T. J. Stiles
Page 4
The Tribune was a weekly paper, so the letter most likely arrived some five to ten days before its news appeared in print; during that interim, someone probably rode to the James farm to give Zerelda the news. Though many wives and children of gold-hungry migrants moved into the houses of friends and relatives, Robert had thoughtfully made other plans. “I think his wife intends living at home with her children and servants,” Jane Gill had written to her sisters upon his departure. “A white man is living close by who is to cultivate their ground and give them a certain portion.” The man’s name was Garland Gentry. He could be seen gathering wood in the timber around the James family’s house, or out in the fields cutting, breaking, and hauling away the harvest of weedy hemp. He used Robert’s own livestock, equipment, and slaves for the work, and he kept a quarter of the crop for himself. But now that arrangement—everything about Zerelda’s life—was plunged into cold, stomach-churning uncertainty.3
The death of Zerelda’s husband pushed her to the helm of her family, and there she would remain until the end, charting a course for her children and herself through the years to come. She was twenty-five, perhaps six feet tall, with two young children and an infant, a three-room house, and six slaves. Little more is known of her at that time. Her temperament and outlook, her likes and dislikes, her sense of humor and sense of honor were only described after tumultuous decades filled with experiences she could scarcely imagine in that grieving winter of 1850.
“She is a remarkable woman!” a reporter would comment thirty years later. “The sentence is well worthy of the exclamation given it,” he asserted. “Her eyes a steely blue; her face is a long oval, set off by a firm, determined expression about the mouth.… She is shrewd, has dauntless courage,” while her devotion to her children “can be likened to nothing else but a tigress’s love for her cubs.” It was her inner strength that drew the most remarks from those who knew her in those later years. “She is said to be a hard woman to deal with,” remarked a neighbor in 1882. “I never heard of her wilting but once,” he added, and that would not be until long after Robert’s death. “Zerelda,” said her grandson’s wife, “had always given orders, but she had never taken any.… The mother of Frank and Jesse James was strong-willed and had plenty of determination.” Her exuberant sense of humor inclined toward practical jokes, particularly as “a way to get even.” Perhaps the most telling observation came nearly a quarter century later, when a man came to Liberty intending to arrest Jesse and Frank. Ex-sheriff O. P. Moss advised the man to stay far away from Zerelda’s farm. “The old woman would kill you if the boys don’t,” he warned. The next day, the man turned up dead.4
Did these strands dominate the tapestry of her personality when she was just twenty-five? We can never know. But the iron lady of later years seemed a vulnerable, untempered, uncertain young woman in 1850. She waited two full weeks after hearing of Robert’s death before she stepped into a local store, on November 11, to buy black calico and gingham to make the family’s mourning clothes. A week later she returned to purchase black crepe and ribbon to shroud her home in grief. She also bought a small pair of shoes—perhaps for her little boy Jesse, perhaps so he could join her in her first public appearance as a widow.5
That occasion came on November 21, 1850, when her brother Dick Cole and her stepfather, Robert Thomason, accompanied her to Liberty for the initial probate court proceeding. If she was unfamiliar with the common law regarding the estates of men who died without wills, then that day must have been a shock: as widow, she inherited nothing. Her children were Robert’s only heirs; since they were so young, the court appointed a local official, James Harris, to administer the estate. Zerelda dutifully signed an agreement accepting this arrangement, but the court required her male relatives, Cole and Thomason, to sign as well.
The months that followed brought a chilling education in the legal limits on women’s rights. “For many women, a husband’s death brought his creditors down on the estate like vultures,” notes historian George C. Rable. “She might have little to say about its disposal.”6 And so it was for Zerelda. Two weeks after she submitted to Harris’s control of Robert’s property, Harris and three court-appointed assessors rode onto the farm. Memorandum books in hand, they picked their way through the fields, the outbuildings, and finally through the house itself, carefully counting every cup and saucer. Two beds (and steads), two tables, one bookcase with fifty-one books, one set of dinnerware, one kettle, two ovens with lids, one skillet with lid, one grindstone—their inventory missed no detail. Harris reserved the agricultural machinery and draft animals for Gentry’s use during the following year; he also temporarily granted to Zerelda ten pigs, two milk cows, one mare, and ten sheep, as well as selected dinnerware, some furniture, one of the beds, two trunks, two carpets, and eighty dollars. The rest would go up for sale to pay her many debts—from the bill for the tablecloth that Zerelda had purchased in October to the personal notes (or IOUs) that her husband had handed out with seeming abandon before his departure.
On the brisk winter day of January 4, 1851, Zerelda stood by with thirteen-month-old Susan, three-year-old Jesse, and Frank (just six days short of his eighth birthday), as a crowd of friends, neighbors, and strangers gathered in her yard and listened to an auctioneer cry out for bids on her possessions. She bought back what she could, including a rocking chair and the dinner table; her mother, her brother, and her brother-in-law William James helped by buying a sow, the grindstone, the other bed, works on the Baptist faith, and John Bunyan’s The Holy War. Much of the rest was sold—a stove and pipe, Robert’s rifle, the unallotted livestock.
In the weeks after that estate sale, hardship crept onto the James farm like the first frosts of winter. On April 19, 1851, the condition of Zerelda and her children moved the congregation of New Hope to take a collection. “He was the humble instrument of God,” they wrote in tribute to their late preacher. He helped them “to see the awful condition we were in; and knowing we righted [sic] to aid him in his temporal wants,” they added sheepishly, “as we should have done during his pastoral charge of New Hope church for 7 years … we hereby agree and bind ourselves to relieve his heirs” of at least part of their debt.7
This financial strain was typical for widows in slaveholding society. In 1851, bills continued to accumulate, from county clerk Greenup Bird’s fee to the second installment on Robert’s $196 pledge to William Jewell College. Garland Gentry sold the year’s hemp crop for $66.50, giving the estate $51.84 as its share, but he charged $38.45 for his services.8 And then there was the cost of school. Free public education scarcely existed in rural Missouri in those years; instead, local parents banded together to hire freelance teachers for their children, with mixed results. Throughout the 1840s, neighbor Jane Gill complained that the opportunity for educating her daughter in rural Clay County was “so poor that I can’t rely on it.” But Zerelda found a place to enroll six-year-old Frank, paying cash for the privilege.9
The threat of destitution, however, could not compare to the ever-present shadow of death. Annual epidemics scourged Clay County with increasing intensity, including a ruthless cholera outbreak in the summer of 1849. The next year it was smallpox. “It has been in and around Liberty more or less for 3 months,” Elizabeth Carter wrote on August 30, 1850, “but now it is within 2 miles of us.… It has thrown a general consternation and alarm through the neighborhood and caused the school to be stopped.” In the summer of 1851, she wailed that “sickness death disease sorrow & tribulation are abroad in our land. The cholera has been raging in Independence, St. Joseph, Weston, and there has been several cases in Liberty.” The people abandoned towns—even farms adjoining those of the plague’s victims—leaving them deserted in the heat of midsummer. “I pray that God in mercy may stay the scourge a little longer,” Carter wrote, “and give poor sinners time and opportunity to repent of their sins.”10
In these uncertain times, Zerelda had reason to repent not her sins but her widowhood. On February 27
, 1852, she once again bore the pain and humiliation of an estate auction; this time, the crier asked for bids on the agricultural equipment—her only means of making money. Zerelda had to ask Tilman H. West, the husband of one of her closest friends, for $3.40 to buy back a hoe for her garden and Robert’s silver watch. West was more than a friend: under the harsh hand of the common law, he—not Zerelda—served as legal guardian for her children.11
With her source of income extinguished, and with Frank, Jesse, and Susan under another family’s legal protection, Zerelda saw one clear strategy for regaining both her prosperity and progeny: marriage. On September 30, 1852, she wed Benjamin A. Simms, a farmer who lived a few miles away. Everything about the match breathed cold calculation. He was wealthy and almost twice her age; she was widowed, with rapidly dwindling resources. Simms owned extensive lands in both Clay and Clinton Counties, as well as a large “family” of slaves (as one neighbor described them). He also belonged to Zerelda’s social circle of Kentucky expatriates; his son Richard had died in California along with Robert James, and notices of both deaths appeared in the same issue of the Liberty Tribune.12
At the age of about fifty-two, Simms may have been drawn to what the Kansas City Times would later dub “the famed beauty in all the country around about.” But if he provided her with security, he would not provide fatherhood. Zerelda later said that she had “humored and indulged” Frank, Jesse, and Susan in the aftermath of their father’s death; to the elderly Mr. Simms, however, they gave “no end of annoyance.” Reportedly at his insistence, she left them in the Wests’ care as she settled herself into her new husband’s home.
For Jesse, the weeks that followed his fifth birthday brought the latest in a series of blows. In all likelihood, he could not remember his revered father, who had departed when he was two. His earliest memories would have been of strangers taking inventory of his family’s possessions; the estate auctions; the threat of poverty; and now, separation from his mother, as she struggled to regain prosperity. The impact of these grim years would remain unknown, but they were unquestionably filled with confusion and pain.
Then Zerelda fell ill. Simms’s probate records show that Dr. Absolam Kerns regularly attended her from January 9 through March 15, 1853; the extended visits suggest a troubled pregnancy, with potentially lethal consequences. On March 8, her condition grew so severe that Kerns spent the night at her bedside; and then the crisis passed, possibly with a miscarriage.13
Zerelda’s calculations in marrying again had gone disastrously wrong. Even as she struggled back to health, she later told a local historian, “her near relatives informed her that if she [did not take her children back] … they would never more recognize her, so she separated from Mr. Simms.” On June 12, 1853, Elizabeth Carter sent the news to the Simms family back in Kentucky. “Old Ben’s young wife has left and gone to live with Mrs. West,” she wrote. Then she added cryptically, “They soon got their satisfaction.” Six months later, on January 2, 1854, Benjamin Simms died.14
Zerelda must have wobbled on a slender rail between losing her children, losing her farm, and losing herself. But in the aftermath of her failed marriage, her illness, and her exile from her first husband’s farm, her inner strength began to emerge. In previous months, Zerelda had made her purchases on credit, and let James Harris as administrator pay them off; now, she simply demanded cash from the estate. Her children restored to her, she resumed life on the farm. And she managed to keep hold of all but one of her six slaves. (Harris auctioned off Alexander, at twelve the oldest boy, to pay the last debts.) On February 6, 1854, the administrator made final settlement of the estate, distributing the assets among the heirs—Frank, Jesse, and Susan—“according to their just rights.”
But Zerelda had not yet completed her project of recovery—the restoration of her autonomy, her property, and her family. Tilman West remained the legal guardian of her children and her farm (since it legally belonged to Frank, Jesse, and Susan). Despite her recent, bitter failure, she knew only one sure way to resolve that intolerable situation. She had to find a husband. On September 12, 1855, she married Dr. Reuben Samuel. He, too, belonged to Clay County’s fraternity of Kentucky natives. Zerelda had probably met him through family connections, for his office was in a store belonging to William James, Robert’s brother, in nearby Greenville.15
Calculation of a different sort marked Zerelda’s third and final marriage. Reuben struck observers as a far less weighty figure than his widow bride. Born in 1828, he was three years younger than Zerelda. While she was giving birth to Susan and enduring the loss of her first husband, he had been in school, studying at the Medical College of Ohio, in Cincinnati. His tall wife overshadowed him physically as well as emotionally; many years later, her granddaughter-in-law Stella James remarked that he was “a small, meek, and quiet man, and I suspected that Zerelda had always ‘worn the pants.’ ” Just nine years after the wedding, Liberty merchant Edward M. Samuel drew similar conclusions. “He is no kinsman of mine, thank God,” he wrote, “yet I think he is an easy, good natured, good for nothing fellow who is completely under the control of his wife.”16
On November 3, 1856, Zerelda’s new husband assumed legal guardianship of her children and her farm. But in every respect, Reuben was tethered firmly in her orbit. He moved onto the James farm (known after that as “Mrs. Samuel’s place”), and he gave up the practice of medicine to attend to its fields and livestock, in accordance with his wife’s wishes. He did everything, in fact, in accordance with Zerelda’s wishes. He had even signed a prenuptial agreement to guarantee her ownership of the farm and slaves after his death—an uncommon if not unheard-of step, indicating her unsentimental determination. As a reporter commented decades later, Reuben was “under her dominion, for that is the way her neighbors speak of ‘Aunt Zerel’s’ management of the farm and everybody on it.”17
This timid, unambitious physician gained more than he lost in his unequal marriage. His willingness to abandon medicine, for example, made perfect sense, since farming was the more respectable occupation in 1855. Doctors could best be described as skilled tradesmen with pretensions. They relied on late-eighteenth-century theories that irritation and excitement caused most illnesses; their cures included bleeding, sweating, and vile emetics. Former president Andrew Jackson had recently died while his doctors plied him with calomel, a compound that included the lethal ingredient mercury. Even when doctors got it right, they looked more like commercial showmen than scientific professionals. Missouri’s Dr. John Sappington, for example, discovered that quinine effectively countered malaria—and he made a major business of his patented “Dr. Sappington’s Anti-Fever Pills.” Small wonder that physicians met skepticism, or that many Missouri doctors spent most of their time running farms or businesses.18
So Reuben Samuel laid his hands on the plow, apparently happy to live as a respectable farmer under his wife’s dominion. On December 26, 1858, came a kind of confirmation of his satisfaction: a baby girl, whom Zerelda named Sarah. The Samuels were an outwardly mismatched but inwardly contented couple.19
It seemed as if Zerelda had finally steered her family out of the storm, back into the quiet haven of Robert James’s farm. In the years ahead, its acres would be the center of the universe for her and her two young boys, who now attended school and learned to ride horses and explored the fields and woods around their home.20 But how different it all would have looked if she could have seen it as it would be: that gate, where Frank would depart when he first went off to war; that tree, where her husband would swing from a rope when the soldiers came; that wagon, in which she would pile her possessions when she and her family were sent into exile; that barn, from which Jesse and his brother would burst on horseback to flee a posse; that window, through which the iron ball would fly, to explode and tear off her arm and kill one of her sons. And how different her little boy Jesse would have seemed, if she could have seen him as the man who would one day defy the world, and die at a traitor’s hand.<
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WITH THE FARM restored, the work began. As mistress of the place, Zerelda was nothing less than the proprietor of a year-round business, one that revolved around the manufacture, preservation, and preparation of food. The cycle began with slaughtering, an activity reserved for the beginning of the year. “This is the season to which the swine look forward with feeling of fear and trembling,” wrote the editor of the Westport Border Star on New Year’s Eve, 1858. “Now, from morn till night, their agonizing shrieks fill the air.” In early January, when the cold kept flies and spoilage at bay, groups of neighbors rode from farm to farm to help with the butchering. The men would begin by gathering in the yard to kill the steer or swine. The crew would then lift the pig into the scalding box, where they drenched it with boiling water. (They would skin cattle instead.) They sawed off the hog’s head, scraped the hair off its hide, hung it up, slit the body from neck to tail, and gutted it. As they scooped out the internal organs, they carefully preserved the fat, separating the lower-quality variety that stuck to the entrails from the highly prized “leaf fat” that lined the abdominal cavity. (They saved beef and mutton tallow for candles and soap.) After the meat had cooled, the farmers would cut it up.21
Now Zerelda would take over—if she were not already managing the entire affair. Most, if not all, of the newly slaughtered flesh had to be preserved. This was one reason why pork was so popular in Missouri; unlike other meats, its flavor improved with curing. It was also the easiest kind of meat to treat, since its oils prevented the absorption of excess salt, and it kept very well. “I hold a family to be in a desperate way,” wrote a farmer’s wife in the 1840s, “when the mother can see to the bottom of the pork barrel.”22 Zerelda would have brought out the pickling brine—a concoction of salt, brown sugar, saltpeter, pearlash, and water that was poured over the meat as it sat in casks. A heavy, flat stone weighed the pork down, and it would be left to sit. Meanwhile the lard would be rendered in pots over a low fire in the gaping hearth in the Samuel kitchen, ladled into cooling pans, and poured into jars.