, June 1, 1867. For a political spin on the robbery, see St. Louis Republican, May 31, 1867.

  18. St. Louis Republican, May 30, 1867; Wybrow, “Ravenous Monsters,” 13; Yeatman, 92. The Liberty Tribune, May 31, 1867, reported the governor’s reward proclamation, though apparently no copy was still in existence when Shoemaker and Avery compiled their authoritative Messages and Proclamations. It should be noted that the state constitution of 1865 preserved the governor’s control over the St. Louis police, as established during the secession crisis of 1861; History III, 202–3.

  19. The rumors were reported by merchant Daniel Conway in the St. Joseph Gazette, December 17, 1869; the anonymous neighbor was interviewed in the St. Louis Dispatch, February 10, 1874.

  20. Wybrow, “Ravenous Monsters,” 13; Settle, 36; Edward E. Leslie, The Devil Knows How to Ride: The True Story of William Clarke Quantrill and His Confederate Raiders (New York: Da Capo, 1998), 288.

  21. Richmond Conservator, November 30, 1867; Wybrow, “Ravenous Monsters,” 13. The bank can be identified by the names of the officers, Preston Roberts and William McCoy, cited in the letter to the Conservator; see Report of the Comptroller of the Currency, December 2, 1867 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1867), 551.

  22. Richmond Conservator, March 22, 1868; St. Louis Republican, March 27, 1868; Liberty Tribune, July 24, 1868; Leslie, 394; Settle, 37; Wybrow, “Ravenous Monsters,” 13.

  23. The identity of the bandits and their rendezvous in Chaplin was uncovered by Louisville detective D. T. Bligh (see below). Bligh presented his findings in a letter to the governor of Missouri dated March 3, 1875. This letter has long been cited as an important source on the James brothers’ activities, but I was unable to locate it in the Missouri State Archives. See Wybrow, “Ravenous Monsters,” 15–18; Robert J. Wybrow, “The James Gang in Kentucky: A Tale of Murder and Robbery in the Blue Grass State,” Brand Book 15, no. 2 (January 1973), published by the English Westerners’ Society, 22–34; Settle, 37–8; Yeatman, 93–5.

  24. St. Louis Dispatch, February 10, 1874.

  25. Settle, 96–7; William N. Gregg to George M. Bennett, April 9, 1898, and E. G. Bower to George M. Bennett, April 25, 1898, Younger Brothers Pardon Application Files, fold. 2: Petitions and Letters in Support of Parole, nos. 555 and 556, 1889–1901, in “Northfield (Minnesota) Bank Robbery of 1876: Selected Manuscripts Collection and Government Records” (microfilm publication), MnHS; Marley Brant, The Outlaw Youngers: A Confederate Brotherhood (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1993),49–56, 82–5. In The Story of Cole Younger by Himself (Lee’s Summit, Mo.: n.p., 1903), 50–8, Younger claims that although he had fought alongside Frank James, he did not meet Jesse during the war. Detective Bligh placed Jesse and Frank James at Chaplin, the raiders’ starting point, on the day of the robbery itself; Settle, 37–8. Years later, Dick Liddil claimed that Jesse told him that he, Frank, George Shepherd, John Jarrette, Cole Younger, and one other person carried out the robbery; St. Louis Republican, September 9, 1883. Though this is a plausible account, it is secondhand information, and questionable; other lists of robbers Liddil provided in the same statement proved flatly wrong.

  26. Norton had been the proprietor of the Southern Bank, which continued on after he and Long opened their firm in 1863, and his brother Elijah had served as a Unionist delegate to the Missouri convention on secession, as a wartime congressman, and later as a state supreme court justice; Paxton, 543–4; Banker’s Magazine and Statistical Register, January 1866. Yeatman, 92–5, says that Long had financed Robert James’s college education, which the bandits were unlikely to know

  27. Wybrow, “Kentucky,” 22–5; Wybrow, “Ravenous Monsters,” 15–18; Settle, 37–8; St. Louis Republican, March 23 and 26, 1868; Settle, 37–8; Yeatman accepts Jesse James’s later alibis at face value, 92–5. Counterfeit notes were a serious problem; see Banker’s Magazine and Statistical Register, March 1866, and David R. Johnson, Illegal Tender: Countefeiting and the Secret Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

  28. Jefferson City People’s Tribune, April 15, 1868; Wybrow, “Kentucky,” 24; Yeatman, 94–5.

  29. Yeatman, 92; Settle, 37; Ross A. Webb, “Kentucky: ‘Pariah Among the Elect,’ ” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States During Reconstruction, ed. Richard O. Curry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 105–45; St. Louis Republican, July 13, 1868; Liberty Tribune, July 24, 1868; Jefferson City People’s Tribune, April 15, 1868; Jefferson City People’s Tribune, April 15, 1868.

  30. U.S. Census, Clay County, 1870, 1880, and 1900; History of Clay, 269. The 1870 census lists two children, Sarah and Mary, who do not appear in Settle, 9. See also Stella F. James, In the Shadow of Jesse James (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Dragon Books, 1990), 59. Contemporary accounts describe freed slaves sometimes returning to their former masters in search of employment; see, for example, L. M. Matz to Cousin, February 13, 1867, William Dunlap Simpson Papers, Duke. In 1875, the eighteen-year-old Ambrose signed an affidavit with the illiterate’s “X—his mark”; a press report also claimed that Charlotte “refused to accept her freedom”; Kansas City Times, January 28, 1875. Certainly Zerelda felt victimized herself, a common reaction by white Southern women; see Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 89. Elsewhere Clinton demonstrates the ways in which freed women suffered violence in the domestic setting; see “Bloody Terrain: Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence During Reconstruction,” in Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past, ed. Catherine Clinton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 136–53. Many studies emphasize black families’ struggle for domestic autonomy after emancipation, making Charlotte’s situation a notable exception that strongly suggests the perpetuation of her antebellum status. See Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 24–65; Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie S. Rowland, “Afro-American Families in Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” and Rebecca Scott, “The Battle Over the Child: Child Apprenticeship and the Freedman’s Bureau in North Carolina,” in The African American Family in the South, 1861–1900, ed. Donald G. Nieman (New York: Garland, 1994), 1–33, 215–27.

  31. Paul W. Gates, “The Railroads of Missouri, 1850–1870,” MHR 26, no. 2 (January 1932): 126–41; Irene D. Neu and George Rogers Taylor, The American Railroad Network, 1861–1890 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 67–79; Edwin L. Lopata, Local Aid to Railroads in Missouri (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 6, 36–8, 42, 61–100; Lexington Caucasian, July 25, 1866. The county bond-issuing frenzy was a departure from antebellum practice; all the local governments in Illinois, for example, issued only $4 million in bonds (less than 5 percent of costs) through 1860; Albert Fishlow, “The Dynamics of Railroad Extension into the West,” in The Reinterpretation of American Economic History, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert W. Fogel (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 402–16.

  32. Gates, 126–41; S. P. Harlan to Sister, October 2, 1867 (for reference to Irish workers, see S. P. Harlan to Sister, August 7, 1867), Bond-Fentriss Family Papers, UNC; History of Clay, 262–3; W. H. Woodson, History of Clay County, Missouri (Topeka: Historical Publishing Company, 1920), 205; History III, 222–3.

  33. James W. Goodrich and Donald B. Oster, eds., “ ‘Few Men But Many Widows’: The Daniel Fogle Letters, August 8–September 4, 1867,” MHR 80, no. 3 (April 1986): 273–303; Portrait and Biographical Record, 216–17; History III, 198–201; A. J. Spease to Brother & Sister, April 19, 1868, James C. Zimmerman Papers, Duke; Lopata, 70.

  34. Goodrich and Oster,
273–303; James Fernando Ellis, The Influence of Environment on the Settlement of Missouri (St. Louis: Webster Publishing, 1929), 142–50; Norman L. Crocket, “A Study in Confusion: Missouri’s Immigration Program, 1865–1916,” MHR 57, no. 2 (January 1963): 248–60; Fellman, 242–44; Parrish, Radical Rule, 177–210.

  35. Goodrich and Oster, 273–303; see also Dan to Brother, April 26, 1867, Jane Peterson Papers, Duke; see also History III, 170.

  36. Foner, quote on 235, 251–61, 271–7.

  37. Foner, 277–8, 333–6; for firsthand accounts, see T. J. Stiles, ed., Robber Barons and Radicals: Reconstruction and the Origins of Civil Rights (New York: Berkley, 1997), 64–79, 151–66. On this constitutional revolution, and how it reflected the African-American vision of the federal government’s role, see Eric Foner, “Rights and the Constitution in Black Life During the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (December 1987): 863–83.

  38. Foner, Reconstruction, 281–91, quote on 283; Stiles, 80–104, 167–80, 195–214, 276–300; Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 78–84. See also Edward Magdol, “Local Black Leaders in the South, 1867–1875: An Essay Toward the Reconstruction of Reconstruction History,” in The Politics of Freedom: African Americans and the Political Process During Reconstruction, ed. Donald G. Nieman (New York: Garland, 1994), 223–52.

  39. Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), xlii–xlviii, 3–21, 26–35, 49–54, 62–4, 89–91; Foner, Reconstruction, 342–3, 425–36; Rable, 59–80; see also Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction at the First Session, Thirty-Ninth Congress (Westport: Negro Universities Press, 1969, orig. pub. 1866). Many local studies reveal the depth and breadth of racial and political violence in the South; see, for example, Randolph B. Campbell, Grass-Roots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 80–3, and Michael W. Fitzgerald, “Extralegal Violence and the Planter Class: The Ku Klux Klan in the Alabama Black Belt During Reconstruction,” in Local Matters: Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South, ed. Donald G. Nieman and Christopher Waldrep (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 155–71. See also the articles in Donald G. Nieman, ed., Black Freedom/White Violence, 1865–1900 (New York: Garland, 1994).