He immediately called a mass meeting in Liberty of all able-bodied men. It didn’t matter if they were under bond, had enrolled as disloyal, or even if they had fought in General Price’s army, he told them; they had to protect Clay County from Kansas bandits, the Red Legs. He armed two new companies of militia under John S. Thomason and George S. Story; within ten days, he claimed, they wiped out the bandits and stamped out anarchy. And he made a point of turning his prisoners over to the civil authorities, not the military provost marshal. “We have had perfect quiet in Clay & Platte for five days and nights past,” he wrote on October 3, 1863, “and the people look refreshed after enjoying a few nights of quiet sleep.”19
Not everyone was so enthusiastic about his enlistment of secessionists and former rebel soldiers. His own brother, O. P. Moss, pulled him aside to voice his concerns. “I remarked to my brother that we were running considerable risk in putting arms into the hands of such men indiscriminately,” he said—but the colonel cut him off. “The war was far down South,” he replied; besides, these “disloyal” men were old friends, and the most substantial citizens in the county.20
Colonel Moss’s troops, however, soon lived up to his brother’s fears. Organized into the Eighty-first and Eighty-second Regiments of the EMM, they won the nickname “Paw Paws,” after the river-bottom bushes where the guerrillas made their camps. Though they vigorously pursued bandits from Kansas, they ignored—even aided—bushwhacker activity (with the notable exception of Captain John S. Thomason’s faithful company). During the month of October, Confederate colonel Joseph O. Shelby mounted an epic raid into Missouri from his base in Arkansas; the celebrated cavalry leader dashed as far north as the Missouri River before retreating. The Paw Paws responded to the crisis by cheering Quantrill and Jefferson Davis in the streets.
A political hue darkened the issue. Colonel Moss bitterly denounced the Radical Party in a public speech. He deployed his troops to catch runaway slaves. When a Union officer came to Liberty to recruit black troops, the Paw Paws chased him out of town. And Moss dismissed the local Provisional EMM from service. All this terrified many loyal citizens. On December 26, the civil and (former) military officials in Clay—Edward M. Samuel, James M. Jones, William Garth, William Rhea, W. T. Reynolds, and Greenup Bird—petitioned army headquarters for a unit of “loyal men.”
As complaints about the Paw Paws mounted, President Lincoln himself ordered General Schofield to look into it. But Colonel Moss survived, in part because old Whigs in uniform rallied to his defense. Even a full-scale investigation by the state legislature went nowhere. Indeed, Moss’s experience underscores the growing division of the Unionist population into radical and conservative camps, a split that would have lasting political repercussions.
And so Clay and Platte Counties continued under the control of admitted rebels, armed by the state government. In one of the most ironic results of the massacre at Lawrence, the woods around Jesse James’s home became safer for the guerrillas than at any time since early 1862. But where were the the guerrillas themselves?21
“YOU CANNOT IMAGINE what pleasure it gave to hear from an absent and beloved husband,” wrote Amanda Savery to her spouse, Phineas, on January 27, 1864. “It has been one year since I received a letter or heard one word from you.” Phineas Savery, once a respectable lawyer in peaceful Liberty, now served with the Confederate army in Mississippi. Even after a year, he had been lucky to find a messenger to slip through Union lines and carry a note to his home in Clay County. Meanwhile, his wife had waited, and fretted.
“You cannot imagine my dear what anxiety—so long a silence I thought a thousand things,” she scrawled, virtually weeping ink onto the page. “I thought you was wounded or lying sick and suffering for the want of attention or perhaps you were killed and laying on the ground.” She moved on to the news, all of it bitter. “Your brother Cyrus died of consumption over two years ago, [in] Illinois, in a land of strangers,” Amanda wrote. “Your brother Abram died in camp near Brandy Station [Virginia] on the 16th [of January]…. He was a soldier of the United States service.”22 Savery’s was indeed a family divided and destroyed by the war, like so many others.
In a few words, she summed up the miseries of a family cut off from its military men, and the terrors of war in Clay County.23 For Jesse James and his family, the terrors subsided during the winter of 1863–64. The Paw Paws mostly left secessionists alone during the snowbound months. Meanwhile, two colonels from General Price’s army, John H. Winston and John C. Calhoun Thornton (Colonel Moss’s brother-in-law), remained in the county, gathering recruits for an uprising in the spring. From farm to farm, they whispered the rumors: Jo Shelby, now a brigadier general, would lead an invasion of Missouri, and a secret rebel organization, the Knights of the Golden Circle, was preparing to rise. Despite all their setbacks, secessionists renewed their faith in the cause. “The South is stronger now than ever before,” they assured each other; “she will certainly gain her independence.” Missouri, they nodded, would surely go with her.24
We can only imagine that Jesse, Zerelda, and her other children feared for Frank as Amanda Savery feared for her husband. Not until April, perhaps as late as May 1864, did they see again his long nose and lanky frame, uninjured after adventures and barbarities beyond description. It seems that he remained with Quantrill when the guerrillas pulled out of Jackson County for a march to Texas on October 1, 1863. Union troops were swarming then, and an early chill began to take leaves off the trees and lay frost on the ground, making trackers’ work far simpler. Frank was with Quantrill at Baxter Springs, Kansas, where the bushwhackers annihilated the one-hundred-man guard of General James G. Blunt (though the general himself managed to escape). Frank passed the winter in Sherman, Texas, where the Missouri guerrillas disintegrated into quarreling gangs of bored, murderous bandits, feuding with the Confederate command as well as each other. By the time the bushwhackers set out in early spring for the long ride north, Bill Anderson and others had split off on their own. Quantrill went back to Missouri with sixty-four followers, only to lose command of this remnant to George Todd in a face-off over a poker game.25
It was a savage set of men who returned with Frank that April. Already hardened by war, they had been blistered by butchery at Lawrence and debauchery in Texas. And Charles Fletcher Taylor, the man who led the small squad that crossed over to Clay County, was one of the hardest. Short, broad-shouldered, sporting a neatly trimmed mustache and beard, “Fletch” had fought with Quantrill from the beginning, scouting out Lawrence before the raid, murdering the innocent in its streets, then riding to Texas. But there he turned against his master, murdering a Confederate officer and resisting Quantrill’s attempt to arrest him. Now he fought (in the phrase of the times) “on his own hook.” Cantering beside him was an even smaller, even more vicious killer: “Little Archie” Clement, a gray-eyed eighteen-year-old from Johnson County. Barely five feet tall, he looked more like a jockey than a guerrilla. But he was already an experienced gunman, and he would soon win the lasting admiration of Frank’s little brother.26
These were the men who brought sixteen-year-old Jesse James to manhood. A year after being dragged through the tobacco field by the Provisional militia, three years after Frank first enlisted in the State Guard, Jesse rode to war. Guided by Frank or another Clay County recruit in late May, he would have crept out at night and sneaked down hog trails to the rugged Fishing River, where Taylor and Clement lay hidden. “There seems to be something of the deathlike brooding over these camps,” wrote Sergeant Bodwell in his diary, after finding an abandoned bushwhacker bivouac. “Always hidden where hardly more than a horse track points the way, in heavy timber and creek bottoms, offal lying about, cooking utensils, cast-off clothing.”
Jesse would have seen a cluster of men gathered around the fire under an awning of low leaves and branches, cooking a meal, drying out socks, cleaning and loading weapons. A strong smell of horses, sweat, and waste (human and animal) would have struck him
, followed by the dense smoke of burning green wood with undertones of oiled leather and wet flannel. They were all young—some astonishingly young, like Jesse himself. “If you ever want to pick a company to do desperate work,” Frank later mused, “select young men from 17 to 21 years old.… Take our company and there has never been a more reckless lot of men. Only one or two were over 25. Most of them were under 21. Scarcely a dozen boasted a moustache.” Or, as another grizzled veteran put it, almost exactly a century after Jesse crept into that camp, “You’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.”27
Now the ritual began. First was the matter of equipment. Either Zerelda or Charlotte sewed a guerrilla shirt for Jesse—a loose pullover with two deep breast pockets for percussion caps, powder charges, and .36 caliber lead balls. Then he needed pistols, a horse, and a saddle. The revolver was the primary weapon, its rapid rate of fire well suited to guerrilla ambushes. Before the war, Colt’s revolvers had been somewhat uncommon, even in Missouri, and they were hard to get legitimately after the conflict began. But the bushwhackers equipped themselves through smuggling, theft, and plundering of the Union dead; so if Jesse did not have a set, one was given to him. As for horses, he would have been told to steal them.28
This last lesson was the start of a much deeper, more lasting education. They were guerrillas. They were not engaged in a war that a colonel of the Army of the Potomac or a general of the Army of Northern Virginia could recognize. They had no lines, no objectives, no strategy, no command structure. Theirs was a purely tactical war, a war to inflict pain, to punish, to kill and destroy. Every barn and brook was a battlefield; every civilian, either an ally or a target. By stepping into that brooding, deathlike camp, Jesse James entered a race to find and kill as many enemies as he could.29
ON APRIL 29, 1864, Major General William S. Rosecrans telegraphed an alert to Colonel Moss in Liberty. The guerrillas were returning, he warned, “to reinaugurate the scenes of murder and robbery which have desolated your country during the past three years.” Rosecrans, humiliated by defeat at the battle of Chickamauga, had been shifted in January to command the Department of the Missouri, a strategic eddy far from the main channels of the war. The state might have been a backwater, but Rosecrans learned that its currents were swift and unpredictable. Accustomed to wielding brigades, divisions, and corps as he marched toward objectives, he now had to weave a net out of slender companies, battalions, and regiments as he waded into guerrilla waters. And no units threatened to unravel more quickly than Colonel Moss’s troublesome Paw Paws. “I expect from you and the Enrolled Militia under your command,” he wrote, “such a reception … as will amply vindicate you from all the charges of disloyalty which have been urged against you.” Moss assured Rosecrans that all would be well.30
Brigadier General Clinton B. Fisk was not so certain. After a military reorganization in January, this stern and voluble officer had assumed command of the District of North Missouri, after serving in the southeastern corner of the state. Fisk had received his rank, in part, through connections in the northern branch of the Methodist Church, an avowedly abolitionist denomination; the savagery of the guerrilla war, however, had negated whatever Christian charity remained within him.31 Rather than rely on Moss, he shifted Captain William B. Kemper and part of Company K, Ninth Cavalry Regiment, MSM, to Liberty in early May 1864. “Clean out and kill every marauding, thieving villain you find,” he wrote to Kemper on May 15, adding, “Keep your eyes on the Paw Paws.”
The captain needed no instructions on that point: he intended to avoid Moss’s men at all costs as he pursued the bushwhackers. And the guerrillas were back—he could feel it. But every time he sent squads to scout the countryside, they came back emptyhanded. On May 24, Kemper changed tactics. After nightfall, he ordered fifteen men to draw rations, mount their horses, and follow him into the country, where he deployed in ambush. After spending a day waiting for the enemy, he gathered his troopers out of hiding and moved on to another spot. Meanwhile, he sent out two spies; each night he rendezvoused with them to better plan his trap for the following day.32
Across the Missouri River, the Second Colorado Cavalry employed the same tactics with devastating effect. Kemper, however, had fewer men and experienced opponents. Fletch Taylor and Archie Clement easily slipped past his ambushes to deliver a sharp reminder that there was no line between combatants and civilians. On June 1, they led their Clay County recruits (dressed in captured Union uniforms) to the farm of Bradley Bond. Gathering outside the front door, they asked to see the man of the house. When Bond stepped outside they shot him to death. The next day, they murdered Alvis Dagley in a field not far from the Samuel place, then trotted to his house and coldly told his widow.
Over the next few weeks, the gang killed at least eight Unionist civilians. “Men were slain before the eyes of their wives and children,” one resident wrote, “or else shot down without mercy by the roadside and their bodies left to fester and corrupt in the sun. Property was taken and destroyed on every hand, business of all kinds prostrated, values were unsettled, everything was disturbed.” They killed one slave “for fun,” and they looted as freely as the worst jayhawkers or militia.
Jesse James never attempted to distance himself from this slaughter; in later years, one of his closest friends boasted of how Jesse and Frank went alone to the home of a local Unionist, just after the death of Dagley, and murdered him outside his house. This, then, was his introduction to warfare: not as a gladiator in battle against a tyrannous foe, but as a member of a death squad, picking off neighbors one by one.33
OF ALL THE departures in Jesse James’s dramatic life, none would ever be so momentous—or portentous—as this one. More than a hundred years after Jesse first fired a revolver at another human being, sociologist Lonnie Athens laid out a process he calls “violentization,” which may best describe what the young Missourian passed through. It is how dangerous violent criminals come into being.
In violentization, Athens writes, an individual passes through four stages. First is brutalization, which consists of violent subjugation by an authority figure, witnessing the subjugation of a close friend or family member, and violent coaching by an intimate—who may ridicule the subject, repeatedly urge him to hurt others, or glorify violence through storytelling. Brutalization leads the subject to reject religious and cultural norms of civil behavior. The next stage is belligerency, as the subject resolves to respond to provocations with force. Then comes the third and most difficult stage, violent performances. The subject pushes through a psychological barrier, and actually inflicts pain on another person. That leads to the final step in the process: virulency. The subject feels his social status change after his violent performance; he sees that others now fear him, while some of his intimates congratulate and reward him. He feels enormously powerful—in sharp contrast to the helplessness he had endured at the brutalization stage—and decides to respond with overwhelming force to the smallest slight.34
This narrative seems to echo Jesse’s life. As a boy, he was turned out of his home and sent away from his mother by his first stepfather; he probably witnessed the beating of slaves, perhaps even hangings; and, most important, he and his family were brutalized by the Provisional militia that stormed onto the farm in May 1863. He had violence coaches on every side, from Zerelda (who explicitly praised the worst rebel atrocities) to his brother Frank. After he took to the brush, Taylor and Clement took over as his mentors; they mocked him for his boyish diffidence, nicknaming him “Dingus” after a euphemistic curse he once uttered. But once he joined in the killing, they gave him their respect. “Not to have any beard,” one of the deadliest guerrillas supposedly said of him, “he is the keenest and cleanest fighter in the command.” Jesse abandoned all civil norms, even the blunt-instrument morality of a slaveowning culture. He now belonged to a group that believed a man must murder for respect.35
Jesse, like other products of
violentization, did not act on impulse. He reflected on what had happened to him, and how he should respond. He reportedly blamed those first two victims, Bond and Dagley, for his beating on the day the militia raided the farm, and for hanging his stepfather. Popular tradition describes Jesse’s trip to the brush as a quest for revenge against such men—a simplified (and sanitized) version of the violentization process. Indeed, there was nothing military about the decision to kill either Bond or Dagley; they had long since left the militia, and had been tending their fields and livestock in peace.36
These facts compellingly fit Athens’s model—though of course Missouri was at war. The guerrilla conflict may have been an intensely personal struggle, but it was still part of a much larger clash of ideologies. Hatred of abolitionism ran deep in Jesse’s family; Rev. Robert James had battled antislavery Baptists as far back as 1845. The Kansas conflict had sharpened the proslavery argument to a lethal edge, and Zerelda had led her children to the Confederate side at the very beginning of the war, long before the Union authorities inflicted any suffering upon them.
By the time Jesse put on his guerrilla shirt, a full year had passed since the brutal raid by the Provisional militia. After a quiet Paw Paw winter, with the conservative Colonel Moss and former Confederates in control of the county, Jesse and his family faced the smallest threat of danger and harassment since the arrival of Union forces. Once he joined the bushwhackers, the process of violentization sped rapidly ahead—but it cannot fully account for his decision to enlist in the first place. In perhaps the most hotly ideological era in American history, Jesse was a true believer. He fought not as a victim, but as a warrior in a cause.37
In one of George Orwell’s earliest and best essays, “Shooting an Elephant,” he describes how, as a colonial policeman in Burma, he shot to death an elephant that had gone on a rampage. Orwell was troubled by the fact that the animal had ceased to be a danger by the time he confronted it. But as a crowd of native Burmese gathered around and watched him stand there with his rifle, he felt compelled to fire. “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys,” he wrote. “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.… A sahib has got to act like a sahib.”38
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