T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  During this time, most likely in February, Reuben would replenish the icehouse from a river or pond. Ice would be hauled back to the farm, trimmed, packed into the double wall of the icehouse (really more of a shack), then stuffed with sawdust to fill any air spaces. Now they had their cool storage area, one that would last far into the warmer months of spring and summer.23

  One, two, or maybe three months would pass after the day of the slaughter before Zerelda would order the curing meat removed from the brine and smoked. If no smokehouse existed on the farm, an upside-down barrel or hogshead would do, once a foot-deep hole had been dug for the coals. After two to four weeks, the meat would be removed, wrapped in muslin, and hung someplace safe from rats.

  By now, winter would be passing away. The “six weeks’ want” would set in—the time when the stock of vegetables ran low, before new plantings could be gathered. They would have sloshed the wagon through the soft, wet roads of spring to buy spinach or eggplant or parsnip seeds from a merchant, then planted them in Zerelda’s garden.24 Fruit came in abundance with the humid heat of Missouri’s summers, and it, too, had to be prepared. The Samuels might have made preserves, cooking the fruit with large amounts of sugar, canning it in the newly patented Mason jar. In the autumn, before the first frost dusted the fields, the vegetables had to be gathered, cleaned, and stored in dry boxes or pickled. And all throughout the warm part of the year, much of the cows’ milk would be turned into butter and cheese through the art of separating, churning, salting, and, finally, storing in jars.25

  No diary tells us what the daily chores entailed, or how the family filled its larder, but if the Samuel clan bore any resemblance to others in Clay County, we can trust that this was how life went by month after month, season by season. By the time the census taker came, in June 1860, to count the family, Jesse was twelve and attending school, together with sixteen-year-old Frank and ten-year-old Susan. In the fall, when Jesse turned thirteen, he enrolled for another year of studies—little realizing that it would be his last.26

  The children and adults made up only a small part of the teeming population of life on the farm. Aside from the livestock, there were rodents, reptiles, insects, and bacteria that swarmed over the fields and into the buildings. Rats and mice posed a constant hazard to the food supply, as did the buzzing black fleet of flies; mosquitoes, horseflies, and gnats harried human skin; and many a Missouri farm child awoke at night to feel a snake sliding across his or her leg. In this age before aspirin, pain was a familiar companion, from nagging headaches to the agonies of a sprain or a broken bone. Soot and smoke were constantly present, thanks to the open fire in the kitchen and the candles and grease lamps that gave off a dim, flickering light.27

  If all this seems like frontier life, it most certainly was not. Despite all the effort expended on food, despite the precarious existence, despite the four-month isolation each winter from St. Louis and other cities (when the frozen river kept steamboats downstream), the Samuel family was tied to the outer world with bonds far stronger than the cotton-baling twine made from Clay County’s hemp. They were no subsistence farmers: they ran a profit-centered, commercial operation, intricately interwoven with the web of local and national business transactions that lifted long-settled Clay to prosperity. As early as 1837 a farmer from another river county noted, “There is a market for everything from an egg to a [hogshead] of tobacco.… The fact is [the] market is at every man’s door.”28

  Reuben and Zerelda probably continued the farm’s specialization in hemp, a trade that stretched from their fields to St. Louis factories, New Orleans warehouses, and Mississippi plantations. In February or March—after the previous fall’s hemp crop had been dried, rotted, broken, and its fibers separated—Reuben would haul it to a warehouse in Liberty to be crushed into bales of up to five hundred pounds each. When the ice broke on the Missouri River and paddlewheelers began to chuff into Clay County’s landings, Reuben would cart his bales to the waterfront, if he had not already sold them to a warehouse owner. These late February or March days filled market towns with a frenzy of activity. The levees would be crowded with stacks of crates and barrels; mules and oxen would pull heavily laden wagons down to the river through milling merchants, farmers, tobacco inspectors, and slaves; a cloud of smoke would rise from the forest of smokestacks as steamboats churned in to unload sugar, coffee, iron, plows, reapers, and newspapers. Then hogsheads of tobacco and bales of hemp would be rolled aboard, and muddy herds of hogs and mules would be driven onto the lower decks. Reuben (or the couple together) would spend a day or two in Liberty during these busy weeks, haggling with a commission merchant from St. Louis or a buyer from a local ropewalk. He would come away with a bundle of banknotes or, if all went well, a stack of precious-metal coin—cold, hard cash.29

  In 1858, Liberty Tribune editor Robert Miller took his own census of this prosperous marketplace. Any visitor, he crowed, “will be led to exclaim, ‘This is a great town for a new country.’ ” He counted a wagon, a copper, and a gunsmith shop; two livery stables, two carriage shops, two saddlers, and two tin and stove stores; three cobblers, three blacksmiths, three cabinet shops, and three housepainting and wallpapering businesses; four tailors; five carpenter shops; and no less than five millinery establishments (all owned and operated by women). There were bricklayers, stonemasons, and plasterers, not to mention the Clay Seminary for Young Ladies, and William Jewell College.30 It might seem strange that only one gunsmith could be found in this western Missouri town, but guns (though common enough) did not define life in Clay County—at least, not yet. Congress grew so worried that California-bound migrants lacked the means to defend themselves, it passed a law that allowed them to buy army revolvers at cost.31

  Clay County rattled ahead smartly, like a well-built carriage pulled by a well-tended team. Between 1850 and 1860 the white population surged up from 7,585 to 9,568. The town of Centerville sprouted not far from the Samuel farm in 1858. Neighbor Waltus Watkins emerged as a leading businessman and public spirit, building a large brick woolen mill in 1860. Rural stores popped up everywhere; neighbors gathered there to discuss politics or religion, phrenology or spiritualism—often over a little rye whisky, as they browsed through bolts of calico, bowls and plates, and green, unroasted coffee. Glittering (and sometimes gritty) entertainment could be had just down the road: horse races, traveling lecturers, minstrels, debating societies, theater, even an occasional ballet—or one of the sixty-one circuses and menageries that hurdy-gurdied through rural Missouri. And at home, the Samuel clan had abundant books and newspapers to read.32

  For Jesse, who had witnessed years of turmoil and stress, the world had finally knit itself together again. As he wandered the farm and went to school and rode the wagon to town, he was not repulsed by the heavy odor of livestock, nor oppressed by swarming pests, nor frightened by the threat of epidemics. Restored to the farm where he was born, reunited with his family, he beheld the Zion that his father had seen. And presiding over it all was the towering presence of his mother, determined never to be a victim of circumstance again.

  Zerelda called herself “a woman of fortitude and resolution.” On that, all agreed. Everyone who ever met her came away impressed with the force of her personality and her lacerating tongue. “She has had the advantages of an early education,” judged artist George Caleb Bingham, some years later, “and seems to be endowed with a vigorous intellect and masculine will.” These were strong words, given that society’s idealization of feminine frailty. Though future events would hone her edge to a lethal glint, even now she undoubtedly could cut the strongest man in a duel of words. One who later made an enemy of Zerelda would put it bluntly: “I regard [her] as being one of the worst women in this state.” Opinionated, assertive, ferocious in social combat, this remarried widow played the proverbial tigress to her cubs, forming a fiercely protective bond with her sons. As the years passed, no matter what charges would be directed against Jesse and Frank, she would repeat a constant refrai
n: “She was proud of them.”33

  Such was the world that Zerelda lost and found again, a world of agriculture and commerce, of wariness and prosperity. And then there were the slaves, the silent chorus of the South. There were 3,455 of them in the county and seven in the Samuel home as of 1860. They were the source of the family’s wealth, and the sign of a coming tribulation.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Slaves

  THE SILENT WITNESSES may be the most eloquent of all. The seven slaves knew better than anyone else the intimate world of the Samuel farm. They could recount with perfect clarity its fields and trees, each horse and hog, and each emotional quirk of Zerelda, Reuben, Frank, Jesse, and Susan. Indeed, though they were called “hands” or “servants” in the parlance of the times, their lives wound around this clan’s existence more intricately than those of nearby cousins and friends.

  In many ways, the black residents of the farm shaped the private realm in which Jesse Woodson James grew up, yet they can tell us nothing. In slave-regime Clay County, the written word was only white. Even the carefully completed grids of the census slave schedules offer only single names—Robert James in 1850, Reuben Samuel in 1860—with no names listed for the six and seven slaves, respectively; the enumerator recorded only age, sex, and color (black or mulatto). That very silence speaks volumes about this family and its society. And those slaves, though denied their voices, show us how the crisis of the age penetrated into the heart of the Samuel household.

  A visitor to Missouri in 1860 could be forgiven for mistakenly believing that slavery was in decline. In contrast to the Deep South’s vast plantations, tended by large gangs of black men and women, Missouri’s family farms would reveal only one or two slaves each—and often none at all. In Mississippi and South Carolina, blacks outnumbered whites, as they nearly did in Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. But Missouri—with only 9.8 percent of its population enslaved, down from 12.8 percent in 1850—resembled colonial New York more than Carolina.1

  Once a traveler stepped off a boat in St. Louis, she might think that she had left the South entirely. Almost 167,000 people teemed through the streets of the great city in 1860. Some 12,000 industrial workers manned its factories and workshops, creating an atmosphere more Yankee than Dixie. A cosmopolitan chorus of foreign languages and accents rose from its sidewalks: three out of every five people in St. Louis arrived from overseas, the largest proportion of immigrants of any American city, including New York. The German or Irish populations alone, at 60,000 and 39,000 respectively, outnumbered the residents of the next largest city in Missouri. But fewer than one out of a hundred faces on those crowded streets was black. In 1856, the city even elected antislavery men as mayor and congressman (the latter being Frank Blair, Jr., from a famous political family).2

  To some, St. Louis may have seemed to define Missouri; in fact, there was not one Missouri, but several.3 There were the hubs of Westport, Kansas City, and St. Joseph on the western border, where Pacific-bound migrants and merchants prepared for the overland crossing, mingling with mountain men and Native Americans. There was the northern fringe, so close to Iowa, so like Iowa, with nearly all-white towns and family farms. There was the white and very poor southern fringe, the Ozark fringe, where scattered farmers scratched a bare subsistence out of the unforgiving hills. And then there was the heart and central artery of the state, the counties arrayed along the Missouri River, the region that would be known as Little Dixie.

  A Southerner who took a steamboat west up the river, chugging past Callaway, Boone, Cooper, Howard, Saline, and Lafayette Counties, would have felt at home. Here, one out of four, and sometimes one out of three, faces was black. In this region, the percentage of slaves in the population had remained the same from 1850 to 1860—or even increased in places. True, the number of slaves owned by the average master was half that of the Deep South (6.1 to 12.7); and true, it was even lower in Clay County (with a mean of only 5.3); and true, this agricultural district seemed a far cry from St. Louis’s industrial dynamism4—but these slaveowning river counties were the great wheel that powered the entire state economy. In St. Louis’s factories, Clay County’s hemp was turned into rope and bagging for sale to Dixie’s cotton plantations; Callaway County’s hogs were slaughtered and packed to feed the great cities; Lafayette County’s tobacco was turned into cigars and snuff. Many of the plows, harnesses, and carriages produced in St. Louis’s workshops were sold in those counties. Missouri remained an agricultural state, its wealth growing out of its soil—and the richest soil was along the Missouri River. Small wonder that the state university and capital had been placed in this region, or that the leaders of the ruling Democratic Party—a group known as the “Central Clique”—were all Missouri valley slaveowners.5

  If a visitor from the Deep South continued on to Liberty landing, she would see scores of wagons rattling to and from the boats, filled with hemp and tobacco. These products brought wealth and commerce; they even fostered manufacturing, as seen in the tobacco stemmeries and ropewalks in every substantial town. The locals argued that only slaves could provide the year-round, backbreaking labor to raise these crops—and even Congressman Frank Blair agreed (Blair himself had owned slaves). Even if white workers were willing, Clay County’s gentlemen would snort, they could hardly be had at any price. Slave labor, they claimed, was cheaper and more efficient. When traders from the Deep South came to purchase human beings, Missourians refused to sell, driving prices to record levels.6

  A ride through the streets of Liberty would show black men and women laboring in every aspect of life: They served as teamsters, personal servants, maids, cooks, and skilled workers. At the courthouse steps or a probate sale, an auctioneer might be heard asking for bids on a man, trumpeting the man’s skills as a carpenter, blacksmith, or stonemason. Almost every businessman owned one or more slaves, and they could be found in workshops, warehouses, ropewalks, and sawmills. The Southerners in Clay County were proud to have adapted chattel labor to a highly diversified economy. Owners with excess hands rented out their surplus; such hired slaves provided virtually all of the wage labor in the region (though the wages went to the owners). And despite the doubts of Yankee critics, slavery did nothing to slow the spread of technology. By 1860, local farmers spent just as much on machinery as their counterparts in the North, some $500 each. Slavery, locals believed, had made this region the most advanced, most commercial, most successful part of the great state of Missouri.7

  SO GOES THE tale of numbers. But a statistical overview strips the slave economy of its humanity—something white Missourians often did when they thought of their society. Farmers, preachers, coopers, and carriage makers viewed their bondservants through a lens that refracted their lives into numerical values, investments, property. Not all the slaves’ names, however, have been lost. Along with the ovens, skillets, and pots in the inventory of Robert James’s possessions made in December 1850, there appear six names, including “one black woman, Charlotte.” She was the only adult among the slaves; the census states that she was thirty years old, more than a decade older than the eldest of the five children who complete the list.8

  Decades later, Stella James reported, “I heard a great deal about Aunt Charlotte,” using the classic American term for a senior female slave. Stella’s grandmother-in-law Zerelda told her that Charlotte had belonged to her family and moved to Missouri with her and Robert. Of course, in 1842 the twenty-two-year-old Charlotte was no elderly “aunt.” But whites fondly used the language of family to depict their ties with their slaves, ignoring the fact that the bonds were utterly involuntary at the other end. “As slavery was an organic part of the Southern household,” notes historian Leeann Whites, “it became organic to the slaveholders’ very conception of themselves as men and as women, as mothers and fathers.” In Zerelda’s eyes, Charlotte would have seemed less an aunt than a child—a dependent in her household, incapable of making decisions yet essential to family life.9

  More th
an likely, Charlotte spent most of her waking hours in the kitchen. It would have been her, not Zerelda, who rendered the lard on slaughtering day, churned the butter, cooked dinner, washed dishes, boiled and scrubbed clothes. It would have been this tireless, enslaved young woman who bathed, clothed, and fed Frank and Jesse.

  Charlotte’s life wound intimately around those of this family, but she also belonged to the shadow society of Clay County’s slaves. Many bondservants in Little Dixie received a limited freedom of movement during the daylight hours, and they used it to mingle with each other. In 1850, Elizabeth Carter observed both this mobility and the ties of slave society in a letter about a smallpox outbreak in the area near the James farm. One of the first victims, she noted, was a “negro man” on a nearby homestead. “While he had the fever raging upon him and before they knew what was the matter with him,” she wrote, “there was a good many blacks to see him.” This horrified Carter—not because the slaves socialized with each other so freely, but because they might spread the disease.10

  Charlotte was a young woman when she arrived in Missouri in 1842, at an age when young women make romantic attachments where they can. She may even have accepted a proposal from a man enslaved on a nearby farm. In “abroad” marriages, as these weddings across property lines were called, the man would ask his master for permission; if granted, the plan would be put to the owner of the bride. Leland Wright in Howard County, for example, wrote to Abiel Leonard to tell him that his servant Flem wanted to wed one of Leonard’s slaves. “I expect him to remain in my family,” he added soothingly, “as long as he lives.”11