Bloody Bill Anderson

by Albert Castel

  Suddenly the mounted detachment came scurrying back, hotly pursued by guerrillas two to three hundred strong. The Union line opened to let the soldiers through, then closed again. The bushwhackers, “yelling like Indians,” charged on. They expected another Centralia.

  They did not get one. Instead, at a range of less than one hundred yards, they began receiving a steady, continuous aimed fire that toppled horses and caused men to reel in their saddles. They pressed on, shooting back with their revolvers, until within forty yards of their foes. There they wavered, then milled about, unable to advance yet unwilling to retreat.

  All, that is, except two charging up the lane far ahead of the rest. The one in the lead rode an iron-gray horse, its reins clenched between his teeth, and he held a blazing revolver in each hand. Every soldier in position to do so fired at both men. Bullets showered leaves and tree limbs all around them. Yet on and on the two riders came, plunging through the Union line and continuing well beyond. It seemed as if they would escape unscathed.

  But their horses slowed and started swerving to the left. First the leader and then his companion fell from their saddles to the ground. The latter scrambled to his feet and staggered off into the brush, disappearing from sight. The following day some Federals found his body in a field and identified it as Captain Rains, son of the Missouri Confederate general James S. Rains, whom Arthur Ingrham Baker had allegedly sought to join back in the fall of 1861.

  The leader, though, remained where he lay, facedown. Moreover, when he fell, the other bushwhackers fled in “wild confusion.” Cox ordered those companies armed with revolvers to remount and sent them pounding off in pursuit. They neither caught nor killed any of the fugitives but found “the road strewn with blood for ten miles.”3

  Several soldiers approached the body of the first bushwhacker who had burst through their line. A bullet had blown away a hunk of his skull behind the left ear and another had penetrated his left temple. In all probability he had died instantly and painlessly.

  Turning the body over, the militiamen studied it. Obviously he was no ordinary bushwhacker. Beside him lay a wide-brimmed white hat with a long black plume. Under his close-fitting, dun-colored frock coat were a blue cloth vest and an elaborately embroidered black shirt. Each hand still clasped a revolver; hip holsters held another two, and the handles of two large pistols projected from holsters attached to the saddle of his magnificent gray mare, which stood nearby, a scalp dangling from its bridle.

  The soldiers then went through his pockets. They found a gold and a silver watch, each with a matching chain, close to $600 in gold and paper currency, a blondish lock of woman’s hair, and a striking photograph of what appeared to be the man plus another of a woman who presumably was his wife, for with the photograph was a letter signed, “your ever loving and obedient wife until death—Bush Anderson—at home Friday evening, April 20th, 1864.” In it she mentioned (according to the Union officer who read it) “certain articles such as a dashing woman would fancy for dress and ornament and some toys for her babe.” Enclosed with the letter and photo was “a small lock of fine dark chesnut-brown hair.”

  Not until they found a small Confederate flag and two folded sheets of paper did the soldiers know who the fallen bushwhacker was. The flag bore the inscription: PRESENTED TO W. L. [sic] ANDERSON BY HIS FRIEND, F. M. R. LET IT NOT BE CONTAMINATED BY FED. HANDS. The sheets of paper proved to be Price’s October 11 order to “Captain Anderson.”4

  The dead bushwhacker was Bloody Bill Anderson—and they had killed him! In a way—in fact, in a lot of ways—this was a greater victory than the defeat of Sterling Price. Certainly it gave them much more personal satisfaction. They hated Anderson with every fiber of their being. Because of him they had passed the whole summer and most of the fall soldiering virtually without pay, away from their families and their farms, where corn now rotted in the fields. They had seen, too, what Anderson and his men did to Unionists, soldier or civilian, when they captured them. Some of their victims had been comrades, friends, relatives, even brothers or fathers or sons. At that very moment, in fact, one of their fellow soldiers was lying paralyzed as a result of wounds suffered in the fight just fought. Now Anderson was dead; his soul—if he had one—was surely already in hell.

  Figure 10.1 According to John N. Edward’s Noted Guerrillas, Anderson kept a tally of his killings by tying a knot for each one of them on a silken cord. If so, then this probably is that cord. It contains fifty-three knots.

  PRIVATE COLLECTION.

  On being informed of the dead guerrilla’s identity and seeing the papers that proved it, Cox had the body loaded into a wagon, then ordered his troops to march back to Richmond. In a little over two days he had done what no other Union officer had been able to accomplish during the past five months: Track down and kill Bill Anderson. Cox felt proud—he had every right to. By pretending to be deceived by the bushwhacker’s old trick of false flight, he had enticed the ambushers into a deadly ambush. To be sure, luck had played a major role in the form of the woman’s tip as to Anderson’s whereabouts. But luck can be as much a part of war as skill, often more so, and outside of Albany on the afternoon of Thursday, October 27, 1864, Bloody Bill’s luck finally ran out.

  Richmond, Missouri: October 27–28, 1864

  Dr. Robert B. Kice supplemented his income as a dentist in Richmond by taking photographs—or “ambrotypes,” to give them the technical name of the time. Usually his subjects were husbands and wives, their children, a young man or woman wishing to send a “likeness” to a sweetheart, and in recent years soldiers posing self-consciously in their uniforms. This morning, however, he focused his lens on a dead man. Moreover, since the dead man was the notorious bushwhacker Bill Anderson, he anticipated a fair amount of money from the resulting pictures.

  Returning to Richmond on the afternoon of October 27, Cox’s soldiers had put Anderson’s corpse on display in the county courthouse, where hundreds of people had filed by to view it. Now, shortly after sunup, the body sat slumped in a chair, legs outstretched, its head held upright by the left hand of Adolph Vogel, Cox’s bugler, gripping the hair. Kice made at least two images of it. In one Anderson’s plumed hat is on his lap and the lifeless fingers of his right hand are draped across the butt of a Colt revolver, the barrel slanting downward toward the hat. The other is almost identical, except that the hat is gone and the pistol barrel lies on top of Anderson’s left wrist. In both pictures revolver butts project outward from holsters on each hip, and through partially parted lips, Anderson’s teeth gleam in a macabre grin.5

  Figure 10.2 Bill Anderson, Photo 1.

  COURTESY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI.

  Figure 10.3 Bill Anderson, Photo 2.

  COURTESY OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI.

  The photographs having been taken, a detail of soldiers proceeded to carry out Cox’s order to bury the corpse in a “decent coffin.” First, though, they performed some acts that normally do not accompany a burial. Even before Kice employed his camera, one of the soldiers had, as the ambrotypes reveal, cut off the ring finger of the left hand to obtain the ring, possibly a wedding band, that adorned it. Now, after carrying the body out onto the street, the burial detail flung it unceremoniously into a wagon and drove north. At the cemetery on the edge of town the men dumped the remains into the “decent coffin,” nailed it shut, shoved it into a hole, and covered it with some two feet of dirt. They then left. The monster had been buried.

  That evening some militiamen visited the the cemetery to pay Anderson their last respects. They spat and urinated on the grave.6

  Yes, it was a different war in Missouri, one that had yet to end. For some it never did end until, like Bill Anderson, they were dead and buried.

  Epilogue

  The Spirit of Bill Anderson Yet Lives

  At first many people doubted that Bill Anderson had really been killed. His death had been reported before, and people feared, as did General Rosecrans in St. Lo
uis, that “the news is too good to be true.”1 But once it was confirmed, a chorus of jubilation arose from Missouri Unionists. Anderson’s death, declared a typical editorial, “was the breaking of the back of guerrilla war in North Missouri. . . . An avenging God has permitted bullets fired from Federal muskets to pierce his head, and the inhuman butcher of Centralia sleeps his last sleep.” “It is a good thing,” echoed another editor commenting on the photos of Anderson’s corpse, “to know that there is one devil less in the world.”2

  For a while, however, it seemed that far from being broken by Bloody Bill’s death, the back of guerrilla war in North Missouri remained as strong as ever. Little Archie Clements, described by one newspaper as Anderson’s “head devil,” took command of the main portion of his slain chieftain’s band following the Albany fiasco and led it across Carroll County, murdering a couple of militiamen along the way, before crossing to the south side of the Missouri near Brunswick. Likewise, Jim Anderson and sixty followers, calling themselves the “Anderson Avengers,” ranged through Howard and Boone Counties, pillaging, burning, and killing in their now-accustomed style. Elsewhere, other guerrilla gangs continued to do the same. By mid-November, little more than two weeks after God permitted two bullets to pierce Bill Anderson’s skull, conditions in northern Missouri continued to be so bad that the St. Louis Democrat (which, despite its name, was the leading Republican paper in Missouri) declared despairingly:

  They say he [Anderson] is dead. . . . Heaven be thanked if it be indeed so. Yet his spirit still lives. . . . This whole region [of North Missouri] is sprinkled with the blood of Union men, and dotted with fresh-made graves, in which they lie, and in many cases their unburied corpses furnish food for swine of the woods. Yes, the spirit of Bill Anderson yet lives. . . .3

  In both defense and retaliation, Federal troops intensified their antiguerrilla campaign in northern Missouri. Since 1861 their policy toward bushwhackers had been, in the words of the St. Joseph Herald, to “shoot them and give them a trial afterwards.” Now, in the wake of Centralia, they did the same to all men, teenagers included, suspected of aiding the bushwhackers, which in practice could mean anyone believed to possess Southern sympathies. Militia scouring Randolph County in late October killed fifteen civilians, one of whom they hanged, and then pinned to a tree with bayonets. They also burned and looted, usually without making any attempt to distinguish between loyal and disloyal. Why bother in an area that was, as the Liberty Tribune said of Clay County, “more rebel than South Carolina”?4

  Unfortunately for Unionist civilians, as soon as the troops passed through, friends and relatives of their victims would seek vengeance in their turn. The result was a conflict that left large portions of such counties as Howard, Randolph, Carroll, Boone, and Clay more or less depopulated, with loyalists either fleeing them or seeking safety in the garrisoned towns.5 Nowhere during the Civil War did people suffer such terror and tribulation as those unfortunate enough to reside in the guerrilla-infested regions of Missouri. Compared to what they experienced, the civilians who were in the path of Sherman’s famed March to the Sea through Georgia got off lightly.

  Not until November did guerrilla activity in Missouri begin to slacken, then virtually cease. As in past years the primary reason was the advent of winter—after being delayed by an unusually long and mild autumn—with its chilling winds and bare branches. Yet this time there was another and, in its implication, more fundamental cause: The failure of Sterling Price’s invasion. Only the most fanatical or obstinate Confederate adherents could now fail to realize that their cause was dead in Missouri and, what with Lincoln’s reelection, doomed in the South as a whole.

  William Clarke Quantrill perceived this. Indeed, he possibly foresaw it as early as the spring of 1864. If so, that would explain why he did not stand up to George Todd—he was, after all, the faster draw and the keener shot—and instead took a vacation, interrupting it only to make a brief, useless appearance at Fayette and to rob the Glasgow bank.

  In any case, soon after Price’s debacle and the deaths of Todd and Anderson, Quantrill sent his mistress, Kate King, to St. Louis and went to the Sni Hills, where he spread word that he intended to go to Kentucky and would welcome good men to accompany him. Bushwhacking in Missouri, he declared, was “played out,” whereas the Bluegrass state offered fresh fields of opportunity—meaning plunder. Moreover, should the war end—and it could not last much longer—the chances of being able to surrender without being executed as bandits afterward would be much better in Kentucky than in Missouri.

  More than thirty guerrillas joined him. Most were veterans of his old band, but some, notably Peyton Long and Frank and Jesse James, had followed Anderson. In December he led them southward into Arkansas, gathering additional recruits along the way. Here six of them, including Jesse James, decided to go to Texas instead. On January 1, 1865, with the remaining forty-six, Quantrill crossed over the Mississippi to Tennessee in a flat boat, then headed into Kentucky, where he resumed his guerrilla career but without his previous success.6

  Practically all of the other full-time, hard-core bushwhackers, among them Archie Clements and Jim Anderson, passed the winter in Texas, as did most of George Todd’s men, now led by Dave Poole. Here they awaited the coming of spring and returning to Missouri. But while they waited, the Confederacy collapsed. By late April, Robert E. Lee’s army had surrendered in Virginia, Joe Johnston’s in North Carolina, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s in Alabama, and what little was left of Edmund Kirby Smith’s forces in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas were in the process of doing the same. Many of the guerrillas elected to remain in Texas; others, like John Thrailkill, went with Jo Shelby’s brigade into Mexico to offer their services to what proved to be another lost cause, that of the Emperor Maximillian. Most of them, though, set out for Missouri, Clements, Poole, and Jim Anderson at their head. It made little or no difference to them that there no longer was a Confederacy to fight for. That had long since ceased to be their motive.

  Early in May, Clements heralded his return. Soon after crossing the Osage River into Benton County, he came upon a militiaman whom he accused of having belonged to a unit that had murdered his brother and burned down his mother’s house. While Jesse James, John Maupin, and another guerrilla pinned the victim’s arms and legs to the ground, Little Archie sat on his chest and cut his throat, then scalped him.7

  Continuing northward into Johnson County on the morning of Sunday, May 7, forty of Clements’s men robbed the stores and killed a civilian in Holden. An hour later, more than a hundred of them rampaged through nearby Kingsville, robbing stores and citizens, torching five houses, and slaying eight men.8 For Clements, who had grown up on a farm only a few miles from Kingsville, this was a visit to his hometown, and he did so as Quantrill had in Lawrence and Bill Anderson in Huntsville.

  Commenting on the Holden-Kingsville raid, the editor of the Kansas City Journal verged on despair:

  The practical question is, what should be done? Is this evil never to cease? Is there no way of reaching and exterminating these worse than fiends? It is no use to shut our eyes to the facts, and to pretend that a little thievery is at the bottom of all of this. It is a deeper and more serious evil than that.9

  Maj. Gen. Grenville Dodge, the new Union commander in Missouri, responded to Holden-Kingsville by ordering all available troops to the region south and east of Kansas City and directing Col. Chester Harding, now in charge of the District of Central Missouri, to spare neither men nor horses in suppressing the guerrillas.10 This sounded good; yet all of Dodge’s predecessors had issued the same order and exhortation to no avail. Would it be any different this time?

  At first the answer seemed to be no. From Johnson County the bushwhackers went into their favorite stronghold, the Sni Hills of western Lafayette County—and on the way they killed fifteen Unionist civilians. So much for a recent editorial in Columbia’s Missouri Statesman, telling its readers: “Let the sight of a guerrilla be a signal to shoot him. If he com
es to your home shoot him. If you meet him in the road shoot him.”11

  Poole’s men remained in the Sni Hills. Here was their refuge and in a sense their home. Besides, where else would they go, and if they went there, what would they accomplish beyond adding to what a hundred-odd years later would be called a body count? The time had come to consider the future.

  Archie Clements and Jim Anderson, on the other hand, sallied forth to a place that was far more familiar to them than the Sni-a-Bar country: the outskirts of Lexington. Ten months after Bloody Bill had done so, Clements sent a message to the garrison commander, who now was Maj. Berryman K. Davis, demanding that he surrender, or his troops would be massacred and the town burned: “We have the force and are determined to have it.”

  Davis made no reply. If Clements had actually possessed sufficient force to take Lexington, he would have attacked at once and without warning. Besides, Davis doubted that the bushwhackers had the stomach for serious fighting and the heavy casualties it would entail. In recent days he had received a number of inquiries from them as to what terms they could expect if they agreed to surrender. He believed, so he had informed Colonel Harding on May 9, that “a large portion of them are anxious to give themselves up if they can be treated as prisoners of war.”12