T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Down the length of the coaches they marched, as terrified passengers shoveled their money and jewelry out of sight. When one woman began to sob, a man nearby spoke up bravely. “Madam, I’ll protect you at the risk of my life.” Another passenger smirked. “Why, then, don’t you go and fight those fellows in front?” he asked, “to which no reply was vouchsafed,” the press reported. In another seat, Rev. J. S. Holmes of Bedford, New York, began a round of hymn singing, followed by loud prayers for their safety and the robbers’ repentence.

  Jesse found the messenger. “Come forward now and unlock that safe without any nonsense.” Bushnell denied having the key. “You want to find it damned quick, or I will kill you,” Jesse snapped. Then he marched Conkling and Bushnell back through the train until they found the brakeman, who handed over the key. Back in the baggage car, it took them only a moment to empty the United States Express safe. “They evidently expected no greater difficulty with the other safe,” Bushnell recalled, “and were considerably surprised and excited when they found that no one of the keys surrendered would fit its lock. They cursed—indeed, the whole affair was redolent of profanity—and were extremely unwilling to believe that the key was not to be had, until the brakeman explained that the Adams Express had no route over the Missouri Pacific, but only a contract with the United States Company for the transportation of a sealed safe from Sedalia to St. Louis.” They managed to smash a hole in the second safe with a heavy iron pick (used to break up coal for the engine), and pulled out papers and envelopes. A quick review of the other baggage car satisfied them they had what they wanted.

  Outside, the remaining bandits kept up a steady rattle of gunfire to intimidate the passengers. The only resistance came from the newsboy: he squeaked off a round from a tiny pepperbox pistol, sparking hearty laughter from the gunmen. “Hear that little son of a bitch bark!” one quipped.

  “Better go through the passengers,” someone suggested. Jesse shook his head. “We’ve been an hour here already, and can’t waste any more time, as trains are coming up. Must get away.” As the others jumped out the door, Jesse turned to Bushnell. “Tell Allan Pinkerton and all his detectives to look for us in hell.” He nodded to Captain Tibbets, the conductor. “Now, Cap,” he said, “you can take your damned old machine and go ahead.” Then he hopped down to the ground.21

  “I expect probably it was an hour before they started off [the train] and came down where we was,” Hobbs Kerry recalled. “We all got our horses and started off. We went about twenty miles.… Miller carried the bag with the money in it part of the time, Cole Younger and Jesse James also took turns.” At one point they rode into a stream to mask their trail. Shortly before dawn, Kerry reported, “we all stopped and divided the money. They tore all the envelopes open and put the money in a pile. Frank James counted the money and gave each one his share.… They gave me about $1,200. Then we all scattered.” The loot totaled some $18,300.22

  As soon as the train arrived at the next station, word of the attack was telegraphed across the state. Governor Hardin posted the largest reward allowed by law, a pitiful $300 for each robber. Cincinnati detective Larry Hazen arrived in St. Louis at the request of the Adams Express to help with the search. And posses formed in the towns nearest the raid: Sedalia, Tipton, and, closest of all, Otterville. The five-man Sedalia party was the smallest, but it proved to be the most determined. It stayed on the bandits’ trail through the Lamine River underbrush for days before admitting that the robbers had escaped. The party’s persistence surprised no one, for it was led by a man renowned for his grit, and famous for bringing down the notorious Archie Clement—Bacon Montgomery.23

  Far ahead of Montgomery and his men, Jesse rode to his mother’s farm. He must have felt satisfaction. If the other new men received the same share as Hobbs Kerry, then Jesse must have collected almost $3,000. Just how princely was this sum? In 1876, the combined total of all greenbacks, national banknotes, fractional currency, and gold and silver coin in circulation amounted to $948,201,690—just $20.82 for each of the estimated 45,550,000 men, women, and children in the country. (This figure does not include bank deposits, but those were concentrated in New York and New England.)24 In terms of purchasing power, $10 could buy a good saddle, $100 a respectable horse, and $3,000 a large, improved farm. By any measure, it was a lot of money.

  He felt satisfaction, then, but not contentment. A bitter edge marked his behavior during the robbery. Paranoia seeped through his words and actions, along with a continuing obsession with his enemies. About to drink a glass of water from a cooler on the train, he accused baggage master Conkling of poisoning it. “Here, you son of a bitch, take a drink out of that,” he said. “I don’t propose to take any chances in any of this water business.”25 And he displayed none of the lighthearted joviality seen in previous train raids.

  He may have been preoccupied. This robbery was only the first phase of an ambitious operation. Ordinarily the bandits dispersed for months after a big robbery. But this time the Youngers reunited with the James brothers in Clay County as early as August 2. Other signs point to a long-standing plan for a follow-up raid. Chadwell fled to Texas immediately after the Missouri Pacific strike. There, far from direct contact with the James or Younger brothers, he wrote to his sister in Minnesota. He had made some money, he told her; soon he would be coming to Minnesota to make even more.26

  On the surface, a second robbery made no sense. Nothing could be more dangerous than collecting together so soon after a big raid. And money would not have been their motivation, as the Missouri Pacific operation had been unusually lucrative. What would prompt this departure from well-established—and highly successful—procedure? The answer, it appears, was all around them.

  When the July 7 robbery hit the headlines, it had to shoulder its way between stories of the presidential campaign, the public obsession of the entire nation. As the bandits rode to their Lamine River rendezvous, they navigated around town squares teeming with delegates assembled for county conventions, around courthouses, taverns, and churches packed with political meetings. Men, women, and children attended day-long picnics, where brass bands played and orators railed. Even in an ordinary year, notes historian Keith Ian Polakoff, “Electoral activity was an important part of the very social fabric of the nation.” And this was no ordinary year. As Polakoff writes, 1876 “was universally expected to be the most closely contested presidential election in more than a generation, even before the candidates were chosen.”27

  Just one week before the Missouri Pacific robbery, the Democratic National Convention in St. Louis had nominated Samuel J. Tilden for president in an atmosphere of hope and expectation not felt in the party since before the Civil War. The sixty-two-year-old New York governor seemed the perfect candidate to end the scandal-ridden Republican era, having smashed the corrupt Tammany Hall organization led by William “Boss” Tweed. Even as the gang waited along the tracks, Democrats were chanting the party mantra, “Tilden and Reform.”28

  All this struck Jesse James in a most particular way. The outlaw was intensely partisan, but not blindly so. If his mother’s opinions reflected his own—as she herself claimed—the Unionism of the leading Democratic candidates squelched his enthusiasm. Connecticut-born John S. Phelps, who had served as a Federal officer and military governor of Arkansas, had defeated former Confederate congressman George G. Vest for the gubernatorial nomination in a state convention marked by wartime divisions. “I don’t think much of Phelps,” Zerelda told a reporter for the Kansas City Journal of Commerce. “He was no better than a Radical during the war,” she explained, adding that her sons “would never vote for him.” She was “equally severe” on Tilden, who was an old abolitionist. She “thought he was a great fraud, but still the worst fraud was better than the best Radical.” At one point she squinted at the reporter angrily, demonstrating her knowledge of his paper’s Republican politics. “I don’t like newspapermen,” she snapped, “and I don’t like Radicals. I named my youngest girl
Fanny Quantrell, just to have a Quantrell in the family. And I am proud of my boys.”29

  Tilden’s slogans about civil service reform and the gold standard meant less than nothing to Jesse. If his politics had been shaped by such questions, he would have switched to the new Greenback Party, which attacked the “oligarchy” of corporate monopolists. But Jesse and his mother were Democrats, ex-Confederate Democrats. For them the decisive question was the end of Reconstruction, as it was for all the white South.30

  By the summer of 1876, the front lines in the war over Reconstruction had long since moved beyond Missouri. And, in a very real sense, Jesse himself had too. But after his Tennessee letter-writing campaign failed to awaken the old Confederacy to his status as a rebel hero, he decided to act more aggressively.

  Jesse James, of course, was always a man in the shadows. His intentions can only be deduced from his actions and the handful of statements he made for the newspapers. But in both word and deed, he now began to hint that he had in mind a stroke with distinctly political overtones. It would not be a grand strategic blow, of course; as befitting a bushwhacker and bandit, it would be tactical, personal—and lucrative. With the climactic election debate raging, he would do as Quantrill had in going after Jim Lane in Lawrence: he would hit the enemy in his own home.

  But before the bandits could act, disaster struck: Kerry was arrested. As they later learned, the capture was organized by James McDonough, chief of the St. Louis police, under the state’s special outlawry act. Early in the year, McDonough had heard rumors of Kerry’s planned Granby robbery and dispatched a team of officers to investigate. Once the Missouri Pacific raid hit the news, McDonough quickly sent his men back to that corner of the state to wait for Kerry’s return. The inexperienced bandit reappeared on July 26, throwing money around with reckless abandon. Five days later he was arrested.31

  Other followers of the James and Younger brothers had been caught, but none had ever said a word about their leaders. Kerry would be different. As early as August 6 the press began to hint that he had broken, publishing an accurate list of the men who had robbed the Missouri Pacific. Three days later came confirmation, followed on August 13 by full details of the arrest and confession. By then the first fruit of his betrayal had fallen. A party of twelve men, apparently hired and led by J. M. Thatcher, officer of the Adams Express, took a special train late on August 10 to a spot near the farm of Samuel Ralston, Frank’s father-in-law, which they raided the next morning. They did not find Jesse—but they soon heard from him.32

  “Last evening,” the Kansas City Times reported on August 18, 1876, “a friend of his rode up to one of the reporters of the Times and handed him the following letter. He was not either Jesse or Frank James, but was much younger than them.” As might be expected, Jesse proclaimed his innocence in the message thus delivered, condemning Kerry’s “so-called confession” as a “well-built pack of lies.” Then he added a rather odd explanation. “Kerry knows that the James and Youngers can’t be taken alive,” he boasted, “and that is why he has put it on us.”33

  A second missive appeared in the Kansas City Times on August 23. Again Jesse attacked Kerry; again he asserted his innocence. Then he turned to his obsessions: politics, his enemies, and himself. Writing with both honest anger and a keen grasp of Confederate resentments, he focused on a man he had hated for the last nine years. “My opinion is that Bacon Montgomery, the scoundrel who murdered Capt. A. J. Clement, Dec. 13, 1866, is the instigator of all this Missouri Pacific affair,” he wrote. “But one thing I know he did do when he was in command of Tom Fletcher’s cutthroat militia. He had Arch. Clement, one of the noblest boys and the most promising military boy of his age murdered in cold blood, and if poor Clement was living to-day he would be worth more to his country than old Tom Fletcher and all the militia that ever were in Missouri.” He declared that Montgomery “had no equal” as a villain, urging that a reporter be sent to Lexington to inquire about the events of 1866. He also alluded to the recent raid at the Ralstons’ and the attack on his mother’s farm the year before. “I am of the opinion he had a hand in that dirty, cowardly work. Montgomery, roll in your special trains, and break down doors and arrest quiet citizens and put them in irons. Ever where you turn makes friends for me.”

  He hesitated, he said, to blame the Democratic governor for the raids made on his family and friends. “Gov. Hardin is a man of too much brains to act in a manner that would kill him in the eyes of the majority of the people who have elected him,” he wrote, “and think he is the best governor Missouri has had since the war. But I can’t vouch for Mr. Bingham’s [the adjutant general] innocence.” Was this a threat? A boast of his political clout? He seemed to be warning Hardin that the Confederate Democrats who sympathized with the bandits would withdraw their support for him if he tried too hard to catch the James brothers. On the other hand, Jesse despised Bingham as an active Unionist, unlike Hardin, who had sat out the war. Jesse went on to bemoan the failure of the amnesty resolution the previous year. Then he lifted his eyes to a higher level. “If we have a wise Congress this winter, which I believe we will have, I am sure they will grant us a full pardon. I will not say pardon,” he added, “for we have done nothing to be pardoned for.” He went on to mock President Grant, scorn Allan Pinkerton, and suggest that the express companies give money to the poor rather than waste it on detectives.34

  This letter is especially significant because it contains Jesse’s unedited opinions. John Edwards was out of circulation, and had no part in it. On September 4, 1875, he had fought a duel with Emory S. Foster, another editor and a former Union officer. Though neither man had suffered injury in the exchange of shots, Edwards had promptly resigned from the St. Louis Times. He had retired to his father-in-law’s farm in Lafayette County, where he was now completing Noted Guerrillas, his history of the Missouri bushwhackers. Had he reviewed Jesse’s note, he would never have allowed such condemnation of Montgomery, who was a close friend despite his Radicalism. Indeed, Edwards pointedly defended him in a passage on Clement’s death in the book he was now writing.35

  This bit of correspondence, then, reflected Jesse’s personal mixture of emotion and calculation. The appearance of Montgomery at this critical juncture struck him as more than a coincidence; few enemies were more significant in his personal mythology of persecution and revenge. Jesse’s fury at Clement’s death was as vivid and real as his love for his mother or his pity for himself. For Clement’s killer to show up now, leading the chase after Jesse himself, made perfect sense in his mind: it sealed the connection between his bushwhacking and his banditry, between the political turmoil of 1866 and that of 1876.

  Jesse shrewdly seized on Montgomery, the old militia officer, as a spark to rekindle the sympathies of his friends and supporters. It offered him a chance to highlight the history of Missouri’s bitterest conflicts, to fan the partisan fires while he pleaded his innocence. And his discussion of Hardin, Bingham, and Congress was striking. He asserted to the world that he was a political actor, one to be reckoned with, one who deserved the attention of the Democratic Congress he confidently expected after the election. He placed himself firmly in the context of the great political revolution that everyone saw coming in November: like the white South, he would only be free when the Republicans were crushed.

  And as he lifted his rhetoric to the national level, he and his gang set out to act on the national stage. Jesse was determined to take his place as a warrior against Reconstruction, as a hero of all the South, and he would do so by taking personal vengeance on an unsuspecting target in the fastness of his final refuge. When a reply from Montgomery appeared in the Kansas City Times on August 24, 1876, Jesse was already well on his way to the quiet Minnesota town of Northfield.

  • • •

  I WILL NOT attempt to tell you what a revolution I have seen and been through,” Adelbert Ames wrote to his wife in June. “The certain monotony of a money-getting existence cannot be wholly analyzed and realized much l
ess intelligibly expressed.”36 But for all his thoughtful self-reflection, he once again applied himself with the iron sense of duty that had always driven him. “I make progress whenever I comprehend what is to be done and how to do it,” he added. “As I become interested the difficulties of the change disappears.”

  As he became interested, he became active. As he pored through the mill’s books, he found some $4,000 in fat to be slashed from the annual payroll. He insisted on sending samples of their flour to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. There, at that grand party the nation was throwing for itself, America’s newest products were going on display, from the seven-hundred-ton, forty-foot-high Corliss steam engine, to the telephone and the electric light, to packaged yeast and linoleum. Agricultural goods would compete for special awards. A prize won there would go far toward securing future business; indeed, more than ten million people would attend the exposition. But Ames’s father and brother were slow to see the possibilities. “The fact is,” he told Blanche, “this firm has been doing an honest plodding business and are far behind others in the details which often amount to so much in a year. Surely I have much work before me.”37

  With each day he became better acquainted with Northfield. From the western side of town, where the mill stood and the railroad tracks ran, Ames could make a short walk across the Cannon River bridge to reach the central square. On its eastern side, it opened onto the main avenue, Division Street, which ran north and south beneath a low plateau. Carleton College stood on those modest heights farther up, and the usual small-town businesses lined Division: the Dampier Hotel; a drugstore run by a man named Wheeler; two hardware stores, one owned by J. S. Allen and the other, on the southern side of the square, by Anselm Manning; and various dry-goods stores. On most days, Division rattled with carriages and wagons driven in from the countryside, as farmers, tradesmen, artisans, and professionals clogged the streets.