T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Price himself seemed to enjoy the slow march through welcoming towns, the cheering crowds of secessionists who greeted him with gifts, and the speeches he gave in village squares. Perhaps at times he actually imagined that he was liberating the state, as his eager supporters clearly believed. To remind him of his failure, however, he had the angry Reynolds, who was sorely miffed at missing a formal inaugural in Jefferson City. And even though Price smiled and waved to the crowds, he had already begun his retreat. General Kirby Smith had instructed him to come back to Arkansas through Kansas, should he fail to take St. Louis. Unknown to the population, Price was now faithfully following those orders.16

  As delighted as he was with Anderson’s gift, Price preferred to keep the bushwhacker chieftain at arm’s length. After the ceremony in Boonville, he scratched out a formal order, instructing “Captain Anderson” to return across the Missouri River and destroy North Missouri Railroad “going as far east as practicable”—the opposite direction from Price’s own march.17

  THE MISSOURI RIVER ran low in the autumn months. Looking out over the water from the Boonville ferry, Jesse would have seen sandbars breaking the current, mudflats left behind and forgotten by the torrents of spring. Earlier that day, he and the other bushwhackers had basked in the admiration of the Confederate Army of Missouri; now they were returning to their work.

  For a few days, Anderson and some of his men lingered on the northern banks of the river, watching as Shelby’s troops seized the waterside town of Glasgow. There, Anderson raped a black woman and then tortured a local banker to the edge of death. Others galloped east, where they burned a couple of depots, looted the town of Danville, murdered several Unionists, and torched their homes. It was the closest they got to inflicting any damage on the North Missouri Railroad.18

  The bushwhackers reunited and turned west, moving parallel to Price’s march. They faced little resistance: the Federal and MSM cavalry had concentrated south of the river to fight the main rebel army, leaving behind EMM troops of decidedly uneven quality. On October 17, the guerrillas stormed into the center of Carrollton, where the 160 men of the EMM garrison immediately surrendered. The guerrillas marched them toward the Missouri River, picking out a man to shoot down here, another there, until a half-dozen bodies marked the trail of prisoners. Then, with equal caprice, they let the rest go and continued their westward ride. Later they forced a German farmer to guide them west; when his knowledge ran out, Archie Clement shot him, sawed off his head, and placed it on the dead man’s chest, with his hands wrapped around it. Then they resumed their march.19

  On the night of October 19, Jesse slogged with the guerrilla band through the cold, dripping branches of the overgrown Crooked River country in west-central Ray County. With them rode James Crowley, a Ray County militiaman they had captured in a skirmish the day before. Crowley had been spared because of a quirk of geography: he lived close by, and the guerrillas needed a pilot. With a pistol at his back, he led the column upward, guiding the line of scrambling horses up a muddy bluff above the Crooked’s Rocky Fork. There familiar routine took over. The riders spread out, pulled saddles off horses, prepared quick meals, and took turns standing guard. For cover in the steady downpour, they threw horse blankets over small shrubs and low-hanging branches to make improvised tents. In short order, most of them were fast asleep.

  A shrieking whistle shattered the morning, sending the bushwhackers scrambling. The enemy had found them. Blurry-eyed, sliding around in the mud in stocking feet, the guerrillas hurriedly buckled on their revolvers and tossed saddles over their horses’ backs. When the first crackle of gunfire spat through the brush, some of the guerrillas simply abandoned their boots and saddles, riding bareback to freedom. Anderson cocked his pistol on prisoner Crowley. Lead us out of this trap, he told him, or you’ll die.

  Jesse and Frank plunged down a narrow trail after the panicked guide, bounding down between the steep bluffs of the Crooked River. After running for half a mile, they pulled up in a creekbed at Anderson’s command and listened for signs of further pursuit. Then they heard the crackling rush of horses galloping through the brush. Anderson ordered the James brothers and some others to form a rear guard as the rest tried to escape.

  Cocking and firing in rapid succession, Jesse blazed away at the men on horseback as they appeared through the trees. He clicked through one cylinder, then pulled another revolver, emptied it, and pulled another, until finally both he and Frank had spent all their loads. They succeeded in holding back the enemy for a few precious minutes, but now they were cut off from the rest of the guerrillas, who were themselves scattered by another squad of militiamen that had caught them in an open field. The brothers wheeled their horses into the brush and spurred east, the unexpected direction.

  After a few hours more of running and hiding, the James brothers found their way back to Anderson. The scattered band eventually drifted back together, minus a few men who had fallen in the attack. If they were thoughtful, they would have reflected on their experience: clearly not all the EMM were inexperienced, unskilled, and cowardly. As for their own leader, he was as unpredictable as ever: after Crowley successfully guided the bushwhackers to safety, Bloody Bill let him go.20

  “IF YOU HAVE got to a place where there is peace you ought to be content, for we still have none here,” wrote Sarah Harlan as she sat at a table in her home in Haynesville, Clinton County, a few miles north of the Samuel farm. She struggled to remain clear and calm. “I hardly know where to begin to tell you the news,” she wrote to her parents. “The next day after you left home there was about eighty bushwhackers and conscripted men in here. I knew a great many of them.” She ran through the list of names her parents would recognize: Will Courtney, Clell Miller, Ol Shepherd (who had joined the State Guard with Frank James in 1891), and the two James brothers.

  After recovering from the scare on the Crooked River, Jesse and the rest of Anderson’s band had continued their march west, moving into northern Clay County, where Zerelda and other secessionists welcomed them with hot meals and hiding places. Then they dashed to the Clinton County line, where they surprised Harlan as she sat alone in her house. After swarming over her home and farmyard, they mounted up and rode to the village of Haynesville. There they repeated the same scenes and replayed the same themes of this Sisyphean war, all under a brilliant canopy of red, yellow, and orange leaves that signaled the approaching end of the year. They kicked in the door of a general store and looted it; they stole horses where they found them; they searched houses for arms and saddles, overturning beds and pulling out drawers. “They took Mr. Parks off with them,” Harlan added, “and they went on from here, robbing as they went.”21

  The guerrillas drifted south toward the muddy Missouri. On the night of October 26, they camped in deep woods near the rugged Fishing River, just west of Albany, Ray County. Anderson, the ruler of all he surveyed, a movable kingdom of terror, was feeling smug again. The morning of October 27, he and a few of his boys demanded breakfast at a home. As the occupants nervously cooked the meal, they glimpsed the cocky rebel bowing to himself in a mirror. “Good morning, Captain Anderson, how are you this morning?” he grinned. “Damn well, thank you.”22

  He swaggered to the camp, ready to give the orders for the day. Then a ripple of gunfire cracked from the east. Anderson knew there were Union forces in that direction, since some of his men had skirmished with them that very morning. Now, it appeared, they wanted to fight. Leaping into his saddle, Anderson called for his men to mount and follow him. Archie Clement soon wheeled his horse alongside Anderson, followed by a cluster of boys from Clay County, including that new recruit, Clell Miller. With the rest of the band following close behind, this small group galloped after their attackers.23

  SCARCELY A MILE to the east, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel P. Cox waited patiently for Anderson. A tough thirty-six-year-old, Cox defied the amateur-soldier stereotype of the EMM. As a teenager, he had fought in the Mexican War, then went on to crisscross
the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains for a freighting company, to serve as an army scout, even to survive a shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico. After returning to his hometown of Gallatin in Daviess County, he had fought briefly on the Union side, then returned to service during the harrowing summer of 1864. As an EMM officer, he fought under state, not Federal, authority, but he still followed the orders of U.S. and MSM generals. So when he was told to take command of the forces in Ray County in order to defeat Bill Anderson, he had obeyed.24

  Marching south from Daviess County, Cox had concentrated the Thirty-third and Fifty-first Regiments of EMM in the town of Richmond, Ray County, on October 26. Several hundred strong, they were numerous enough to give the bushwhackers a good fight—if they could find them. That night a woman came into camp and asked to see the commander. The guerrillas were camped in the timber just west of the village of Albany, she said. As Cox listened, he may have hesitated before trusting her; after all, Confederate sympathizers were known to spread misinformation. But he decided to take her at her word. Early the next morning, he ordered his men to move out.

  Long and painful experience had taught Union officers two ways to fight the guerrillas successfully. First, there was the surprise attack on a rebel camp. This required excellent intelligence and even better luck; if the bushwhackers took even halfhearted steps to protect themselves, they usually escaped with only a few casualties. Second, there was the ambush, a tactic used to good effect by the “foot scouts” of the Second Colorado Cavalry early in the summer. Cox decided to go one better: he would adopt Bloody Bill’s own favorite method—the decoy. He would lure the wily guerrilla into a carefully prepared trap.

  After chasing away some of Anderson’s sentinels on the outskirts of Albany on the morning of October 27, Cox marched his men to the western side of the village. There he deployed his force of farmers and part-time soldiers, armed with muzzle-loading rifles and a handful of revolvers, along the edge of some woods that extended on either side of a road running west. He sent their horses and supply wagons to the rear, guarded by a small detachment. Then he dispatched perhaps fifty men on a ride to Anderson’s camp. Theirs was the critical part: they would find Bloody Bill, taunt him, and lead him back—hopefully too mad to think clearly.

  Lieutenant Thomas Hankins waited in that line of Union militiamen, looking west for some sign of the enemy. “Everything seemed to stand still,” he wrote in his diary, “not even a horse appeared to move. ‘Bang,’ a single shot, then a sharp volley, followed by the ‘rebel yell’—once heard, never to be forgotten.” Hankins saw the decoy unit “tearing down the road” with screaming bushwhackers close behind. The Union riders dashed through the opening in their line, which waited for the guerrillas “without a break,” Cox reported.

  Down the lane came twenty to fifty guerrillas, probably including Jesse James, galloping after the militiamen who had dared to fire into their camp. They kicked their spurs into their horses, balancing in the stirrups with revolvers in one hand and reins in the other. Anderson pulled ahead, together with another rider; they could see their prey, almost within range, running toward a line of timber.

  Suddenly a crackling wave of fire erupted along the trees, throwing up a dense cloud of smoke. Balls of lead tore through horses and riders. The bushwhackers who survived reined in and turned back for cover, but Bloody Bill and his companion kept on, spurring their horses toward the hole in the Union line. The guerrillas could see more small puffs of smoke as Cox and a few others fired revolvers. Then Anderson pitched forward, his horse still galloping on, until finally he tumbled to earth some fifty yards behind the front.

  The other rider yanked his horse around and spurred back to his companions. He escaped unharmed as the Union troops frantically rammed home a second load into their muzzle-loading rifles. But the militia were ready when Anderson’s men launched another charge. Once again, the line of muskets erupted, toppling more horses and riders. The shattered bushwhackers retreated, leaving behind a badly wounded Clell Miller. Cox immediately ordered a squad of his best men to follow the bushwhackers. “Our cavalry pursued them some ten miles,” he reported, “finding the road strewn with blood for miles.”25

  As the militiamen gathered around Anderson’s inert form, they could scarcely believe their accomplishment. The terror of Missouri was dead, his men scattered and defeated. The Unionists gathered up his body and carried it to Richmond, where a photographer snapped some memorable photographs of the long-haired man in his embroidered guerrilla shirt. They caught his horse, too, a fine, powerful animal with two fresh scalps swinging from the bridle.26

  FOR REBEL CIVILIANS such as the Samuel family, the dream of a Confederate Missouri had never seemed more real than in early October, when Price marched from Boonville to Lexington and on toward Kansas City. Crowds cheered him; recruits rushed in from Clay County and other secessionist strongholds; even the enemy seemed incapable of stopping him. Most Kansas militiamen initially refused to cross the state line to stand in his way; only two thousand troops advanced to Lexington. Then, suddenly, the dream evaporated.

  From October 19 through 21, Jo Shelby led the rebel vanguard in a bitter fight that gradually drove the Union detachment back through the streets of Lexington, past Independence, to the banks of the Big Blue just east of Westport and Kansas City. But Price was fighting on two sides: from the east came General Alfred Pleasonton—the former cavalry commander for the Army of the Potomac—with eighty-five hundred troops, followed by many more. Meanwhile General Samuel R. Curtis crossed the Kansas border with some thirteen thousand men. On October 22, Shelby pushed Curtis back into the town of Westport, but to the east, Pleasonton routed Price’s rear guard. The Confederate Army of Missouri had shoved itself into a trap.

  The fighting that took place on the next day, October 23, is usually dignified with the name “the Battle of Westport.” Though it was just one day in more than a week of continuous combat, it deserved the distinction: on that chilly Sunday, the Confederate cause in Missouri permanently collapsed. On the rebel left, Shelby threw his men uselessly against the enemy line outside of Westport; on the right, the Union attack broke through. Before long, the Confederate army crumbled into a panicked mob. Over the next one hundred hours, Price and his shattered divisions raced south, covering as many as fifty-six miles in one day. Only Shelby’s tired but resilient men held back the pursuing enemy. After a final skirmish on October 28, the rebel Army of Missouri abandoned its home state forever.27

  Many explanations would eventually be offered for Price’s failure, some of them contradictory: he tried to carry out an invasion when he should have confined himself to a mere cavalry raid; he did not move quickly enough to take St. Louis; he simply wasn’t up to the job. Ultimately, however, Price failed because the people of Missouri, on the whole, wanted him to fail. For every family that turned out to welcome him, there were two that sent their men into battle in the ranks of the MSM, the EMM, or the U.S. Volunteers. More ominous for the rebel cause, a number of the faces in the Federal ranks were black—former Missouri slaves, now Union soldiers.

  Perversely, the bushwhackers understood this better than Price did. Theirs was a war against the Union population, whether uniformed as militia or working peacefully in the fields. Anderson’s band was hardly alone in this respect: as Price moved west through Saline and Lafayette Counties, guerrilla leaders George Todd and Dave Pool burned the homes of Unionist Germans, murdering dozens on October 10 and the days that followed. In one immigrant community, forty-five men—20 percent of the male population—died at the hands of bushwhackers. Ironically, Price indirectly contributed to the destruction of Todd and his band. Unlike Anderson, they fought alongside the Confederate army, and on October 21 Todd was killed by a Union bullet in skirmishing near Independence.28

  Price’s war ended at almost the same moment that Anderson toppled from his horse. But Bloody Bill’s war against the Union population continued even after his death. On October 29, Sarah Harlan reported th
at Ol Shepherd and the James boys were back in northeastern Clay County, which was now, as always, their refuge. But they did not act like refugees. About nine o’clock that night, wearing their captured blue uniforms, they rode to the home of a Unionist named Baynes. They banged on the door until the farmer poked his head out. They were Federal soldiers, they told him, and they had gotten lost. Could he show them the way to the main road? The gentleman agreed—cheerfully, perhaps, now that Price’s army had been routed and Anderson and Todd were dead. He walked out into the yard, pointing and explaining, as the bushwhackers followed. Then they pulled their pistols and fired. Baynes collapsed to the ground, dead from five close-range bullet wounds. Then the men rode to the home of an elderly man named Farran and murdered him in the same fashion. Word of the murders led other Unionists to flee the area, but the guerrillas continued their harassment, sending death threats to, among others, the prominent merchant and banker Edward M. Samuel.29

  Jesse James’s five-month war had come full circle. He had returned to where he began—the familiar wooded country around his mother’s farm. And he had returned to his original role as a member of a death squad, murdering loyal citizens in their homes. But the changes wrought by Price’s defeat and Anderson’s demise were inescapable. The old band was breaking up, as small clusters of men drifted off, each taking its own direction, and the James brothers drifted off as well. They may have parted as early as November, when an old acquaintance was surprised to see Frank on the road, riding alone. Or the brothers may have split after meeting with Quantrill south of the Missouri River in December, where the guerrilla leader had called together his old followers. Ultimately Frank headed east to Kentucky with Quantrill, while Jesse rode south to Texas.30

  Back in Liberty, Captain Kemper was doing his research. After the mayhem surrounding Price’s invasion, he had revived Colonel Catherwood’s plan to banish the leading rebels in Clay County. On December 2, he finished writing an eight-page report that detailed the evidence against ten families. “It is not through anything personal that is existing between these parties and myself that I speak thus,” he wrote. Indeed, his assessments were quite accurate, though his evidence was sometimes thin. He proceeded from one case to the next, saving the most dangerous for last: the family of Reuben and Zerelda Samuel. Their banishment was essential, he wrote. “I feel today that I am almost as much in ‘rebellion’ here in this county as I would be in South Carolina.”