Though Atchison’s constituents often asked that the lands just west of Missouri be opened to settlement, the senator resisted because the Missouri Compromise—“that infamous restriction,” he later called it—prohibited slavery there. The leaders of the Central Clique, the slaveowning Democrats who dominated Missouri politics, wholeheartedly agreed. “If we can’t go there on the same terms, with all our property of every kind,” Claiborne Jackson wrote to Atchison, “I say let the Indians have it forever. They are better neighbors than the abolitionists.… If this is to become ‘free-nigger’ territory, Missouri must become so too, for we can hardly keep our negroes here now.” Jackson and Atchison shared an almost hysterical fear of anti-slavery designs on poor, exposed Missouri. “All the territories of the United States [are] to be abolitionized,” Atchison declared on one occasion; “colonies are to be planted in all places where slavery and slave institutions can be assailed; and Kansas is now a favorite position.”36
Atchison’s use of the word “Kansas” sprang from an important new development in this struggle for the territories. At the end of 1853, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois became the champion of the plan to organize the territories west of Missouri. He was particularly interested because he wanted to promote a transcontinental railroad that would run through the region. On January 22, 1854, he reached an agreement with Atchison and the F Street Mess. The next day, he offered a bill to create two new territories—Kansas to the west of Missouri and Nebraska to the west of Iowa—and explicitly repeal the prohibition enshrined in the Missouri Compromise. Instead, settlers would vote on whether they wanted slavery or not, an idea known as “popular sovereignty.” On May 30, 1854, President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.37
PERHAPS NOTHING destroys a political system more quickly and efficiently than paranoia. The situation can be grave enough when one party to a quarrel believes the worst of the other, when it pictures its opponents as conspirators. But when both sides see the other as ruthless, treacherous, and unwilling to abide by the rules, then all room for compromise disappears.
The fantasies of scheming hordes of abolitionists conjured up by Atchison and Jackson were standard material in Southern newspapers and political speeches. “Northern resistance to the fugitive slave law,” writes historian David Brion Davis, “aroused nightmare images of vast organizations of slave stealers who would drain the South of its wealth.” Political argument and agreements would not stop abolitionists, they thought; only facts on the ground, the actual rooting of slavery in the territories, would preserve the peculiar institution.38
The North had its own paranoid, conspiratorial image of the South: the Slave Power. The phrase appeared in the 1830s, and abolitionists repeated it endlessly during the Wilmot Proviso controversy.39 True abolitionists were hard to find in the North, but even racist Yankees feared and resented the Slave Power and its works. “Slavery withers and blights all it touches,” asserted an Iowa politician, because it made it impossible for free workers to earn a decent living. Even worse was the ruling planter class. Nowhere on earth, claimed one Yankee, “are the people subjected to a sterner despotism than are the white population of our own Southern States.” Northerners complained that slaveowners had maintained a persistent grip on the presidency, the Supreme Court, and the congressional leadership.40
If the Slave Power was to be stopped, it was in the territories. The question of extending slavery into new lands united Northern public opinion like nothing else. “We are all personally interested in this question, not indirectly and remotely as in a mere political abstraction—but directly, pecuniarily, and selfishly,” declared politician Oliver Morton. “If we do not exclude slavery from the Territories, it will exclude us.” David Wilmot himself drove home this point. No “morbid sympathy for the slave” moved him to offer his Proviso, he said. “The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent,” he argued. “I would preserve for free white labor a fair country … where the sons of toil, of my own race and color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”41
When the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, outrage erupted, instantly remaking the political landscape. The Whig Party virtually dissolved: its Northern members refused to accept the repeal, while its Southern members refused to remain in a party that rejected slaveowners’ rights in the territories. Many Whigs fled to the secretive American Party, nicknamed the Know-Nothing Party (since its members refused to say anything about its workings), which rested on two foundations: a nationalistic devotion to the Union, and a fear and hatred of foreigners. Less xenophobic Yankee politicians formed temporary coalitions, identifying themselves simply as “anti-Nebraska.” As early as May 9, 1854, thirty congressmen endorsed a new name that finally stuck: they called themselves the Republicans.42
Amid all this political fury, a group of abolitionists saw the need for direct action to stop the Slave Power. In Massachusetts—probably the only stronghold of humanitarian abolitionism in the country—legislator Eli Thayer addressed a public meeting in Worcester on March 11, 1854. If popular sovereignty would decide the fate of Kansas, he argued, they should form a company to help antislavery settlers fill up the territory. A month later, a charter was issued to the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society (later renamed the New England Emigrant Aid Society). Other companies were organized in Washington, D.C., New York, and Connecticut. The fate of Kansas would be decided by a race between North and South.43
JESSE JAMES WAS a mere boy in the 1850s, doing nothing that contemporaries found worth recording, and there is little to be said about him during his childhood. But his world was changing rapidly, preparing a place for him to stand and command attention.
Even before he reached adulthood, his life would become one of ceaseless conflict. And the conflicts that would frame his existence were to be both deep and wide, ranging from a nation-splitting war to invisible lines of enmity that would sunder one farm from another in the fields all around his mother’s house. Before he reached the age of ten, the great struggle had already begun. It was during these years of peace and prosperity in this Missouri Zion that the great issues of the age penetrated to the grass roots of Clay County, dividing one family from the next.
As American politics exploded over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, David Atchison departed Washington in the summer of 1854, bound for Missouri. The nation’s future, he believed, would be decided on the ground in the Kansas Territory. “We are playing for a mighty stake,” he wrote to messmate Robert Hunter. “If we win we carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean, if we fail we lose Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas and all the territories. The game must be played boldly,” he added, observing darkly, “I know that the Union as it exists is on the other side.”44
When Atchison stepped off the steamboat Australia in Platte County at the beginning of August, he found that the people had already begun to organize. A full year earlier, a group of men in Liberty had formed a paramilitary company to fight abolitionists. Starting in June 1854, public meetings on Kansas had taken place each week across western Missouri. In Weston, a thousand men joined the new Platte County Self-Defensive Association on July 20, 1854.45
The leader of this group was Benjamin F. Stringfellow, one of Atchison’s closest allies. A former state attorney general, he and his brother now led the proslavery extremists under Atchison’s command. He and Atchison launched a speaking tour to organize secret, armed organizations based on the Platte County model. They called these bodies “Blue Lodges,” “Sons of the South,” or “Social Bands.” With deadly seriousness, the members greeted each other with secret signs and handshakes; they used passwords, saying, “Sound on the goose” and “Alright on the hemp,” and wore strands of hemp in their buttonholes. They also drilled for combat in hidden camps, including several in Clay County.46
“We will have difficulty with the negro thieves in Kansas,” Atchison wrote to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis on September 24
, 1854, referring to the abolitionist emigrant-aid societies. “They are resolved, they say, to keep the slave holder out, and our people are resolved to go in and take their ‘niggers’ with them.” He bluntly planned to win at all costs. “We will before six months rolls around, have the Devil to pay in Kansas and this State,” he added. “We are organizing to meet their organization. We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over. We intend to ‘Mormonize’ the Abolitionists.” This last sentence was a dark reference to the mob attacks that had driven the Mormons out of Missouri and later Illinois, at the cost of many lives.47
Over the next several months, Atchison organized the systematic theft of Kansas elections. With two Bowie knives and four revolvers thrust under his belt, he roused mass meetings in Liberty and elsewhere, led columns of proslavery Missourians across the border, cast fraudulent ballots, then promptly rode home again. An ever-increasing majority of actual Kansas residents, however, were “free soil,” and they were outraged. “What are we? Subjects, slaves of Missouri,” roared Charles Robinson at an Independence Day rally in Lawrence (a town created by the New England Emigrant Aid Society). “We must not only see black slavery planted in our midst, and against our wishes, but we must become slaves ourselves.”48
Both sides prepared for open warfare as 1855 drew to a close. Charles Robinson wrote to allies in New England, appealing for rifles and ammunition. Free-state men with sharper and harder edges—James Lane, James Montgomery, Charles R. “Doc” Jennison, and John Brown (“Old Brown,” as everyone called him)—assembled bands of antislavery “jayhawkers” and demanded retaliation. On the other side were proslavery Missourians, derided by the freesoilers as “border ruffians.” It was a name they gloried in: merchants renamed their businesses “Border Ruffian Co.” or “Border-Ruffian Store.” George S. Withers, a proslavery leader in Clay County, even named his son Border Ruffian Withers. Many Missouri notables, including Claiborne F. Jackson and Joseph O. Shelby (owner of a ropewalk in Waverly and one of the wealthiest slaveowners in the state), organized armed squads to fight in Kansas.49
Then came the first killing, on November 21, 1855. 50 That death set off a year of warfare in Kansas—a year of complicated maneuvers, small-scale skirmishes, and occasional pitched battles between free-state jayhawkers, proslavery settlers, squads of border ruffians, and a handful of federal troops—that dominated life in Clay County. In the opening days of combat, two hundred men from Clay collected $1,000 from local citizens, purchased arms and equipment, and ferried over the Missouri River to fight. On December 4, 1855, approximately one hundred local men stormed the federal arsenal in Liberty, arresting the major in command and removing rifles, pistols, cannons, and a large store of ammunition, which they conveyed to border ruffian camps in Kansas. In March 1856, a meeting at the Liberty courthouse raised a large amount of money for the cause. In June, the most prominent local politicians organized the Pro-Slavery Aid Association. Meanwhile young men purchased firearms, mounted their horses, and rode to join the skirmishes and raids. 51
On May 21, 1856, Atchison joined eight hundred border ruffians in the looting of Lawrence.52 John Brown led his sons on a raid against proslavery settlers and murdered five. Columns under Brown, Atchison, Jim Lane, and others crisscrossed the land. 53 Atchison ordered the Missouri River closed to free-state migrants and goods during the summer of 1856. Armed squads of men stood guard along the waterfront in Platte, Clay, Lafayette, and Jackson Counties; they stomped aboard each steamboat, interrogated the passengers, and hauled out anyone who seemed suspicious. “We give you no mere rumors,” Atchison declared to the people of Missouri on August 16, 1856, “but a simple statement of undoubted facts. We say to you that war, organized, matured, is now being waged by the Abolitionists. And we call on all who are not prepared to see their friends butchered, to be driven themselves from their homes, to rally instantly to the rescue!”
In September, he led perhaps as many as three thousand men into Kansas in an attempt to trap the forces under Jim Lane. Instead, he encountered the new federal governor, John W. Geary (the third in the troubled territory’s brief history). Geary told Atchison that he intended to use his now-reinforced U.S. troops to vigorously suppress the militia on both sides. The tall chieftain of the border ruffians agreed to send his men home. Geary kept his word. The fighting slowed, scattered, then finally stopped. After the loss of perhaps two hundred lives, the war in Kansas was over. And the freesoil settlers continued to pour in.54
In many ways, the bloodshed in Kansas proved to be both a precipitating factor in the outbreak of the Civil War and a first skirmish in the conflict between North and South. But the Kansas fight played another, largely overlooked role. The proslavery mobilization divided Missourians against each other. It created a hard core of militants who championed the state’s Southern identity, battling a prevailing sense that Missouri was more West than South.55 The border ruffian organizations swiftly marched beyond mainstream opinion, arguing that slavery mattered more than the Union itself. And as they did so, they became increasingly intolerant.
The Platte County Self-Defensive Association, Clay County’s Pro-Slavery Aid Association, the Blue Lodges, and all the other proslavery bodies had another purpose besides conquering Kansas: social and political control. From the beginning, they set out to stifle white dissent. Benjamin Stringfellow began by targeting Frederick Starr, a Presbyterian minister in Weston from the quietly abolitionist American Home Missionary Association. On July 29, 1854, the Platte County Self-Defensive Association put Starr on trial in his own church. Southern civilization, Stringfellow declared to the crowd, was superior to that of the North; only in the slave states could a white man truly be free. “Every man who works for his living is a slave,” he shouted, “and every poor white working woman a whore.”
The proslavery extremists demanded absolute unity in the white community. On August 9, 1854, the Platte association called for a boycott of those who did not agree with them. In the spring of 1855, a committee banged on Starr’s door, hauled him out, and bundled him onto a steamboat to St. Louis. On April 14, a crowd stormed into the village of Parkville, Platte County, and attacked the offices of the Parkville Industrial Luminary. The paper had earned the hatred of the extremists by taking a freesoil stand on Kansas—and by remarking on Atchison’s tendency to give speeches while drunk. A mass meeting gathered in the Liberty courthouse on April 21 to hear Stringfellow speak, and heartily endorsed the destruction of the Industrial Luminary. It passed its own ominous resolution: “We will begin at home, and rid ourselves of the traitors harbored in our midst.” To say anything “calculated to render slaves discontented, to irritate them to escape or rebel,” it stated, “is not an exercise of the ‘liberty of speech,’ but is an act of positive crime of the highest grade, and should receive summary and exemplary punishment.”56
As Atchison’s forces crushed dissent in Missouri, they polished and hardened their arguments. Stringfellow authored Negro Slavery; No Evil; or the North and the South. Stringfellow’s brother edited the Leavenworth Squatter Sovereign, a ferociously proslavery newspaper. Robert Miller, editor of the Liberty Tribune, followed their lead. “Where there is no legal sanction of slavery the masses, the laboring portion of the people, are oppressed and run over,” he wrote.
But Miller was not in the same camp with Stringfellow, Atchison, and the others. He had pitched his tent a little farther off, where most Missourians could be found. At bottom, he defended slavery because it was “indispensible to the preservation of the Union, and to the great principles of Republican Liberty which are secured by the Federal Constitution.”57 Miller’s Unionism marked a very fine distinction between himself and the Atchison extremists—but it mattered immensely to those on his side of the line. He was a Whig, struggling like all Missouri Whigs to cling to his party even as it disintegrated. The Whigs, wrote party elder James S. Rollins in February 1855, were “ready to resist illegal Northern aggression and abolitionism on the
one hand, and to suppress the Southern fanaticism and nullification on the other.” In other words, they supported the extension of slavery, but they would not destroy the Union in the process. Like most Missourians, including some Democrats, they saw their state as part of the border West—a section with strong affinities for the South, but regionally distinct from it. They placed themselves in the middle, both geographically and ideologically.58
Once the national party came crashing down, Rollins and most Missouri Whigs moved into the American (or Know-Nothing) Party. In the fall of 1855, Clay County’s farmers organized Know-Nothing councils in most townships; like the Blue Lodges, they adopted secret signs, handshakes, and passwords (a favorite was “Have you seen Sam?,” meaning Uncle Sam). Several prominent slaveowners, including brothers James H. Moss and O. P. Moss, joined the new party. They formalized their organization with a meeting at the Liberty courthouse on January 1, 1856, where they passed a resolution firmly condemning Southern secessionism. The party even carried the county in the presidential election that fall.59
The Know-Nothings’ success in Clay was only one sign of the widespread dissent against the extremism of Atchison’s Southern-rights Democrats. As early as September 1, 1854, a large group in Weston denounced the Platte County Self-Defensive Association, which was soon replaced by the secretive Blue Lodges. In Parkville, a body of citizens eventually spoke out against the destruction of the Industrial Luminary; the owner even won damages in court for his losses.60
In standing for slavery and the Union, Missouri’s Whig/Americans balanced on a very slender wire. Miller received threats when he mildly suggested in the Liberty Tribune that the destruction of the Industrial Luminary might have been excessive. On June 2, 1855, a large public meeting in Columbia met to support the spread of slavery into Kansas, but the resolutions offered by Whigs James Rollins and Odon Guitar were not enough for hard-line Democrats, who threatened violence unless the meeting called for armed force against abolitionists. In June 1856, a proslavery mob attacked Darius Sessions, a Know-Nothing leader in Clay County, who was saved from death by the intervention of a few neighbors.61
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