Amateurism exacerbated the inherent brutality of martial law. The Union army consisted largely of men who had been civilians until April 1861, and most were new to all things military. With each month, more and more arrested civilians arrived from the country in St. Louis and other cities, often with little paperwork to define their crimes or the evidence against them. “Washington,” comments one historian, “never exercised much control over Missouri.”42
This last point is essential to understanding what was happening to this beleaguered state. The phrase “martial law” conjures up misleading images of invading outsiders, of a military bureaucracy that paid little attention to the sensitivities of residents. But the provost marshal system and the “occupying” regiments were largely staffed by Missourians themselves, thanks both to the self-organization of the Unionist population and the diligent efforts of Governor Gamble and his administration. In November 1861, with the cooperation of Frémont’s replacement, Major General Henry W. Halleck, the provisional government created a local force that would bear the primary responsibility for pacifying the state: the Missouri State Militia (MSM). When recruiting came to a halt on April 15, 1862, the MSM boasted fourteen regiments of cavalry, along with another regiment of infantry (more than ten thousand men in all). Outfitted with the same arms, equipment, and uniforms as the U. S. Volunteers, these state troops emerged as full-time, professional fighting men; though they fell under Federal command, they could only be used within Missouri’s borders.43
Missouri-based or not, the military rapidly began to supplant civil government in many areas of life. The army enforced a loyalty oath that Gamble’s administration required of all officeholders, jurors, and, finally, voters.44 It put the press under strict censorship. It required passes for much travel, and military baggage inspectors made the rounds of hotels. Military officers regulated commerce and imposed fines and assessments on secessionists. The provost marshals constructed secret networks of detectives.
These drastic steps were fueled by pity, fury, and the need for control. Starting in July 1861, secessionist bands struck across the state, destroying railroad tracks, tearing down telegraph wires, burning bridges, sniping at Federal sentries, and terrorizing loyal families. Army officers—far from seeing all Missourians as disloyal—submitted report after report bemoaning the suffering of Unionist refugees. General Ulysses S. Grant vividly remembered Jefferson City in the summer of 1861, a town “filled with Union fugitives who had been driven by guerrilla bands to take refuge with the National troops. They were in a deplorable condition.… They had generally made their escape with a team or two, sometimes a yoke of oxen with a mule or a horse in the lead. A little bedding besides their clothing and some food had been thrown into the wagon. All else of their worldly goods were abandoned and appropriated by their former neighbors.”45 In the fall, Brigadier General William T. Sherman found the countryside around nearby Sedalia “full of returned secessionists who are driving out all Union men.”46
Bridge burners struck all along the Missouri Pacific and Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroads. On September 3, twenty civilians died when a train tumbled off a wrecked span. Halleck estimated that fifteen thousand men were in a state of “insurrection” north of the Missouri River. On December 22, he issued General Order No. 32, one of many directives that were aimed at Missouri’s civilians. “Any one caught in the act [of sabotage],” he wrote, “will be immediately shot.” At the end of 1861, he put his regiments on the march to destroy or disperse the guerrilla squads. “Scour the country and arrest all enemies,” he ordered. One column tramped from St. Joseph into Liberty, tore down the Confederate flag, arrested veterans of Price’s army, and forced them to take the loyalty oath. After a few days the column moved on.47
One thing can be said for all this marching, this fighting, these harsh measures: to a limited extent, they worked. Towns—such as Liberty—where the stars and bars had floated over county courthouses became somewhat safe again for loyal citizens, who started to trickle back as Federal troops and the MSM established garrisons. The Clay County Court, the county government, assembled again in January 1862 and took the loyalty oath. One of the justices was Alvah Maret, the man who had sold land to Robert James and would soon reappear in the life of James’s widow.48
The very success of Union efforts, however, merely weeded out the weak and disorganized insurrectionists. The smarter, tougher, angrier rebels survived, and grew more skilled in the ways of partisan warfare. From the Mississippi River to the Kansas border, small bands continued a deadlier, if less pervasive, guerrilla struggle. They were not a new phenomenon. They, too, emerged from the slaveholding counties’ secessionist fervor, which had grown out of the border ruffian mobilization. Under the pressure of the Union counteroffensive, these secessionist guerrillas broke into small cells that fought without central direction or official Confederate sanction, passing under the nickname of “bushwhackers.”49
Nowhere would the bushwhackers be smarter, tougher, and angrier than in Jackson County, just across the river from Clay. There the rebel forces regrouped as guerrillas amid the most furious Union campaigning in the state. In November 1861, “Doc” Jennison returned to Kansas City as leader of the Seventh Kansas Cavalry Regiment. Jackson County, wrote the regiment’s chaplain on November 15, “has been represented as conquered by the Union troops 5 times, but no sooner are the forces withdrawn from their midst than they rise up and commence anew their depredations and persecutions of the Union men, confiscating their property, shooting, hanging, or driving them from the country.” The Kansans sought to protect loyal citizens, and often used them as guides to hunt down secessionists. And that hunting was harsh. “I am fully convinced,” continued the chaplain, “that the only way to subdue them is to take from them all means of subsistence and execute their leaders as fast as they fall into our hands.”50
The jayhawkers focused their fury on the secessionists, but they aroused widespread discontent with their destructive methods. “Westport was once a thriving town, with large stores, elegant private dwellings, and a fine large hotel,” wrote a Union officer on December 31, 1861. “Now soldiers are quartered in the dwellings and horses occupy the storerooms. The hotel was burned down three days ago. The houses are torn to pieces … the mantles used to build fires, and doors unhinged. I presume the place will be burned as soon as the troops leave.” In the countryside, he saw “crops ungathered, houses deserted, barns and stables falling to pieces, fences torn down, and stock running loose and uncared for.” Jennison started to call his unit the “self-sustaining regiment,” and “jayhawking” became a synonym for plundering (by Union forces in particular). And wherever they went, they invited slaves to join them—which the slaves happily did.51
Jennison’s men were not the worst Kansans striking Missouri. Senator (and General) Jim Lane liked to tell his men to clean out “everything disloyal, from a Shanghai rooster to a Durham cow.” Captain Marshall Cleveland resigned from the Seventh Kansas in November 1861 and set up shop as a straightforward bandit. Once the Missouri River froze over, Cleveland raided the border counties for loot. In January 1862, General Halleck ordered his troops to drive the Kansans out. “They are no better than a band of robbers,” he fumed. “They cross the line, rob, steal, plunder, and burn whatever they can lay their hands upon.” As a general description of their actions, Halleck exaggerated. As harsh as they were, most Kansas troops came to fight existing secessionist forces, and they cooperated with local Unionists more often than they despoiled them. Their methods, however, became a rallying cry for the rebels in the winter of 1861–62.52
In the meantime, Price and his men lingered in southwestern Missouri, a refugee army guarding a refugee government. In the border town of Neosho, Governor Jackson called the General Assembly into session; a mere handful of legislators answered the roll and voted to join the Confederacy. The measure—carried out by a rump of an assembly—ran counter to the earlier actions of the special state convention on secession
, but it gave a legal gloss to Jackson’s stand. On November 28, 1861, the Confederate Congress formally accepted Missouri, adding its star to the stars and bars. Missouri now had two governments: a loyal one that had the support of most of the population but virtually no constitutional basis, and an exiled one headed by the elected governor but in open rebellion against the Union.53
On February 12, 1862, advancing Federals forced Price’s dwindling army to abandon Missouri entirely. Less than a month later, on March 7 and 8, the Union troops thrashed the combined forces of the State Guard and the Confederate army at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, locking Price and his men out of their state. On April 8, the general resigned from the militia and accepted a Confederate commission; most of his four thousand troops followed his example. The State Guard was no more.
Frank James, however, remained behind in Missouri. When Price retreated from Springfield, the young soldier lay sick with the measles, a potentially fatal illness in the mid-nineteenth century. The advancing Union troops took him prisoner, then paroled him, releasing him on the promise that he would not fight again—a common expedient, especially at this stage of the war. It appeared that Frank’s war—the family’s war—was over.54
CHAPTER FIVE
Neighbors
AS JESSE WELCOMED Frank back to the farm in the cold, dry spring of 1862, the brothers faced a most distressing fact: The Union stood triumphant. General Price had been chased to Arkansas, and Missouri had fallen under the heavy cords of military control—strands that were woven, day by day, into an enveloping blanket. On February 16, General Grant had completed the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee, taking some twelve thousand Southern prisoners; then, on March 7 and 8, came the bitter Confederate defeat at Pea Ridge. In Clay County, schools were shut down and businesses disrupted.1
“You asked me to tell you about the state of affairs in Mo., that you had awful accounts,” wrote Kate Watkins, neighbor to the Samuel family, on June 9, 1862. “Well, you have never heard the half of the outrages that have been committed, and you never will, for it all could not be told. All the western border counties have been almost ruined by the Kansas jayhawkers.… The newspapers give accounts of a great many misdeeds which they say the rebels have done,” she said, though she personally believed the Kansans were the worst by far. “The jayhawkers have stolen all the stock, run off all the negroes, and burnt a great many dwellings.”
Kate exaggerated. Few armed Kansans had visited Clay County. There and elsewhere, most of the livestock and slaves remained, as farmers continued to plant and cultivate their crops. And, she admitted, “there has not been much of this done lately,” for most of the jayhawkers had been ordered—or chased—out of the state by the Union army. But tales of their very real depredations had spread far and wide, and they infuriated her, as they did so many other Missourians.
And then there was the occupation—or the legitimate Union effort to maintain peace and order, depending on one’s point of view. To Kate, it was definitely an occupation. The first permanent military presence in Clay County began on March 15, 1862, in response to a raid on Liberty by three dozen bushwhackers from Jackson County; in April, the Fifth Cavalry Regiment of the Missouri State Militia, under Colonel William R. Penick, assumed control. Penick, like most Missourians, was Southern-born, and a slaveholder as well, but he took a grim view of secessionists. He soon had his men scouring the countryside, looking for guerrillas and stores of arms.
“The Feds condescended to pay us a visit,” Watkins wrote, “though they were uninvited and unwelcome. They got in and were over half of the house before we knew they were on the place. They turned beds upside down, searched drawers and trunks, and jawed and disputed around considerably.” The “Feds,” of course, were all fellow Missourians, members of Penick’s command. They found only a few small items that could be considered contraband. Frustrated, powerless, embittered, Watkins closed her letter by warning that the authorities might open it, “and if the writer is found out it may not be so well.” She signed, “Your affectionate niece, Secesh.”2
What seemed like oppression to Watkins looked like half-measures to Missouri loyalists. “We Union people are very low up here,” wrote Anna Slayback from St. Joseph on May 9, 1862. “The laws are becoming more stringent on the rebels in Mo. & they must be put down. They are impudent & rejoice over our defeat. This must not be.” But in another letter, she paused to contemplate the true horror of the war. “I think every victory is maiming our nation,” she wrote. “Were the rebels a foreign foe or a stronger people, then subduing them might be called victories. But this is a family quarrel, brother against brother, & we bite & devour one another that other nations may mock & laugh at our folly.”3
Such honest reflections, it seems, rarely shadowed the minds of most Missourians as they killed each other. They wanted not saints but heroes. For secessionists, one had already appeared in Jackson County. “There is a man by the name of Quantrill,” Kate Watkins observed, “who is fighting the Feds on his own hook.” This Quantrill, she wrote, “is giving the Feds some trouble.”4 And so he was.
William Clarke Quantrill was Ohio-born but had drifted west to serve as a freelance fighter on both sides of the struggle over Kansas. Just before the war erupted, he had shifted his field of operations to Missouri. Starting with just fifteen men, he began to fight Union forces at the end of 1861. He was hardly the only guerrilla leader in Missouri—perhaps not even the best—but he came to be remembered, revered, and reviled as was no one else. As early as February 3, 1862, Union captain W. S. Oliver wrote of him as “the notorious Quantrill.” Reporting from the town of Independence, Oliver growled, “I have seen this infamous scoundrel rob mails, steal the coaches and horses, and commit other similar outrages upon society even within sight of this city. Mounted on the best horses of the country, he has defied pursuit.” Even as Quantrill struck government posts and ambushed Federal patrols, he remained focused on the internal war against Missouri’s Unionist civilians, and continued the political cleansing of the countryside. “I hear of him tonight fifteen miles from here,” Oliver added, “with new recruits, committing outrages on Union men, a large body of whom have come in tonight, driven out by him.”5
What lifted Quantrill above the scores of bushwhackers operating in Missouri was less his talent or personal magnetism than his ambition. On February 22, he had the audacity to ride through the streets of Independence (though he and his men were quickly chased away by Union cavalry). On March 7, he raided into Aubry, Kansas. On March 22, after learning that General Halleck had decreed the execution of captured guerrillas, he personally shot one of his prisoners, declaring, “Halleck issued the order, but we draw the first blood!” In April, he issued a proclamation, telling Jackson County Unionists that there was no point in planting their crops, because they would be dead or driven out before they could harvest them. On April 18, the Kansas City Journal of Commerce reported that the guerrillas had stopped all mail into the town for three weeks.6
Across the river in Clay County, news of such exploits lifted the spirits of the beleaguered Samuel family. After Frank learned of one bushwhacker raid, he reportedly ran about in frenzied joy, blasting his pistol in the air and cheering for Jefferson Davis. But guerrilla successes inevitably led to a Union backlash. In early April 1862, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard G. Farrar, provost marshal general for Missouri, advised his subordinates to arrest “disloyal persons,” then make them take a loyalty oath and post a bond for good behavior. Before the end of the month, a squad from Colonel Penick’s regiment hauled Frank to Liberty. There, on April 26, he duly swore his allegiance to the United States, posted a bond, and returned home. By the end of the year, 612 men in the Liberty district alone underwent the same process.7
In peacetime, Clay County had had a traditional society, built on shared values and personal relationships. The same handful of men had led civic organizations and held public office; elections had been held in the open, with no secret ballot; citiz
ens had voiced their opinions through mass meetings at churches, taverns, and the courthouse in Liberty. At the same time, much of life there passed beneath an awning of privacy. Farm families lived in isolation down eroding dirt lanes; men eagerly joined secret organizations, the Masons and the Oddfellows; and slaves furtively pursued their own social relations.
Unionists no less than secessionists quailed as Colonel Penick tried to hack his way into this now-decaying structure. On August 14, 1862, for example, Penick fought a group of bushwhackers on the Platte County border. “Previous to attacking their camp I had found three men at the [nearby] house, who denied having any knowledge of any camp or gathering of armed men,” he wrote the next day. “After the skirmish was over I sent two of these men out … and had them shot.” His superiors once rebuked the overzealous colonel for calling the venerable Masonic Order a disloyal organization (an unfortunate bit of paranoia, since his commander was a Mason). Even Unionist leader Edward M. Samuel thought Penick was “very rigid,” and often went to MSM headquarters to plead for the release of arrested neighbors.8
On July 22, 1862, the new commander in Missouri, Major General John M. Schofield, issued General Order No. 19, instructing all men of military age to enlist in a new force, the Enrolled Missouri Militia (EMM), intended to relieve the full-time MSM and U. S. Volunteers of garrison duty, mail escort, and other simple work.9 “Disloyal persons or sympathizers with the rebellion,” on the other hand, “are required to report at the nearest military post or other enrolling station, be enrolled, surrender their arms, and return to their homes or ordinary places of business.” In September 1862, Reuben Samuel rode to Colonel Penick’s office in Liberty, where he had to take a loyalty oath and pay a $10 commutation tax to avoid service. Frank James, on the other hand, had to mark himself down as disloyal because of his service in the State Guard, despite his earlier surrender.10
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