T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Such assurances were rare. As property, each partner might be sold away at any given moment. One study of Boone County turned up documentation of thirty-six such weddings between 1830 and 1864; at least twenty-seven broke apart because at least one spouse was sold. Under the law, slave marriages simply did not exist, and owners did not hesitate to sunder them if it suited their finances.12

  As with married adults, so too with children. As Robert James prospered, he acquired five new slaves, all minors: Nancy, age eleven in 1850; Alexander, age nine; Maria, age eight; Mason, age six; and Hannah, age two. As to whether any of them were Charlotte’s offspring, the minister’s probate records offer no clues. The census, however, tells us that they were all black, not mulatto, which disperses any suspicion that the preacher fathered any of them himself.13

  But most of the children probably passed into Robert’s hands with a bill of sale. Most slaves were sold locally in Little Dixie, so he most likely went no farther than Liberty. Perhaps he stood in a crowd and made bids as a dealer held little Nancy or Mason on the auction block, or perhaps he went to an estate or bankruptcy sale. A slave dealer would ask for cash, but Robert could have paid half down for Alexander at an estate sale, settling the balance over the next nine to twelve months. By buying young he was buying cheap: little Hannah would have cost only $200, but her value would double, then triple through puberty. A shrewd investment indeed.14

  These children had parents, of course, whom they would probably never see again. Even owners who freely purchased boys and girls sometimes acknowledged the agonies they caused. In October 1845, for example, J. Bull of Howard County dispatched a slave to Abiel Leonard to pay a debt. “I send you a little boy named Alick or Alicsander,” he wrote. “He is about 3 or 4 years old, and the child of Caroline. I cannot be present [for the transfer]. The negroes will look to me for help and I cannot give it.” These words say everything about the trade in children. No matter how many times black Missourians experienced such events, the pain and injustice remained fresh, incomprehensible, and unbearable.15

  And so the wheels of commerce and Robert James’s wagon brought a family of black children onto the farm, where they mingled with Frank, Jesse, and infant Susan. How easy it would be to conjure up a false image of this situation—to picture little Jesse (three years old in 1850) playing with a host of laughing black children close to his own age. Reality, of course, was far crueler. Everything spoke of the assumed, enforced inferiority of these children. Most of them probably slept in an outbuilding with Charlotte, in a simple, dirt-floor cabin, or in the kitchen in winter. They almost certainly ate separately from the white family, their fare quite often beans, potatoes, cornbread, and milk. “All us kids ate on da floor,” recalled Louis Hill, another Missouri slave, “and da biggest dog got da mos’.”16

  In the summer, they went barefoot; for the winter, they perhaps received a pair of shoes. Judging from other farms, the boys wore nothing more than long, coarse shirts that hung down to their knees. When they reached the age of twelve or so, Zerelda might have given them heavy brown jeans, a couple of shirts, a hat, and a coat.17 Studies of probate records suggest that most slaves received about as much medical care as their owners. Sometimes whites even paid tribute to the slaves’ knowledge by approaching herb doctors. Here and there these black men and women might be found, hunting up remedy weed near springs, or collecting dogwood buds for use as a laxative, or butternut root for chills. Later they would prepare teas for clients who were suspicious of the mercury handed out by doctors.18

  The black children on the James farm spent most of their lives at work. Nancy, Alexander, Maria, and Mason would have cut grass along fences, pulled weeds in Zerelda’s garden, helped with the hoeing, fed the livestock, and carried water. Indoors they would cook, clean, iron, wash dishes, and scrub the laundry. Alexander would have shouldered the heaviest tasks: chopping wood, plowing, cutting hemp with a cradle scythe, beating the stalks with a flail called a swingletree to shake loose the seed, crushing the stalks on the hemp break with a large stone, then separating out the fibers.19

  Robert James’s demise may have more thoroughly shattered the lives of Charlotte’s ad hoc black family than any others in the household. Robert Harris, the estate administrator, sold Alexander in 1851; the next year he rented out Nancy and Maria. It would not be surprising if Charlotte saw these children as her own, even if they were not hers by blood, but she had no control over their allocation.20

  In 1860, the African majority on the Samuel farm looked very different than it had a decade earlier. Charlotte still presided, now forty years old, but (in addition to Alexander) Nancy, Mason, and Hannah were gone. Perhaps Zerelda and Reuben sold them to J. H. Adams, a dealer who toured the county in September 1856, specifically seeking young slaves without families. Or perhaps they carted these children to one of the permanent slave-trading houses in St. Joseph or Lexington, where R. J. White maintained a three-story pen. But the Samuels acquired more servants than they sent away. By 1860, Charlotte and eighteen-year-old Maria shared their quarters with a sixteen-year-old girl, a thirteen-year-old boy, an eight-year-old girl, and two little boys, ages three and one.21

  Some of the children Zerelda and Reuben sold may have been Charlotte’s (just as the toddlers may have been hers or Maria’s). No matter, in Zerelda’s eyes: the trade in bondservants was business, not philanthropy. But the relationship between master and slave was complicated, contradictory, and sometimes unsettling. Charlotte most likely shared emotional ties with her white possessors. She had attended Zerelda since they were both girls, and had helped to raise her mistress’s children. This family, she knew, depended on her completely, and that knowledge may have fostered a sense of responsibility, satisfaction, and even loyalty.

  Zerelda and her children most likely felt some real affection for Charlotte and the others in return. We can never know their true feelings, but fellow Baptist neighbors sometimes spoke of their slaves in the most intimate terms. Jane W. Gill, a devout member of Robert James’s church, wrote “my children black and white.” Slaveowners entertained a convoluted, paradoxical outlook. On one hand, they believed that blacks were intrinsically inferior; on the other, they implicitly acknowledged their humanity.22

  Like any set of human relationships, those on the Samuel farm may have warped in surreptitious ways. Slaves often engaged in subtle acts of resistance—working slowly and sullenly, for example (though Missouri masters often assigned tasks with fixed targets, and financial incentives for finishing early). They would sometimes ruin food they were preparing, in the hopes that it might be given to them to eat, or they might steal it outright. And there are all the possible entanglements of two adolescent boys (Frank turned seventeen and Jesse thirteen in 1860) living with two girls, one eighteen and one sixteen.

  Even if we imagine that all was happiness on the farm, that the hirings and sales of the children, the racial overlordship, meant little to the black majority—that Zerelda, Reuben, and the boys were all kindness and propriety—even in this blissful state, the humanity of the slaves would assert itself. “Whenever my condition was improved,” wrote Frederick Douglass, “instead of it increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free.” Later he put it another way: “If a slave has a bad master, his ambition is to get a better; when he gets a better, he aspires to have the best; and when he gets the best, he aspires to be his own master.”23

  “I SEEN PEOPLE turned across barrels and whipped. Dey was whipped ’cause de white people was mean. Sometimes dey tied dem to trees and whipped ’em. Dey didn’t have no clothes at all—dey was just like dey come into de world!” The words belonged to Marilda Pethy, a very old woman who was thinking back to when she was enslaved in Missouri. She did not recall being whipped herself; but the memory of seeing someone else beaten and humiliated still burned in her mind.24

  No evidence exists that Zerelda or Reuben Samuel ever beat their slaves, nor was any whip listed on the probate inventory of Robert�
�s possessions. And yet, as Pethy’s memories show, the threat of violence by white masters hovered in the air. Frederick Douglass argued that such violence was essential to keep the slave from thinking of freedom; as the testimony of Pethy shows, its mere proximity proved effective. But the whip was also necessary for white Missourians’ peace of mind. “There was a constant state of apprehension and uneasiness among most slave owners,” wrote one resident of Clay County, “a fear not alone of an exodus, but of an insurrection on the part of the negroes.”25

  White Missourians’ vulnerability began with the knowledge that their state was a slaveholding outpost pressed into the lines of the free states. In 1840, reports spread that the Underground Railroad—the secret network of abolitionists dedicated to helping slaves escape to the North—had formed new lines in Illinois and the Iowa Territory. Suspicions seemed to be confirmed when Missouri authorities captured abolitionists George Thompson, James Burr, and Alanson Work as they tried to smuggle slaves out of the state. Governor Thomas Reynolds declared that antislavery raiding parties were crossing into the state to steal its human property.26 Fears of abolitionists and rebellious slaves even penetrated the churches. In 1844, the Methodists split into Northern and Southern factions over the issue of slavery; the Baptists followed in 1845 (a division that forced Robert James to stand firmly for slavery). In 1847, the state legislature prohibited slaves from gathering in any kind of assembly, barred any religious services that were led by a black minister (unless a white official was present), flatly outlawed the immigration of free black people into the state, and prohibited anyone from teaching a slave to read or write.

  It also refined the rules for a traditional Southern institution, a feature of Missouri life since at least the 1820s: the patrol. The state government codified the power of counties, townships, and municipalities to form squads of civilians with the purpose of searching out and punishing escaped slaves—any black person twenty miles from home without a pass, or simply out after curfew (nine o’clock in most localities). Black Missourians called them “PAT-er-rollers”; how many runaways they actually caught is open to question, but they undoubtedly spread fear wherever they went.27

  Tensions mounted. In Missouri, unlike the Deep South, slaves received trials for their offenses—but mob action became increasingly common. In 1850, a Clay County slave woman murdered her master with an axe, and implicated a white man in the plot. In May, a mob in Liberty broke into the county jail, hauled out the two suspects, and hanged them both. In October 1853, local slaveowner T. P. Diggs saw a runaway mingling with his field hands; the escapee, realizing that he had been discovered, stabbed Diggs to death. In the same month, the citizens of nearby Fayette held a mass meeting to “suppress insubordination among slaves.” In August 1853, planter Eli Bass led a mob in Boone County that interrupted the trial of a bondman named Hiram, who was accused of raping a fifteen-year-old white girl. Prosecutor Odon Guitar announced that he wanted everyone to act “coolly, and do it decently in order.” Coolly and decently, the orderly crowd hanged Hiram.28

  Only 60 out of 87,422 Missouri bondservants ran off in 1850. A decade later, the numbers rose only to 99 out of 114,931. This ratio was higher than the national average of 1 out of every 4,919, though a Missouri slaveowner was still more likely to lose one of his hands to illness.29 But it was the immense scale of the possibilities, not the minuscule size of probabilities, that dominated the thinking of white Missourians when it came to slave rebellions and escapes. Next to land, slaves represented the single most valuable type of property in the state; demand pushed prices ever upward, leading one historian to call the 1850s the “golden age of slave values.” At the same time, whites had to confront the fact that this sort of property was fully conscious, with the entire range of human emotions, reactions, and aspirations. Inwardly, they knew that a slave who could master such skills as carpentry, blacksmithing, and stonemasonry also had the cunning to plot a revenge killing or an escape to free territory. Small wonder that whites wildly overreacted to the handful of runaways, or that they screeched (as the St. Louis Democrat did in 1859) that murders of masters were “alarmingly frequent” when in truth they were exceptionally rare.30

  As the 1850s progressed, these fears increasingly led to action. In Platte County, two slaves landed in jail for preaching; in Chillicothe, a committee of vigilantes ordered minister David White to leave because of his insufficiently proslavery views; in St. Joseph, a college student who gave a vaguely antislavery talk had to flee for his life. There was resistance, of course, but white mobs increasingly enforced a rigid orthodoxy, almost a kind of thought control, in an edgy atmosphere verging on hysteria. Black, white—the enemy was everywhere.31

  On the Samuel farm, those six or seven silent witnesses stood watch as these years unfolded. Yet their presence tells us that Jesse grew up in a household more black than white (if we count numbers alone); that he was raised as much by a black woman as a white one; that he was reared in a family that counted its wealth in human beings; that he saw children his own age bought and sold by his mother and his stepfather; that he grew up immersed in the implicit and explicit cruelties of slavery; that he learned from infancy that all this was as it should be, that African Americans were inferior, that their subjection was the inescapable basis of Southern society.

  They also bear witness to the vitally important fact that Jesse and Frank came of age in an atmosphere of suspicion and anxiety. Slavery’s confused cloud of mutual dependence and mutual fear cloaked the Samuel farm. Zerelda and her family relied on their slaves for their prosperity, yet they also had to see them as a potential threat, or at least as a potential loss. This defensive tension might have dissipated with time. But a peculiar confluence of events turned Clay County into center stage in a great national drama over the fate of slavery, and in that drama, Frank and Jesse would find lifelong roles.

  On October 5, 1855, a small notice in the Liberty Tribune announced the September 25th marriage of Zerelda James Simms and Dr. Reuben Samuel. The item might have been missed by the average reader, however, for much of the paper was devoted to another matter entirely. With emphatic language, editor Robert Miller urged the people of Clay to attend “a grand mass meeting of the pro-slavery party.” At stake was the expansion of slavery into Kansas, the newly opened territory just a few miles west. On the issue of Kansas, Little Dixie’s anxiety over its peculiar institution emerged as hard-bitten militancy, and that militancy was about to veer from lynchings and riots into open war.32

  WAR MADE SLAVERY a matter of politics. Until the day when American troops marched into Mexico, Missouri politicians had generally ignored it, largely because of the Missouri Compromise, the agreement that had brought the state into the Union in 1820. Under its terms, slavery was forever barred in all the territory north of latitude 36°30’ (roughly the line of Missouri’s southern border), with the exception of Missouri itself. A balance in the Senate between North and South was maintained in the years that followed as the territories were organized into an even number of free and slave states. The Missouri Compromise allowed the two great parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, to span both North and South by focusing on such national themes as banks, internal improvements, and tariffs (with Whigs in favor, Democrats opposed). Slavery remained an issue for a hard core of abolitionists, but the two parties largely suppressed it.

  The Mexican War upset this balance—indeed, it toppled the scale itself. Victory over Mexico expanded the nation by a third, much of this new territory below the Missouri Compromise line. Northerners, accustomed to the idea that slavery had been fenced in, awoke to find that Southerners had their wagons hitched, ready to carry their human property all the way to the Pacific. So in 1846, Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania attached an amendment to an appropriations bill prohibiting the expansion of slavery into any territory acquired in the war. Dubbed the Wilmot Proviso, it passed in the House with votes from Northern congressmen of both parties, though the Senate blocked it. />
  Wilmot’s amendment enraged Southerners. On January 19, 1849, Missouri state senator Claiborne F. Jackson sponsored a series of declarations, written by proslavery ideologue William B. Napton but immediately dubbed the “Jackson Resolutions.” In ferocious language, these statements denounced abolitionism, proclaimed the right to carry slavery into the territories, and called for cooperation among Southern states against “Northern fanaticism.” The legislature passed these startling resolutions by large majorities.33

  Even the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso did not end the question of slavery in the new territories. The discovery of gold brought a vast number of Yankees to California, where they petitioned for admittance to the Union as a free state. In the convoluted Compromise of 1850, the South agreed, in return for the Fugitive Slave Act. This law guaranteed the cooperation of U.S. marshals in capturing escaped slaves—an unprecedented expansion of federal power at the insistence of self-proclaimed defenders of state sovereignty. Now it was the North’s turn to be furious. State legislatures passed “personal liberty” laws in an attempt to nullify the act. In Boston and elsewhere, mobs attacked jails and freed recaptured slaves; in Christiana, Pennsylvania, two dozen armed black men battled a slave-catching party on September 11, 1851, killing the slaveowner who led it.34

  “Although the loss of property is felt,” said Senator James M. Mason of Virginia about such defiance, “the loss of honor is felt still more.” Mason belonged to a small group of hard-line proslavery senators known as the F Street Mess (they boarded together on F Street in Washington, D.C.). The Mess’s leader was a tall, quick-tempered Missouri Democrat, David Rice Atchison, a rawboned country lawyer given to hard liquor and plain speaking who was about to help change the direction of American history, and the life of young Jesse James of Clay County.35