After four years of war and another of exile, it seems that Edwards still hungered for bloodshed. And bloodshed he would have. As 1866 progressed, the Juaristas steadily gained ground, drawing the Confederates into the battle as they attacked their colonies. Shelby found himself repeatedly under fire; he even took command of the evacuation of French troops from Cesnola late in the year. In November 1866, under pressure from the United States, Napoleon III informed his Mexican puppet that he would do nothing more for him.
In early 1867, French forces withdrew to the coast under constant Juarista attacks. Panicked Southerners raced after them, clogging the seaports in their frantic search for escape. The insurgents captured Maximilian outside the capital and executed him on June 19, 1867. Two days later, Juarista general Porfirio Díaz captured Mexico City. On July 4, exactly two years after the Iron Brigade crossed the Rio Grande, Vera Cruz fell. Their Mexican adventure was over.6
About the time of Maximilian’s execution, Shelby and Edwards set foot on Missouri soil for the first time in three years. In June 1867, Shelby and his family returned to his old plantation in Aullville, Lafayette County; Edwards settled briefly in St. Louis, where he took a job as a reporter with the Republican. There he finished his florid history of the Iron Brigade, Shelby and His Men, which he published that year. The young writer had hardly reconciled himself to Radical rule, as his book made clear. He reserved his highest praise for Shelby’s ruthless intransigence. “Time has demonstrated the strength of his judgment,” he wrote. “The South, despite the sentimental ravings of her delicate generals, will be crushed and ground into powder under the ponderous wheels of a brutal and successful North.”
In 1868, Edwards quit the Republican, perhaps because of his increasingly virulent alcoholism. Or perhaps he had already learned of an opportunity in the burgeoning railroad metropolis of the western border. That year he and Colonel John C. Moore launched the Kansas City Times. As editor of a new daily in a fast-growing town, Edwards rose quickly in fame and notoriety. He serialized his accounts of Shelby’s exploits in its columns, winning himself literary acclaim and an enthusiastic audience of ex-Confederates. In his stories and editorials, he continuously stressed the righteousness of the rebel struggle.7
Ultimately, he would not be satisfied with a sheet that was merely a groaning requiem for the Lost Cause. The openly partisan newspapers of the era wielded tremendous political influence, but the constitution of 1865 had effectively shut Edwards and his fellow Confederates out of politics. In 1870, he finally glimpsed a path back from political exile.
The Radical front was crumbling. As early as November 1866, a faction, known as the Planter’s House group, after a pivotal meeting in the famous hotel, had formed within the party. The group wanted to enfranchise both black men and former secessionists; its slogan, coined by journalist and politician B. Gratz Brown, summed up their cause: “Universal Suffrage and Universal Amnesty.” Hard-line leader Charles D. Drake, father of the state’s constitution, had balked at the idea. “If it is right to make the Negro a voter,” was his reply, “let it be done because it is right, not as a swap with the rebels.” The Radicals had followed his lead, presenting to voters a measure to extend the ballot to black Missourians, only to have it decisively defeated in 1868. Then Drake began to lose influence in the party. First, his choice for an open U.S. Senate seat, Benjamin Loan, was resoundingly defeated by Carl Schurz, an ally of the Planter’s House group. The final blow for Drake, ironically, was the nation’s ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which removed racial restrictions on voting; now the Radicals could no longer postpone the reenfranchisement of rebel whites by arguing that loyal blacks should come first. As 1870 began, it appeared that Confederates would soon be back at the ballot box.8
At this propitious moment, Edwards heard of how Jesse James had tried to take revenge for Bloody Bill Anderson. The tale would have appealed to his morbid fascination under any circumstance—the cold-blooded nature of the killing, the bold defiance of the authorities, the daring escape from a posse—but Edwards must have taken particular pleasure in the crime’s Confederate overtones. Here was one Southerner willing to, as Edwards had written, “appeal again to the sword.”
At some point in the spring of 1870 Edwards made contact with the James brothers. Introductions were required, for nothing indicates that Edwards knew them during the war. (He had praised Cole Younger and Dave Pool in Shelby and His Men in 1867, but had made no mention of the James boys.)9 It was the beginning of a lasting friendship that would change the lives of all three men. A few years later, Edwards would write about Jesse with honest affection. “There is always a smile on his lips, and a graceful word or compliment for all with whom he comes in contact.… Jesse laughs at everything—Frank at nothing at all. Jesse is light-hearted, reckless, devil-may-care—Frank sober, sedate, a dangerous man always in ambush in the midst of society. Jesse knows there is a price upon his head and discusses the whys and wherefores of it—Frank knows it too, but it chafes him sorely.” In the miles and miles of yarn that Edwards would later spin, these words, at least, seem a reasonably direct assessment of the brothers as he saw them. Edwards also introduced them to a wider Confederate circle, including Shelby, who became their lasting patron and protector.10
The first public sign of Jesse’s budding relationship with Edwards came in June 1870, when the Kansas City Times published a letter from the outlaw, addressed to Governor McClurg. In it, Jesse pleaded his innocence in the Gallatin attack; more than that, he made a call for public sympathy. “Some of the best men in Missouri,” he wrote, could prove his alibi, “but I well know if I was to submit to an arrest, that I would be mobbed and hanged without a trial. The past is sufficient to show that bushwhackers have been arrested in Missouri since the war, charged with bank robbery, and they most all have been mobbed without trials.” He continued with a thinly veiled appeal to the secessionist public. “It is true that during the war I was a Confederate soldier, and fought under the black flag,” he added, “but since then I have lived a peaceable citizen.” He admitted that he had fought the posse, even that he personally knew Oscar Thomason, the deputy sheriff’s son, but that they had refused to identify themselves, and he could not recognize Oscar with his face muffled against the cold. “As soon as I think I can get a just trial I will surrender myself to the civil authorities of Missouri,” he concluded, “and prove to the world that I am innocent of the crime charged against me.”11
The peculiar timing of the letter—six months after the crime—suggests that it had more to do with Jesse’s growing friendship with Edwards than anything else. It has even been suggested that Edwards heavily edited, even authored the note.12 The latter is almost certainly untrue. As time would show, the former guerrilla was a prolific correspondent, especially when it came to asserting his innocence. Nor did he need the newspaperman to polish his prose. Though Jesse had a limited education, his brother Frank had enjoyed more than ten years of schooling, and both were voracious readers.13 This letter features few of Edwards’s characteristic flourishes—but it does have one. “The black flag” was an expression for bushwhacker warfare that the editor had diligently popularized, starting in 1867 with Shelby and His Men; the phrase both veiled and celebrated the cold-blooded murder that marked the guerrillas’ methods.14 The letter as a whole began a similar process for Jesse himself, presenting him as the target of unjustified, vindictive persecution, while hinting at his dangerousness.
In July, the bandit published another brief note to the governor. “I have been influenced by my friends to prove an alibi,” he wrote, adding that proof would follow.15 And it came: affidavits from three residents of Kearney, who swore that he had been in town the evening before the Gallatin murder, and visited a Mrs. Fox the day after. One of the statements was from the notably discreet John S. Groom, who swore that young James had made some purchases in his store on December 6. “I further state that I have known Jesse James since 1866, and I have never known him to
act otherwise than respectful, and I have never known a more honest person in all his business transactions.”
The only individuals to swear to Jesse’s whereabouts on the day of the Gallatin raid were from his own family. Susie James claimed that she and her brother had “attended a preaching in Greenville” on the day before, that the bay mare Kate was hers, and that Jesse had sold the horse to some men from Kansas just before the Gallatin raid. The implication was clear: jayhawkers had killed Sheets. This would prove to be a characteristic ploy by Jesse, who often would claim that his enemies had committed the crimes he was accused of. Susie and Zerelda both asserted that Jesse was home when Sheets was murdered. Reuben said that he had been gone all day, helping his brother-in-law Jesse Cole kill hogs, though he had seen his stepson at home that morning.16
Despite the alibi’s obvious hole—the fact that only Jesse’s immediate family accounted for his whereabouts the day of the murder—the campaign to exonerate him succeeded to some extent. Suspicions began to thin. At the beginning of August, Jesse and Frank appeared openly, albeit warily, in Kearney. “They were heavily armed, and well mounted,” noted a correspondent to the Liberty Tribune. “They soon left.” But Clay County was still not safe for the now-notorious brothers. True, the local Radicals had been driven from power in 1868, but the resurgent Democrats in the county were all old Unionists. William G. Garth, once a captain in the Provisional EMM, now served in the state legislature; neither Sheriff Moss nor Deputy Thomason had any sympathy for the bushwhackers-turned-bandits.17
The Samuel family still fretted for Jesse’s life. “I heard Mrs. Samuels, his mother, ask the prayers of the Baptist church in this town in 1870,” recalled Dr. W. H. Ridge of Kearney a dozen years later. “I believe it was for her erring boy, Jesse.… Susie James made one of the most touching appeals to heaven for him that I ever heard made in any church, in the New Hope Baptist Church in 1870.” Under the circumstances, it was hardly strange that Jesse departed for Texas in August 1870 (as he later claimed, in one of his few statements about himself that ring true). He had been there in the winter of 1864–65, when he had gone south with Clement. And the Younger clan was spending much of its time in Dallas County, where Cole’s younger brother John killed Deputy Sheriff Charles H. Nichols on January 15, 1871.
A fugitive could easily disappear in Texas, especially one who was comfortable in the saddle. The cattle business was booming, offering no-questions-asked employment on the long drives to the railhead towns in Kansas. In February 1871, the James brothers returned home through the Indian Territory, perhaps to visit Shelby’s farm in Lafayette County, where Edwards was to wed Mary Virginia Plattenburg on March 28. About the same time, Jesse began to furtively court the quiet Zerelda Mimms, who had cared for him when he was bedridden after being shot through his lung. The affair would have been a psychoanalyst’s playground: Zee was not only Jesse’s first cousin; she had been named for his mother.18
Frank began his own surreptitious courtship around this time, of a schoolteacher named Anna, or Annie, Ralston, who lived with her father, Samuel, near Independence. The two apparently met at a racetrack near Kansas City. Horse racing was an intense passion with both of the James brothers, a natural interest for men who lived by the speed of their mounts, and Anna shared it. “I would call on Anna in the late evening and leave before dawn,” Frank recalled many years later, “and this arrangement worked well for some time.”
A reporter later asked Samuel Ralston if he had had any inkling of Frank’s intentions toward his daughter. “Not the least in the world,” the father replied. “Frank James, however, was an occasional visitor at my house after the war, and from 1870 [to 1874] … was at the house perhaps a half dozen times. The idea that he wanted my daughter for his wife, or that she would accept him never entered my head. I know all about his actions and doings during the war and didn’t want such a man for my son-in-law.”19
AMID THE EARNEST protestations of innocence, the banditry continued. On June 3, 1871, four horsemen rode into the town of Corydon, Iowa. Two of them were the James men; the third was Clell Miller, the fellow veteran of Anderson’s band who had been captured in Bloody Bill’s final battle in 1864. The fourth was Cole Younger. The men’s appearance in Iowa was not entirely a novelty. At least once before, during the war, a bushwhacker crew had raided the state. This time, by accident or design, the bandits arrived on a day when the famous orator Henry Clay Dean had come to speak, and virtually the entire population had jammed into the yard of the Methodist church to hear him.20
Dean, wrote Mark Twain, was “a volcano” who “drew farmers to his stump from fifty miles around.”21 With his shouts and jests echoing down Corydon’s deserted streets, the four horsemen quietly rode to the bank, where they convinced the cashier, the lone occupant, to hand over the estimated $6,000 that sat in the safe. Then they rode to the churchyard. The mass of people sat spellbound as the orator bellowed on, and still no one paid any attention to the outlaws. Finally one of the bandits could stand no more, and interrupted the thundering Dean.
They had just robbed the bank, he announced. “They shook the stolen money at the crowd,” reported one newspaper, “defying pursuit.”22 The disbelieving audience turned back to the famous speaker with great irritation. The bandits “took their departure with the utmost coolness,” claimed one man, “loudly cursing the ‘damned Yanks’ for cowards as they left.”23 Not until the frightened cashier was discovered did the people of Corydon understand what had happened.
The bank officials immediately sent a telegram to Chicago, requesting the services of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. The company’s founder, Allan Pinkerton, promptly dispatched his son Robert to the scene. In the meantime, the county sheriff organized a large posse and set out in pursuit. The bandits escaped across the state line. Over the next two days, they rode south, stopping with friends and supporters, as they had when they were guerrillas.
On June 5, the robbers relaxed around the dinner table in the home of George Lee, in a part of Daviess County known as Civil Bend, just northwest of Gallatin. Somehow they learned that a few of their pursuers were approaching the house. Immediately the James brothers and their companions raced out the door for the stable. The posse opened fire, but the bandits found shelter. In their excitement, the attackers quickly emptied their weapons. As soon as the shooting dropped off, the robbers threw open the stable doors and galloped outside, firing rapidly as they went. Someone in the posse let loose with a shotgun blast that sent a bandit reeling in his saddle, forcing him to drop his coat and a revolver as his hat flew off his head. The robbers escaped, riding toward the heavy timber along the railroad between the towns of Kidder and Cameron, but a member of the posse picked up the fallen coat and found it stained with blood.24
One of the men who studied that red-spattered garment was Robert Pinkerton. He had evidently caught the first train from Chicago, and he and the sheriff had continued on the robbers’ trail after the rest of the posse turned back at the Missouri border. Being a party of only two men, however, they had been unable to stop the bandits from escaping at Civil Bend; afterward, the sheriff, whose horse had been shot by the outlaws, returned home (most likely catching the train at Cameron), while Pinkerton continued the search alone. He tracked the crew to the Missouri River, “and spent several days in the vicinity,” his brother William reported a decade later, “acquainting himself with the history of the men who were engaged in the expedition. During the progress of his investigation he visited the house of Mrs. Samuels, the mother of the James brothers, and called on several persons who were intimately connected with the gang.” He failed to learn anything of use, however, and when the bank called off the hunt he returned empty-handed.25
Despite Pinkerton’s failure, there seemed to be little doubt that Jesse and Frank James had led the raid. “From a description of the robbers it is believed that the James boys, the Gallatin bank robbers, are of the party,” reported a newspaper in Hamilton, just south o
f Gallatin. “They seemed to know every inch of the ground, and to be familiar with the names of parties along the road.” On their way to and from Iowa, they had charted their course along the railroads that cut through the woods and untrafficked backcountry—just as they had in December 1869.26
Almost immediately, Jesse and Edwards began a new publicity campaign, beginning with another letter to the Kansas City Times, dated June 24, 1871. This time, however, Jesse adopted a markedly different tone from that of the previous year. Now his words were explicitly, even harshly, political. “I have just seen an article in the Lexington Register,” he began, “charging myself and my brother Frank with robbing a bank in Iowa.” This complaint immediately staked out a partisan approach, since the Register was vehemently Republican (its owner later shot the editor of a Democratic paper in a political brawl). Jesse claimed, as before, that he could prove his innocence by the “best citizens in Missouri,” but there was no point in doing so. The year before, he wrote, “the degraded Radical party criticised my alibi and insinuated that I had bribed my witnesses, and just so it would be in this case if I was to prove an alibi. But I don’t care what the Radical party thinks about me, I would just as soon they would think that I was a robber as not.” He concluded with a veiled appeal for political change that dripped with partisan sarcasm. “If times ever get so in Missouri that I can get an impartial trial, I will voluntarily go to Clay county and stand my trial. But I am satisfied that if I was disarmed at present, that those brave Radical heroes in Missouri would try to mob me.”27
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