T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Of all the people I want to thank for their help, support, and enthusiasm for this project, the first is Nadine Spence. Her clearheaded assessments, scrupulous reading and rereading, and sacrifices have meant more to me than I can ever say. I want to thank my agent, Jill Grinberg, who saw the potential of my approach and represented me so well. I owe much to my editor, Jonathan Segal; this is a far better book for his truly fine editing.

  Like all historians, I owe an unpayable debt of gratitude to the volunteers and employees who staff the many archives and libraries where I conducted my research. I once heard an archivist say that it is the historian’s job to find the diamond in the dung heap, and it is the archivist’s job to catalog dung. Poorly paid, unrecognized, yet tirelessly professional, they deserve far better than the obscurity in which they work. I would like to thank the staffs of the Chicago Historical Society, the William R. Perkins Library at Duke University, the Missouri Historical Society, the Missouri State Archives, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress, the Southern History Collection at the University of North Carolina, the Western History Department at the Denver Public Library, the Minnesota Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and the libraries of Columbia University. I want to single out Shirley Fansher, a volunteer researcher at the Clay County Archives; Tim Peterson and Beth Beckett of the Clay County Department of Parks and Recreation; David F. Moore and William T. Stoltz of the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the State Historical Society of Missouri; Christine Montgomery, also of the State Historical Society of Missouri; Timothy Rives of the National Archives, Kansas City; Lori Swingle of the Western History Department of the Denver Public Library; and Anneliese Detwiler of the Northfield Historical Society. I particularly appreciate the help offered by the staff of the Watkins Woolen Mill State Historical Site and Park; this facility is no archive, yet it houses a priceless, little-known collection of copies of letters written by the neighbors of the James and Samuel family. I warmly remember their forebearance as I worked in their midst. In addition, Brice Hammack and Nora Wertz aided my research for the maps. Philip and Kathleen Brady housed me during my research trips to Washington, despite the chaos of remodeling and the demands of a new baby. Will Goldstein put a roof over my head in St. Louis. And my sister Karen and her husband, Ted Patton, put me up in North Carolina. Thanks to all.

  I also offer my gratitude to the scholars who reviewed the manuscript and otherwise supported my work. The fine Missouri historians William E. Parrish and Christopher Phillips detected errors, offered perceptive comments, and made helpful suggestions for further reading as I completed this book, as did Carl Weiner of Carleton College, an old mentor. I want to specially thank Robert Bonner, my old college adviser and the recently retired head of the American Studies program at Carleton College. He read the manuscript carefully and shared his insights; he also taught me more about the craft of history than anyone before or since. More important, he and his wife, Barbara, imparted lessons about dignity and humanity that I bear in mind every day. I would also like to thank Richard Maxwell Brown for his support from start to finish. Without his groundbreaking work on violence in American history, which takes seriously those figures better known through folklore and Westerns, this book would not exist. Few historians have had such an opportunity to shape the study of a neglected aspect of the past, and he has made the most of it. Yet he approached my project without any hint of a proprietary air. He read and reread these chapters with great generosity, offering suggestions and warm encouragement throughout. He, too, has been a model of decency as well as good scholarship, and it has been an honor to benefit from his help.

  T.J.S.

  Abbreviations Used in the Notes

  CWH Civil War History

  Duke: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

  Fellman: Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)

  History III: William E. Parrish, A History of Missouri, vol. 3, 1860 to 1875 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973)

  History of Clay: History of Clay and Platte Counties, Missouri (St. Louis: National Historic Company, 1885)

  MHR: Missouri Historical Review

  MHS: Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri

  Militia Report: Report of the Committee of the House of Representatives of the Twenty-Second General Assembly of the State of Missouri, Appointed to Investigate the Conduct and Management of the Militia (Jefferson City: W. M. Curry, 1864; reprinted 1999 by the State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia)

  MnHS: Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota

  MSA: Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri

  NA: National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  O.R.: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901). Citations as follows: series (arabic): volume (roman), part (arabic): page number (arabic).

  Pinkerton Papers: Papers of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Provost-1: One-Name Citizen File, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Record Group 109, Microfilm Publication M–345, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  Provost-2: Two or More Name Citizen File, Union Provost Marshal Papers, Record Group 109, Microfilm Publication M–416, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  Settle: William A. Settle, Jr., Jesse James Was His Name, or, Fact and Fiction Concerning the Careers of the Notorious James Brothers of Missouri (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977)

  Shoemaker: Floyd C. Shoemaker and Grace Gilmore Avery, eds., The Messages and Proclamations of the Governors of the State of Missouri (Columbia: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1924)

  UNC: Southern History Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

  Watkins Mill: Collated typescript Blythe, Culbertson, Frass, and William Jewell letter collections, Watkins Woolen Mill State Historic Site and Park, Lawson, Missouri

  WHMC: Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri

  WHMC-KC: Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, State Historical Society of Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri

  Yeatman: Ted P. Yeatman, Frank and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2001)

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. Kansas City Times, April 4, 1882; see also Stella F. James, In the Shadow of Jesse James (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Dragon Books, 1990), 7.

  2. Statistics compiled from Shoemaker, vols. 4–6. Newspaper reports indicate that some reward offers were issued that were not included in this work.

  3. Popularizations of Jesse James’s life started before his death, with James William Buel’s The Border Bandits, and fictional dime novels published by Frank Tousey; see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1998), 160–6. Later popular literature on the outlaws includes such classics as The Rise and Fall of Jesse James, by Robertus Love (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990, orig. pub. 1925), and Homer Croy’s Jesse James Was My Neighbor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, orig. pub. 1949). Recent examples include descendant James R. Ross’s I, Jesse James (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Dragon Publishing, 1988) and Marley Brant, Jesse James: The Man and the Myth (New York: Berkley, 1998). One recent popular account stands out: Ted P. Yeatman’s Frank, and Jesse James: The Story Behind the Legend (Nashville: Cumberland House, 2001). A diligent researcher, Yeatman helpfully offers extended primary-source quotes and lengthy appendices. Though a valuable resource, it is more an extended research report than a scholarly historical work, in that it does not critically engage its (sometimes problematic) sources, contextual issues, or the historiography on the period. The first serious full-length biography of the Jam
es brothers was the groundbreaking Jesse James Was His Name, or, Fact and Fiction Concerning the Careers of the Notorious James Brothers of Missouri, by the late William A. Settle, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977, orig. pub. 1966).

  4. Edwards’s close connection to the guerrillas and the James gang in particular has long been known. For useful discussions of Edwards’s polishing of the myth of the “noble guerrilla,” see Fellman, 247–66, and Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 129–36.

  5. Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of a Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 285–92. The importance of Phillips’s work exceeds the limited scope suggested by the title. It includes an excellent analysis of Missouri’s postwar politics that neatly fits the argument made in this book, which was being written when Missouri’s Confederate was published. On banditry as a historical problem, see Eric J. Hobsbawm, Bandits, rev. ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1981, orig. pub. 1969). Hobsbawm’s concept of the “social bandit” is discussed in chapter 20, as are analyses by both Fellman and Richard White, “Outlaw Gangs of the Middle Border: American Social Bandits,” Western Historical Quarterly 12, no. 4 (October 1981): 387–408.

  6. Jesse James’s purposeful role in creating his own public image is developed throughout this book; see especially the summary in chapter 20. It should be noted that this book was written before September 11, 2001. The interpretation presented here, including the use of the word “terrorist,” was not influenced by the events of that day, nor by subsequent developments.

  PART ONE: ZION

  CHAPTER ONE: The Preacher

  1. Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (New York: Penguin, 1969), 37–45; see introduction by David Levin, 7–26, and editorial note, 29–30; see also Herman Melville’s review in The Literary World, March 31, 1849.

  2. R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 170–1.

  3. E. Carter to My Ever Dear Mother and Sisters, November 25, 1847, Watkins Mill.

  4. Perry McCandless, A History of Missouri, vol. 2, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972), 137; Parkman, 37–8.

  5. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Penguin, 1984), 67, 81; McCandless, 139; William E. Lass, “The Fate of the Steamboats: A Case Study of the 1848 St. Louis Fleet,” MHR 96, no. 1 (October 2001): 2–15.

  6. McCandless, 138; Lass, 5; Elizabeth Carter to My Ever Dear Mother and Sisters, November 25, 1847, Watkins Mill. The Kanzas or Kansas nation is now known as the Kaw. Erratic punctuation and spelling were common in nineteenth-century letters; all have been standardized in this book, except where the original is pertinent (e.g., all letters by Jesse James).

  7. Parkman, 39.

  8. Alphonso Wetmore, Gazetteer of the State of Missouri (St. Louis: C. Keemle, 1837), 57; Joseph Trego quoted in Thomas Goodrich, War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas, 1854–1861 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1998), 19 (a badly flawed work cited here merely for its quotations).

  9. For a discussion of Indian removal and the permanent Indian frontier, see Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier and the American West, 1846–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 37. McCandless writes that an annual average of $100,000 to $200,000 in silver flowed into the state via the Santa Fe trade, 130; Hurt, 73–4, 96, 104, 133.

  10. Parkman, 97; Elizabeth Carter to My Ever Dear Mother and Sisters, November 25, 1847, Watkins Mill; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31; Fellman, 1–7.

  11. Ross A. Webb, “Kentucky: ‘Pariah Among the Elect,’ ” in Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States During Reconstruction, ed. Richard O. Curry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 107; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 605, 767; see also Richard Maxwell Brown’s important study of the Regulator movement in Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

  12. Jane W. Gill to My Dear Mother & Sisters, March 29, 1846, and Jane W. Gill to Beloved Mother & Sisters, June 15, 1846, Watkins Mill; Joan M. Beamis and William E. Pullen, Background of a Bandit: The Ancestry of Jesse James (n.p.: 1970), 16–9; Louis W. Potts, “Waves of Revivalism in Clay County, 1840–1918,” MHR 88, no. 3 (April 1994): 262–9.

  13. For an example of hiring a wagon, see Elizabeth Carter to My Ever Dear Mother and Sisters, November 25, 1847, Watkins Mill; description of the farm—admittedly, decades later—in the St. Louis Republican, February 4, 1875. The farmhouse still exists, though it has been altered over the years, and is a county park in Kearney, Missouri. On roads, see Hurt, 155, 170–1.

  14. Jane W. Gill to My Dear Mother & Sisters, March 29, 1846, Watkins Mill; Hurt, 97–100, 109. Robert James Probate Records, 1851–1854, Clay County Archives, Liberty, Missouri, show that he was a commercial hemp farmer.

  15. Jane W. Gill to Beloved Mother & Sisters, June 15, 1846, Watkins Mill; Beamis and Pullen, 16–19.

  16. See letters from Robert to Zerelda James cited in Settle, 8; Beamis and Pullen, 8, 16–9, 58–9. Newspaper accounts frequently said Zerelda was six feet tall; e.g., Kansas City Times, April 4, 1882.

  17. Settle, 6–7; Liberty Tribune, April 14, 1882. Robert James and a friend posted a marriage bond with a penalty of fifty pounds of tobacco. The use of tobacco as money in regions that depended on the leaf economically dated back to the early seventeenth century, when the colony of Virginia made it legal tender; see Paul Einzig, Primitive Money: In Its Ethnological, Historical, and Economic Aspects (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1949), 278–86; and Leslie V. Brock, The Currency of the American Colonies 1700–1764: A Study in Colonial Finance and Imperial Relations (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 2–37.

  18. Liberty Tribune, April 14, 1882; Potts, 263–5.

  19. Liberty Tribune, April 14, 1882; Potts, 263–5; Anne C. Loveland, Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 27; Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 103–13. Preachers were usually men, but not always; Catherine A. Brekus has uncovered a rich tradition of female preaching in Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

  20. Loveland, 68–9, 82; Wayne Flint, Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 80, 161; Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), xxi, 225–6; Liberty Tribune, April 14, 1882. Frances Lea McCurdy emphasizes the stress placed on individual liberty and agency in rural oratory in Stump, Bar, and Pulpit: Speechmaking on the Missouri Frontier (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969).

  21. Settle, 6–7; Potts, 264–5; Tabitha Gill to ?, May 17, 1846, Watkins Mill. Heyrman, 94–113, discusses the itinerant preaching tradition.

  22. Hurt, x–xiii; Potts, 263–4; Heyrman, 113. The term “Little Dixie” originated shortly after the Civil War, but it offers a useful term for this region, defined by Hurt as those counties with at least a 24 percent slave population: Clay, Lafayette, Saline, Boone, Callaway, Howard, and Cooper Counties. See also Robert M. Crisler, “Missouri’s ‘Little Dixie,’ ” MHR 42, no. 2 (January 1948): 130–9.

  23. Dorothy B. Dorsey, “The Panic and Depression of 1837 to 1843 in Missouri,” MHR 30, no. 1 (October 1935): 132–61; McCandless, 229; Hurt, 58, 62; Harry S. Gleick, “Banking in Early Missouri,” part 1, MHR 61, no. 4 (July 1967): 427–43, and “Banking in Early Missouri,” part 2, MHR 62, no. 1 (October 1967): 30–44; Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957), 460–86; Timothy W. Hubbard and Lewis E. Davids, Banking in Mid-America: A History of Missouri’s Banks (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1969), 97.

  24. McCandless, 229; Hurt, 58, 62, 109; Settle, 7; Marley Brant, Jesse James: The Man and the Myth (New York: Berkley, 1998), 8, 270; Hurt, 63; Robert James Probate Records; Yeatman, 26.

  25. Dorsey, 160–1; for a description and first-person account of the Great Migration, see T. J. Stiles, ed., Warriors and Pioneers (New York: Berkley, 1996), 5–8, 21–7; Hurt, 82–97, 243; McCandless, 257; Miles W. Eaton, “The Development and Later Decline of the Hemp Industry in Missouri,” MHR 43, no. 4 (July 1949): 344–59; Robert James Probate Records.

  26. Hurt, 65, 225, 233–6; Harrison A. Trexler, “The Value and Sale of the Missouri Slave,” MHR 8, no. 1 (January 1914): 69–85; Seventh Census of the United States: Slave Schedules, Clay County, Missouri, September 16, 1850 (to be cited as U.S. Census, 1850). Robert James Probate Records list six slaves in Robert James’s possession in 1850; see also Settle, 7. Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of a Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), argues forcefully and well that Missourians saw themselves as part of a distinct region, the border West, and that they refused to choose between North and South until after the outbreak of the Civil War (see 181–6, 240–1). This is an important argument, though it understates regional variations within the state, the strength of family ties to the South, and early challenges to this border identity.