T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  In this moment of turmoil and bloodshed, the bushwhackers were bound to reappear. The most coherent and consistent groups would reemerge in precisely that triangle of counties—Clay, Jackson, and Lafayette—where resistance to the Radicals was fiercest; and (as the Lexington Caucasian’s correspondent noted) they moved about with the respect of the secessionist community. All of this suggests that their reappearance was a response to the revolution around them—a response that could hardly be surprising. “Military service has often been a politicizing and radicalizing experience,” historian Foner notes. In the North, veterans formed the backbone of the Republican Party, while in the South they fought to restore the old social order. The situation was similar in some ways to Europe after World War I, when reactionary soldiers’ groups such as the Italian Fascists and German Freikorps battled socialists in the streets. In the American South, the target was less a political party than the entire race of African Americans. “They govern … by the pistol and the rifle,” wrote a visitor to Louisiana in 1865. “In some areas,” Foner observes, “violence against blacks reached staggering proportions in the immediate aftermath of the war.”46

  In Missouri, the guerrillas had filled the same role during the war. They had often brutalized escaping slaves, sometimes killing them, sometimes recapturing them and selling them in the Confederacy. When black men began to enroll in the Union army, the guerrillas had swept in to terrorize them. After emancipation, bushwhacker Jim Jackson pledged “to hang and shoot every negro he can find absent from the old plantation.” He went at it with vigor until he was finally caught, tried, and hanged in June 1865. “Slavery dies hard,” mused General Fisk. “I shudder for my race when I discover the wicked barbarity of the late masters and mistresses of the recently freed persons.”47

  But this was not the Deep South. For one thing, it was heavily white; nowhere in Missouri had slaves made up much more than a third of the population. And the white majority was bitterly divided. The shock of the Confederate surrender had left many guerrillas confused and indecisive, unprepared at first to resist the Radical regime. On July 1, 1865, Captain Clayton E. Rogers—the same man who accepted Jesse James’s surrender in Lexington—reported that the rebels “seem thoroughly subdued and willing to accept peace on any terms our government might dictate.” A few remained at large—notably Archie Clement and Jim Anderson, who never gave themselves up. Under relentless pressure from pursuing militia, they had fled the state about the same time that Jackson swung from a rope, taking refuge in Texas. There the renegade Missourians became “a scourge and terror to the good citizens,” according to one Texan. But they did not remain south for long.48

  In the summer and fall of 1865, it became clear that the Union victory meant a Radical victory. Society was changing drastically, and the winners of the war meant to change it still further, until Missouri had truly become a Northern state. In the face of political revolution and private revenge, in the face of former slaves who now carried muskets and asserted their freedom, it was only a matter of time before the bushwhackers resisted in the manner to which they were accustomed.

  In August 1865, the Samuel clan started to drift back to the old homestead, which had been ravaged by war and left untended through winter, spring, and summer. Susie, Zerelda, Reuben, and the couple’s young children came first. Charlotte came too—perhaps out of loyalty, perhaps because, though free in name, she was a forty-five-year-old, illiterate black woman who could realistically imagine no other future than a continued life of labor on this farm. Perhaps she was given no choice. One or two other former slaves returned with her, including a nine-year-old boy named Ambrose and possibly a young woman. They would all work as they did before the war, but their freedom meant the dissolution of much of the family’s wealth.49

  According to Jesse’s own account, he rejoined his mother, sister, and stepfather in October, five months after being shot in the chest. By now, any infection would have either killed him or subsided—it was clearly the latter—and his lung would have sealed and reinflated. If he did still suffer, as he later claimed, it would likely have been from the pressure of pneumothorax—an air pocket in the lining of the lung, sometimes the result of a penetrating wound. Such a condition would have been uncomfortable, but far from crippling. Frank, too, returned home late that year. He had been with Quantrill in Kentucky on May 10, 1865, when the old bushwhacker was bushwhacked himself and killed. Frank and the other survivors had surrendered in Nelson County, Kentucky, on July 26, 1865.50

  In the secessionist corner of Clay County society, the James brothers received a warm welcome home. “Jesse joined the Baptist church in this place after he came out of the army,” recalled an old friend of the boys, Dr. W. H. Ridge, sixteen years later. He joined a Southern Baptist congregation, of course, firmly sympathetic to the rebel cause. “I think he was baptized, and for a year or two acted as if he was a sincere and true Christian,” Ridge added. “He was quiet, affable, and gentle in his actions. He was liked by everyone who knew him.” For a supposedly sick and suffering man, he was surprisingly active. “I have been personally acquainted with Jesse James since 1866,” wrote former Confederate soldier John S. Groom in 1870. He often saw the teenager in his store after the war; he was “respectful,” Groom added. “I have never known a more honest person in all his business transactions.”51

  Relations among former secessionists were one thing; relations with the Unionists, especially the Radicals, were quite another. In December 1869, merchant Daniel Conway reported local rumors about the James brothers. Jesse, he said, “has been leading a wandering, reckless life … and ever since the war has been regarded as a desperate and dangerous character.”52 Even one of Jesse’s stalwart defenders later claimed that he “rode armed, watchful, vigilant, haunted.” The young guerrilla might be ambushed at any moment by his enemies, he added, “but he would be killed with his eyes open and his pistols about him.”

  Filaments of truth run through these blankets of rumor and hyperbole. When Jesse’s comrade Ol Shepherd surrendered, he voiced a fear of “personal enemies.” A year later, the Easton brothers pursued a vendetta against bushwhacker Jim Green, just a few miles north of Zerelda’s farm. Clearly Jesse also had reason to fear retribution from them, because he had been seen in the company of Green on their murder spree in October 1864. As the biblical proverb wisely observes, “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.”53

  As the winter of 1865–66 descended, Jesse was deep into his “wandering, reckless life.” He and Frank began to gather again with their wartime comrades. Young Clell Miller, Jim Cummins, Ol and George Shepherd, and others lived close by, but the James boys also reunited with Dave Pool and his brother John, now resettled across the river in Lexington. At some point before or soon after the new year, Jim Anderson and Archie Clement returned from Texas, closing the circle of Bloody Bill’s inheritors. According to one report, this reunion landed the James brothers, Miller, George White, and one of the Pools in a minor scrape in Liberty.54

  On January 1, 1866, local Radicals prepared for the year ahead by formally organizing themselves as the Republican Party of Clay County (though the Radical label would continue in use for years to come). The central committee was virtually identical to the roster of officials appointed by Governor Fletcher under the Ouster Ordinance. Former militia officers played a prominent part. In the Samuel family’s own township, the Republicans were led by none other than Captain John W. Younger, the man who had likely commanded the squad of Clay County militia that took part in the fateful raid on the farm back in May 1863.

  On January 29, the Republicans of Clay County held a mass meeting at the Liberty courthouse. With control of state government, with a lock on the door to the polls, with a thorough township organization, they swelled with confidence. They believed that the tide of the times was with them: they would bring their revolution to fruition, even here in the heart of secessionist Missouri. Their leaders spoke for long hours to a crowd of enthusiastic suppo
rters as bitter rebels and bushwhackers watched. The next day, they went back to their shops and offices, including one business where most of them shared an interest: the Clay County Savings Association.55

  * I have capitalized “Oath,” both to stress its importance and to avoid partisan labels.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Guerrillas Return

  THE CLAY COUNTY Savings Association was more than a bank: it was the physical embodiment of the Radicals’ vision of themselves as the party of progress and industry. They were concentrated in the major centers of commerce, from St. Louis to Kansas City to county seats (though that was partly a result of being driven there during the war by bushwhackers). In Liberty, the nascent Republicans* had coalesced around Edward M. Samuel, the town’s most enterprising merchant for the past twenty years.1

  In 1863, Samuel and a group of Radical allies had purchased the assets of the Liberty branch of the Farmer’s Bank of Missouri and reopened in the same building, as the Clay County Savings Association. Samuel himself had left in early 1865, driven away by rebel death threats, and he began a new life as a commission merchant in St. Louis (where he would commit suicide in 1869). But the Association continued on as a distinctly Radical institution, staffed by Radical officials, including circuit clerk James Love, the bank’s president.2

  As Clay County’s Republicans organized their local bank, the realm of money and banking was passing through a revolution as sweeping as emancipation itself. In the decades before the guns erupted at Fort Sumter, the most important function of a typical bank was to issue notes. Normally it would build a reserve fund of gold coin, then make loans by issuing its own paper money. People paid each other with these privately printed notes, trusting that they could be redeemed at the issuing bank for gold. A well-run institution circulated paper worth no more than two or three times its holdings in coin.

  That, at least, was the ideal. In reality, many firms—nicknamed “wildcat” banks—recklessly issued bills far beyond their gold reserves (if they had any at all), leading to frequent crashes. Under the best circumstances, banknotes would be discounted when accepted as payment, based on the issuing bank’s reputation and distance, since both affected the likelihood that the bills could be redeemed in precious metal. “A man could not travel from one state to another,” complained the St. Louis Democrat, “without suffering a shave from five to twenty-five per cent on his money.” Counterfeiting was rampant: by 1860, an estimated five thousand varieties of fake notes circulated. With more than a thousand legitimate varieties in the marketplace, detecting the phonies was almost impossible. Herman Melville parodied the situation in his 1857 novel The Confidence-Man, in which he depicted a man trying to detect counterfeits with a counterfeit-detector that itself was counterfeit.3

  This confusing, inconsistent system crashed for the last time in 1861. As war erupted, nervous Americans rushed to return their bills for gold. At the same time, the federal government was draining specie out of banks by borrowing for the war effort. From Manhattan to rural Missouri, banks suddenly stopped redeeming their notes. “There is no such thing as gold and silver coin circulating in the country,” observed Senator John Sherman. “It is stowed away.” The people were left with nearly worthless banknotes, while the U.S. government could no longer sell bonds to banks to finance the war effort. One way or another, Congress had to step in. As Sherman declared, “We must have money or a fractured Government.”4

  The federal response to the crisis changed the face of the American economy forever. First, Congress created a national paper currency, immediately nicknamed the greenback. Unlike private banknotes, the greenback was legal tender—it had to be accepted as payment in all private and public transactions (except customs duties)—and, unlike almost every other kind of paper money in American history, it could not be redeemed in gold. It was money not because it represented an underlying, intrinsically valuable commodity, but because the law said so. Next, Congress established a system of national banks with federal charters (all existing banks were either private or state-chartered). It took this step partly to stabilize the country’s financial structure, partly to guarantee a market for U.S. bonds (each national bank was required to maintain a reserve of federal securities). To drive state-chartered banks into the system, it levied a lethal 10 percent tax on their notes. As a result, only national banks could afford to issue paper money—and this, too, was standardized. The new national banknotes were stamped with the issuing bank’s identity, and made redeemable in greenbacks, not gold. By the end of 1865, almost a thousand state banks across the country had converted into national ones.5

  But, at the same time, the law created a rural niche for state and private institutions, because congressional requirements made it almost impossible to organize a national bank outside of a large city. In towns with fewer than six thousand people, a national bank had to have a minimum capital stock of $50,000—a figure that was doubled for towns of between six thousand and fifty thousand residents. This was an immense sum at the end of the Civil War, especially in war-racked Missouri. The second problem was that national banks were forbidden to make mortgage loans—and, needless to say, land was the primary asset in farm country. On both counts, then, there was plenty of room in Clay County for a private or state-chartered bank, even if it could not issue notes of its own.6

  What Clay County Savings Association did was buy and sell money. And in postwar Missouri, money was physical, and it was scanty. It was physical because the checking account remained a largely urban phenomenon; only in the great cities, where banks were dense and clearinghouses had been established, could it play a significant role. Rural areas depended on cash—as of October 1, 1865, only $460,844,229 in greenbacks and national banknotes were in circulation. In a nation of roughly 35 million people, that meant that only $13.17 existed per person (plus 43¢ in coin). Even this figure exaggerates the amount of money available, since a significant proportion of physical currency, along with almost all checking deposits, was concentrated in the bank-rich Northeast, especially in New York City.7

  The result was sometimes a staggering cash drought, as families often went for weeks at a time without any coin or currency on hand. “When I was growing up there was no such thing as money,” recalled Clark Griffith, the cofounder of baseball’s American League, who grew up in a cash-starved town in post–Civil War Missouri, where “the medium of exchange was apple butter.” Things were never quite so grave in Clay County, a center of commercial, market-oriented agriculture. But there as elsewhere improvisation reigned. The most popular form of ad hoc currency was government securities, especially Missouri’s Union Military bonds and the federal 5:20 and 7.30 bonds (the first named after its minimum and maximum terms of maturity, the second after its interest rate). But they could not simply be traded at face value due to the complications of accruing interest, paid in gold dollars, which had a much higher value, dollar for dollar, than greenbacks.8

  In this cash-bare economy, country banks such as the Clay County Savings Association made money available by purchasing bonds, gold, silver, and old banknotes, all at a healthy discount, so they could profit by reselling them in New York through correspondent banks. They also took deposits and made loans against real estate, often for small amounts, frequently as low as $100, and for terms as brief as thirty days. Rural Missourians went to banks not only to finance large purchases of land or equipment, but simply to get ready cash for a short period.9

  Given the dependence on physical cash, the busy trade in bonds and other financial instruments, and the raw shortage of money, the heart of the bank was the vault. Its master was the cashier. He oversaw discounting on bonds and loans, paid out cash, and kept the keys to the vault and the safe that usually sat inside. His name would appear on the bank’s letterhead, across from the president’s. In the Clay County Savings Association, this important personage was, as of late 1865, the peculiarly named Greenup Bird. Unlike the owners, Bird was not active in politics, but he
had long been a fixture of Clay County’s public life. He had signed at least one petition against the Paw Paw militia, for example; he also had served as county clerk in the 1850s, when he had helped to administer the estate of one Robert James.10

  At two o’clock on February 13, 1866, exactly two weeks after the owners of the Clay County Savings Association led a mass meeting of Radicals in Liberty, Bird sat at his desk in the bank writing a letter. His son William worked at a desk to his left; apart from that, the bank was empty. Suddenly the quiet scratching of nib on paper was interrupted by the creak of the door and a gust of cold air, as two men in blue soldiers’ overcoats strode in. They paused in the warm space around the stove, then one of them walked up to the counter and asked to have a ten-dollar bill changed. Young Bird stood up to attend to the task—and saw a revolver in the man’s hand.

  William backed toward his desk as the gunman scrambled up onto the counter and leaped down. “Also the other man, drawing his revolver, followed over the counter,” Greenup Bird reported. “One presenting his revolver at Wm. Bird & the other man presenting his revolver at me, [they] told us if we made any noise they would shoot us down, demanded all the money in the bank, and [said] that they wanted it quick.” William stood stunned and speechless. Infuriated, his attacker spun him around and smacked him on the back with his heavy metal revolver, snarling, “Damn you, be quick!”