“Times here is very hard,” Missourian George F. Terry complained in 1841, “& money scarce.” The sort of scarcity Terry wrote about was absolute—a complete absence of the medium of exchange. This drastic cash shortage even forced the state government to accept shelled corn for taxes up to $500 (at 50 cents per bushel). These conditions made it extraordinarily difficult for a new farmer to buy basic equipment—a shovel plow, a scythe, and a wagon—along with draft animals, hogs, and seed. So Robert and Zerelda James struggled along at first, sharing a home with her mother and her stepfather. After the birth of Frank, they finally moved onto the land that would be their home for the rest of their lives: that three-room cabin hard by a creek in the northeastern corner of Clay.24
The year of Frank’s birth, 1843, revolutionized the fortunes of the western border of Missouri. The first large wagon train to Oregon—a thousand men, women, and children who would soon be dubbed “the Great Migration”—departed that spring, starting the annual movement that would total ten thousand settlers by the end of the decade, and pour tens of thousands of dollars into Missouri’s rural economy. Commercial agriculture picked up again, too, part of a web of business ties that connected this western county to Southern markets. In part, this revival was due to Congress: in 1841, it enacted a protective tariff for hemp, the raw material for rope. Robert James, like many Clay farmers, knew about the crop from Kentucky, and he began to raise it as its price outstripped tobacco and other cash crops. He carted his annual harvest to the Missouri river landings, where he sold it to commission merchants who sailed upriver from St. Louis, or to buyers from local ropewalks (as rope factories were called). It eventually made its way down the Mississippi and onto the plantations of the Deep South, where it served as baling twine for cotton.25
As a border state, Missouri shared characteristics of both North and South; indeed, many residents considered it part of a third section, the border West. But slaveholding families such as the James clan—born in Kentucky, living in slave-dependent Clay County, shipping their hemp down the Mississippi—felt themselves to be a part of the seamless fabric of the South. In their eyes, Southern people, Southern agriculture, and Southern markets made the Missouri River valley “Little Dixie” indeed. And like most Southern commercial farmers, Robert began to buy slaves as he prospered, probably paying between $200 and $400 for each of the boys and girls who populated his spread by the end of the decade.26
Boys and girls? The image is jarring: the pious, beloved man of God, shouting out bids for toddlers at auction. But that is indeed what he did. By 1850, he came to own at least five black children, ranging in age from two to eleven (in addition to a black woman, age thirty).27 And those child slaves on the James farm were not only evidence of affluence, but an indication of a spiritual choice on the part of the preacher. Despite the omnipresence of slavery in Clay County, some local Baptists began to question its morality. By 1845, two circuit-riding evangelists named Chandler and Love had turned this ambivalence into a crusade. “No slave holder,” they declared, “had a right to an office in the church, or a place in the church.”
They carried a surprising number of people with them. Jane Gill described Chandler as “an avowed Northern man” who “influenced the most of the preachers under him to go with him,” and badly divided the Liberty church membership. “Two local preachers, Huffaker & Garner, got such a tincture of abolitionism last year,” she wrote in 1846, “that they lost their usefulness and have been exerting an unhealthy influence ever since.”28
Clay County’s furor played out against a backdrop of turmoil in the national church. In the eighteenth century, evangelical Christians throughout the American colonies-turned-states had raised serious questions about slavery; by the early nineteenth century, however, Southern preachers and congregations had come to accept “the peculiar institution,” as it was called, with few, if any, reservations. But the issue flared into public debate once again as Baptists began to organize on a large scale in the 1830s and 40s. This time, the antislavery critique took on a distinctly sectional character, as Northern congregants pressed abolitionist sentiments on their Southern brethren. In 1845, Baptists below the Mason-Dixon line split off to form the Southern Baptist Convention—an explicitly proslavery denomination—which the Missouri Baptist General Association soon joined.
It was a grim omen. For border-state Missouri, this religious dispute was an early challenge to its regional status, forcing individuals to choose between North and South. Back in Clay, the controversy burned with bitter intensity. “Chandler and Love,” Tabitha Gill wrote, “almost broke up all the churches.” Their goal, Jane Gill believed, was to “have a northern conference in this state,” but large numbers of local Baptists opposed them, as did most others in the county; as across the South, the challenge of abolitionism drove slaveholders into a fierce defense of their institution. “The world was enraged against them,” Jane observed, referring to the non-Baptist public, “and threatened Love so that he could not preach there.”29
“The church at New Hope,” on the other hand, “seems to get along in peace and harmony.” Robert James had made his choice: a slaveowner himself, he rejected the crusade of Chandler and Love. The controversy must have been troubling, even baffling to him. He had profited from the labor of bondservants all his life; slavery was central to the South’s social order. But here in Missouri, abolitionist emissaries had almost turned the people against it.30
The preacher soon had far more to worry about than this local, spiritual war. By 1846, a far larger battle—a real battle of flesh and blood—darkened the future. It, too, sprang from the issue of slavery. In 1836, American settlers in Texas defeated Mexico in a war of independence. For the next eight years, this new Lone Star republic petitioned its American parent for admission as a slave state. But apathy and Northern opposition kept the Texans out until 1844, when Congress finally acted on its request. “The treaty for the annexation of Texas was this day sent in to the Senate,” abolitionist John Quincy Adams noted in his diary, “and with it went the freedom of the human race.”31
Annexation passed though Congress just five days before James K. Polk took the presidential oath of office, in March 1845. Polk’s overriding goal was to extend the nation’s borders to those places where its settlers had spontaneously gone—Oregon, Texas, and at least part of California. But the absorption of Texas virtually guaranteed war with Mexico, which had never accepted the independence of its rebellious province. In January 1846, the president ordered General Zachary Taylor to lead American troops to the disputed border, where they were ambushed a month later by Mexican forces. News of the battle arrived in Washington four hours after Polk and his cabinet had decided to open hostilities, giving them a convenient excuse for their existing plans. On May 13, Congress declared war.
Military fervor gripped Clay County. Men flocked by the dozens to join the First Regiment of Missouri Mounted Volunteers, under Colonel Alexander Doniphan; in Liberty, more than one hundred recruits signed up for Company C under Doniphan’s prominent brother-in-law, thirty-three-year-old Oliver P. Moss (universally known as “O P. Moss”). On June 6, 1846, the troops departed for war.32
AND SO HERE Robert James found himself, as he packed his bag to visit Kentucky in the spring of 1846. He could boast an enthusiastic spiritual following and considerable worldly success, but both had come through ceaseless struggle. Threats of disaster had hovered over him the entire time, droning in his ear like a horsefly: economic depression, abolitionists in the church, and now war. The cruelest blow, however, had come from an invisible, unknowable hand—the sort of blow one might expect from an angry God. On July 19, 1845, Zerelda had endured the harrowing (and life-threatening) agonies of childbirth, bringing into the world a boy the couple named after his father. The infant lived only five days. Such deaths were disturbingly commonplace in the 1840s, but no less heartbreaking for their frequency. Perhaps, in its aftermath, the preacher asked himself what he had done wrong, if th
ere was more he should do to save the souls of mankind.33
Robert journeyed to his old home of Kentucky and back again, even as long files of men from neighboring farms and towns marched off for Mexico (running into Francis Parkman on the Great Plains along the way). When the pastor returned, “better contented,” he poured himself into his preaching.
James’s religious activity filled the pages of the press after 1846, as he piled up victories for Christ. Couples sought him out to preside over their weddings, including Zerelda’s brother Jesse Richard (Dick) Cole and his bride, Louisa G. Maret. The preacher won particular acclaim for his role in bringing a new Baptist college to Liberty. The project began when William Jewell gave an endowment worth $10,000 to the General Baptist Association. In 1849 an intense rivalry arose among different towns that wanted to host the school. Robert stumped the countryside to raise money (personally pledging $196); by the time a convention met, on August 21, 1849,to decide the location, Clay County’s subscriptions outstripped all others. William Jewell College opened its doors in Liberty on January 1, 1850, with James serving as one of its trustees.34
By then, the distant sounds of war had long since died off—Mexico’s capital was captured, and the northern third of that republic was sheared off and stitched onto the burgeoning United States. Here in Clay County, Robert’s own little empire burgeoned as well. After his 1846 trip, he purchased his homestead, along with adjoining land belonging to R. G. Gilmer and Alvah Maret, giving him a farm of more than one hundred acres, plus another eighty that he rented out. His hemp crop alone brought him roughly $70 a year, far more than his annual state and county taxes (which totaled $10.58 in 1850). He had hogs and corn to sell, along with the wool from his thirty sheep, and six slaves to tend it all. Robert stuffed a bookcase in his little three-room house with fifty-one volumes. The library testified to his education; it ranged from Charles Dickens to the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, from works on Greek and Latin to books on astronomy and theology. He subscribed not only to the local papers, but also to the St. Louis Western Watchman.
Then came a sign of his personal redemption, after his season of discontent—a blessing to counteract the pain of the infant Robert’s death. On September 5, 1847, Zerelda gave birth to a healthy boy. They christened him Jesse Woodson James.35 That day, it would have seemed absurd to suggest that Robert would be remembered primarily as the father of this infant.
The charismatic preacher, as the Liberty Tribune reported, was now “well known in this community … a man much liked by all.” The climax of his career came in the memorable summer of 1849, the season of his greatest coup in his gentle war for God. On the third Saturday in July he began the largest and longest camp meeting Clay County had ever seen. Local Methodist and Presbyterian preachers joined in, filling each lamp-lit night through the end of August with emotional pleas for conversion. Forty people joined the New Hope church before the meeting was half over, “which surprised a good many,” Elizabeth Carter observed. Robert’s conquests for Christ provided a domestic victory as well. “Dick Cole and his wife has joined,” Carter wrote; “he is a brother to Mrs. James.”
Called by Robert’s compelling voice, the people of Clay County experienced an emotional and spiritual catharsis at the six-week revival. At one point fifty-five trembling sinners simultaneously went up to the mourners’ bench. “It looks like the good Lord has began a good work,” the preacher declared, saying that he had never seen so many come forward at one time. He baptized some twenty-five that day, as pregnant Zerelda and little Jesse—not yet two years old—looked on.36
There was something foreboding, however, in Robert’s words of satisfaction, hinting perhaps that he heard the Lord calling him elsewhere—to California. The first rumors of gold in that newly conquered province appeared in the Missouri press as early as September 1848; by the end of November, men were returning to the state with evidence of the abundant precious metal to be found in the far west. The ultimate confirmation came on December 5, 1848. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory,” President Polk reported to Congress, “are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.” Soon every local paper carried tales of the fortune-filled earth on the Pacific coast. Books and pamphlets giving pointers on the trip to California sold as fast as they could be printed. When William Gilpin of Independence wrote a letter describing the route west for his friend Samuel Ralston, it quickly emerged as a printed circular.
In January 1849, the Liberty Tribune reported the story of Joseph H. Cutting, who had spent forty days digging in California; the gold he found yielded an average of $37.50 per day. This figure was more than half of the annual proceeds of James’s hemp harvest. In April 1849 the Tribune printed a remarkable account from Clay Countian Peter H. Burnett. “Men here are nearly crazy with the riches suddenly forced in to their pockets,” he wrote. “The accounts you have seen of the gold region are not over colored. The gold is positively inexhaustible.”37
“I have never heard of as many families being left alone or placed in other’s houses in all my life before,” Jane Gill wrote from Clay County; a “strange infatuation,” she called it. “Well might the Apostle say, the love of money is the root of all evil.” Preacher James might have agreed—except that he himself fell victim to the “strange infatuation” (despite the birth of another child, Susan Lavenia, on November 15, 1849).38
“Brother Robert James preached his farewell sermon to us at New Hope two weeks since, and left for California the Wednesday after,” Gill wrote on April 14, 1850. “Brother James seemed very much affected at parting from us and said his object was not to get gold but to preach, and numbers think he was justifiable in going.” Gill, however, does not seem to have been among them. “Aaron made a golden calf to worship whilst Moses was on the mount,” she chided, “and priests and ministers with their members may do the same in this day, and have done it no doubt.” But she did reserve judgment on her beloved preacher, adding, “We will miss him very much.”
Three decades later, after this contented corner of Missouri had passed through biblical plagues and apocalyptic trials, locals would recall this moment with vivid but unreliable memories. “To this day,” a newspaper would report, “the old settlers about the James home say, and it has been a tradition, that the Rev. Robert James was driven from home by his wife.” Robert’s brother would agree, saying the sharp-tongued Zerelda had bitterly resented her husband’s peripatetic preaching.39
Perhaps. He was a restless, driven man, and once before he had seemed discontented with life in Missouri. The 1846 trip had made clear that he was comfortable taking long absences from his wife and children. The movement to California, however, was a force far larger than any domestic squabble, and the preacher’s sense of calling loomed larger still. The 1850 migration from Clay County dwarfed even that of the previous year; some thirty men made the journey with Robert (including the abolitionist Huffaker).40
But a sense of fatalism hovered around him as he departed. Cholera and other diseases plagued the California migrants, and James had spent heavily on medicine. Zerelda later claimed that, in a telling gesture, little Jesse clutched his father’s leg before he left and begged him not to go; of course, at two years old, the boy could not have grasped that his father was leaving for a year or more. Robert’s brooding echoed throughout his letters, as he wrote Zerelda from the overland trail. “Train up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,” he urged on April 14, 1850, “and live a Christian life yourself.… Give my love to all inquiring friends, and take a portion of it to yourself and kiss Jesse for me and tell Franklin to be a good boy and learn fast.” On May 1, he began to voice explicit fears. Robert commented darkly on the long eighteen months he planned to spend in the mining camps, where dozens at a time succumbed to epidemics. “Pray for me,” he wrote to Zerelda, “that if [we] no more meet in this world we can
meet in Glory.”41
A few months later, Robert James was dead.
CHAPTER TWO
The Widow
ADEATH REQUIRES record keeping—a coroner’s inquest, a cemetery plot, a probate court proceeding—but no files can be kept of grief. So the moments following the news of Robert James’s passing, on his farm in far Missouri, can only be imagined. A succession of neighbors, bearing gifts of food; round after round of relatives, lingering for long afternoons to comfort the baffled three-year-old Jesse, the seven-year-old Frank, and the tall, young widow Zerelda, who cradled Susan, her infant daughter. Local dignitaries might have called to offer condolences; New Hope church would have held a memorial service within its new brick walls; then came the nighttime hours alone.
But there would be no funeral, no burial, and no headstone. Robert had met his end in the California gold fields in September 1850, in a camp tellingly named Rough and Ready. He had lingered in illness for some two weeks, with a Dr. Newman in attendance at his bedside, before he passed away. Then the gold seekers he had come to convert had thrown his body into a hastily dug grave near their hastily built dwellings. Robert had died deeply in debt for room and board and medical care to another Missourian named Daniel H. Wright, who collected most of the bill by selling the dead preacher’s mule, valise, and boots, and by emptying his wallet of his last ten dollars and fifty cents.1
It was not until October 25, 1850, that a small headline in the Liberty Tribune announced, “DEATH OF REV. ROBERT JAMES,” as heralded in “our last advices from California.” The story offered no hint of the gritty indignity of his bootless demise; instead, the editor warmly eulogized the preacher’s prominence, popularity, and piety. “As a Revivalist,” he mused, “he had but few equals in this country.… More additions have been made to the Baptist Church, in Clay County, under his preaching (length of time considered) than under that of any other person.”2
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