The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  But if, by fleeing the battlefields of the Carolinas, Rob and Wilky had hoped to escape the hardships and insanities of war, they had miscalculated catastrophically. While the nation as a whole was in turmoil, the Missouri they reached in late September 1864 was in utter chaos. Even before the outbreak of the Civil War proper, that beleaguered border state had been the scene of some of the most violent and vitriolic bloodletting in American history—the gory “Bleeding Kansas” wars over whether the neighboring western territory should be admitted to the Union as a free or a slave state. (As early as 1856, the James boys’ erstwhile abolitionist idol John Brown had been active in Kansas, where on one occasion he and his sons had abducted five Southern settlers and summarily split open their pro-slavery skulls with a cutlass.) Though nominally in the Union camp, Missouri was in fact deeply divided, torn by a war within a war that pitted neighbor against neighbor, waged by marauding partisan bands sowing terror among the populace. Most feared among these were roving gangs of rebel guerrillas operating independently of the regular Confederate army’s chain of command, slaughtering and plundering their way around the state, striking random targets, conducting furtive raids, and engaging in savage skirmishes whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself.

  On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 27, 1864, in keeping with their routine of traveling by night and lying low during the day, the fugitive James brothers bedded down in the woods outside of the railroad village of Centralia in Boone County, unaware that only that morning one of the great atrocities of the war had been perpetrated a couple of miles from their clandestine campsite. The Centralia Massacre, as this bloody episode came to be known, had begun a little before noon when a band of about eighty rebel irregulars swept into town bent on mayhem. The guerrillas, many wearing purloined Union army uniforms, had set about terrorizing the populace, looting the tiny town’s two stores and helping themselves to whatever goods they pleased, including a barrel of whiskey that they smashed open and guzzled down in short order. After holding up an arriving stagecoach, the gang, drunk on booze and bloodlust, had boarded a North Missouri express train as it pulled into the Centralia station and begun robbing and brutalizing the passengers. Among these were a score of unarmed Union soldiers, many on furlough from service in Sherman’s march on Atlanta. The rebels hauled them out of their coach and stripped them of their uniforms. As the distinguished University of Missouri historian William E. Parrish described the grisly scene that followed, “[t]he guerilla chieftain turned to Little Archie Clement, his second in command, with instructions to ‘muster out’ the enemy. Clement, a perpetual smile on his twisted face, did so with a vengeance, firing point blank at the stunned troops with a pistol in each hand.” Before galloping out of town, the drunken bushwhackers torched the train and sent it roaring down the tracks in flames at full throttle with its whistle wailing.

  It didn’t take long for federal forces in the vicinity to get wind of the atrocity. A battalion of the Missouri 39th Infantry, U.S. Volunteers under the command of Major A.V.E. Johnston, arrived on the scene later that afternoon and quickly fanned out across the surrounding countryside to hunt down the perpetrators. One of Johnston’s search parties descended on the James boys’ makeshift bivouac and rousted the sleeping brothers from their bedrolls, roughly rummaging through their belongings and discovering the Union uniforms and government-issued sidearms in their rucksacks. The intruders also came upon a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets, with Wilky’s name and rank in the Massachusetts 54th proudly inscribed on the flyleaf.

  “Pretty far from your colored boys, ain’t you, Lieutenant James?” observed the sergeant in charge.

  Wilky tried to convince the officer that the book belonged not to him but to his late cousin Garth W. James, who he claimed had been killed at the battle of Fort Wagner. Identifying himself as Frank James—a name chosen, perhaps unconsciously in the heat of the moment, in tribute to his former headmaster Franklin Sanborn—Wilky explained that he carried the pistols and uniforms as mementos of his fallen kinsman, and that he and his brother were on their way to Columbia to enlist in the Union army.

  But the sergeant was having none of it. He remarked snidely to his squad that either these boys were deserters from the U.S. Army or else “damned seceshes” trying to pass themselves off as Union soldiers with stolen government property. In either case, he concluded, they were not fit to live and ought to be executed on the spot.

  Sensing that the jig was up, the James boys made a wild run for their lives, scrambling through the brush with the bluecoats in hot pursuit, blazing away with muskets and revolvers.

  Ironically, it was only the fact that the federal troops were so hard on their heels that saved the brothers’ lives. Their desperate dash brought them out of the woods and smack into a guerrilla encampment on a meadow at nearby Young’s Creek, where the resident rebels, more than two hundred strong, made short bloody work of their pursuers. The guerrillas, upon spotting the federals, had followed the wartime logic of “the enemy of my enemy must be my friend,” assuming that Rob and Wilky were fellow Confederates—a life-sparing misapprehension of which the James boys had scant desire to disabuse their saviors.

  As they were about to discover, the brothers had fallen in league with no less formidable a figure than William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, who, in the unequivocal characterization of Jesse’s biographer T. J. Stiles, “was quite simply, the most vicious man in Missouri.” A white supremacist who dressed in black, rode a black horse, and flew the black flag of no quarter in battle, Anderson was a notorious murderer, rapist, torturer, scalper, and beheader. It was he who had led the Centralia Massacre and upon whose orders his cutthroat lieutenant Little Archie Clement had served as the eager executioner of the furloughed Union soldiers.

  The James boys, barefoot and clad only in the long johns in which they had been sleeping, were brought before Anderson and Clement at their campfire. Little Archie was diminutive indeed: Only eighteen years old, the gray-eyed killer was barely five feet tall and, according to Stiles, “looked more like a jockey than a guerrilla.” Bloody Bill, though slim and wiry, was a more imposing presence, with sharp feral features, icy blue-gray eyes, a wild dark beard, and a majestic mane of rippling black locks flowing over his shoulders. When the fearsome guerrilla chieftain asked Rob his name, the nervous teenager meant to answer “Just call me Rob” but instead stuttered, “Jus…jus…jus….”

  Bloody Bill, perhaps taking the flustered youngster for a halfwit, laughed. “Spit it out, boy! Is it Jesse?”

  “Yes, sir!” Rob replied, and thus the name that would come to be one of the most feared in all the West was coined in an attack of jitters.

  The rebel leader explained to the newcomers that he had contrived a classic guerrilla ambush for Major Johnston’s battalion: A small decoy contingent led by Dave Pool was about to lure the federal troops down into the meadow, where they would find themselves facing the full force of Anderson’s Confederate irregulars. The James boys were naturally expected to “show their stuff” by participating in this lethal scheme. They were outfitted with horses and revolvers and clad in Union uniforms that had been stripped from soldiers massacred that morning at Centralia.

  For the newly self-christened Frank and Jesse, the ensuing battle was a baptism by fire. As Frank described the scene to a journalist many years later, “we dismounted to tighten the belts on our horses, and then at the word of command started on our charge…. Our line was nearly a quarter of a mile long, theirs was much closer together. We were some six hundred yards away, our speed increasing and our ranks closing up, when they fired their first and only time. They nearly all fired over our heads…. Up the hill we went, yelling like wild Indians…. Almost in the twinkling of an eye we were on the yankee line. They seemed terrorized. Hypnotized might be a better word…. Some…were at ‘fix bayonets,’ some were biting off their cartridges, preparing to reload. Yelling, shooting our pistols, upon them we went.”

  The Battle of
Centralia, as the ambush and its aftermath went down in history, turned out to be a brutal rout in which only a handful of rebels perished while nearly 150 Union soldiers lost their lives. Those who weren’t killed outright in the meadow were picked off one by one as they fled back toward town. Many of these unfortunate federals had their throats slashed, their ears and/or noses lopped off, their scalps taken, and their severed heads impaled on local fence posts. At least one of the dead bluecoats had his penis sliced off and shoved into his mouth. Early in the engagement, Jesse James, eager to exhibit his courage and commitment to Bloody Bill and his new comrades-in-arms, bolted to the head of the charge. Riding straight for Major Johnston, he brought down the commander of the Yankee battalion with a single shot from his revolver, then finished him off with a second bullet to his head. “Having killed Major Johnston,” wrote T. J. Stiles, “Jesse’s fame—and his fate—were sealed.”

  The question of character and fate, as it happens, was a major theme of William James’s thought, and it is worth considering at this juncture one of his best-known pronouncements on the subject:

  The issue here is of the utmost pregnancy for it decides a man’s entire career. When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? Choose that profession? Accept that office, or marry this fortune?—his choice really lies between one of several equally possible future Characters. What he shall become is fixed by the conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is less what act he shall now choose to do, than what being he shall now resolve to become.

  Ignoring for the moment William’s striking substitution of “marry this fortune” for the more conventional “marry this woman,” the case of Rob and Wilky becoming Jesse and Frank seems to have been less a matter of choosing any particular course in life—some future Character or being—than of simply resolving to go on living. In assuming their new personas, the younger James brothers clearly did not enjoy the luxury, as did William and Henry, of taking their own sweet time to “find themselves.” Their own crises of identity played out under the immediate imperative of quite literally saving their own scalps. (The rebel guerrillas were a notoriously paranoid lot, with little compunction about ruthlessly culling from their ranks any members suspected of the slightest doubt or disloyalty.) Fortunately for the James boys, identity in the wartime border country was famously fluid: The Confederate irregulars, as we have noted, wreaked much of their havoc in Union uniform; conversely, Unionist Missouri militiamen often carried out raids on suspected secessionist homesteads posing as rebel bushwhackers. Nor were such identity swaps limited to masquerading as the enemy: During the course of the war, many border combatants actually switched sides, following shifts in the political and military winds or the mandates of private vendettas. (William Clarke Quantrill, known to history as one of the fiercest of the guerrilla chieftains, had been born in Ohio and, like the Jameses, had begun his sanguinary career as an anti-slavery partisan before flipping allegiance to lead his notorious Black Flag Brigade.)

  Thus, contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated assertion that there are no second acts in American lives, the nation has always fostered a robust tradition of its citizens reinventing themselves, few perhaps so dramatically as the younger James brothers. Though initiated by sheer fear and a blind will to survive, their attachment to Anderson’s band must also be seen as the expression of an adolescent desire to belong. For all their military experience, Frank and Jesse were nonetheless still impressionable teenagers at heart, hardly immune to the allure of being part of a group of hard-riding, hard-fighting commandos. Jesse especially, being younger and doubtless more of a born psychopath than Frank, would have been particularly susceptible to the blood-knit camaraderie of the guerrilla tribe. In adopting the homicidal mores and trying to win the esteem of the likes of Clell Miller and the Younger brothers, the former “foundling” and future outlaw was forging familial bonds that would endure well beyond the war years. “He now belonged,” wrote T. J. Stiles, “to a group that believed a man must murder for respect.”

  Following Centralia, the James brothers continued to ride with Anderson’s band, crisscrossing the state and engaging in a series of raids and skirmishes, during which time Jesse “paid his dues” to the cutthroat cult in both the violence he wreaked and the wounds he received. (Though here again, the outlaw tried to gussy up the truth by telling Elena that he had taken a bullet in his lung during a pitched battle with the federal foe, whereas in fact he’d been shot during the considerably less heroic escapade of trying to steal a saddle off the fence of a German farmer. Likewise his missing fingertip, which he attributed for Elena’s benefit to the blade of a Yankee bayonet, was more likely the result of his own clumsiness in loading pistols.)

  Within a month of Centralia, Bloody Bill was gunned down in an ambush near Albany in Ray County. In a gruesome demonstration of how far the war in Missouri had degenerated below the oxymoronic standards of “civilized” military etiquette, Anderson’s corpse was hauled to the nearby town of Richmond, where it was photographed, then decapitated, the head jammed atop a telegraph pole and the torso roped and dragged by horses through the town square. (The rebels clearly held no monopoly on barbarism.) Shortly before his demise, Anderson had introduced the brothers to the keepers of a well-known secessionist “safe house” in Clay County, which turned out to be the farm of Zerelda and Reuben Samuel. Zerelda told the boys they would always be welcome. (Being no one’s fool, she cannily reckoned that it wouldn’t hurt to have a couple of strong young hands around now and then to help work the farm, especially with her stock of slaves depleted and her husband basically useless after having been “hoisted”—that is, strung up by the neck—at the hands of unionist militiamen in 1863.) For the duration of the war and in the years thereafter, the James boys often stayed at the Samuel farm, which became the closest thing to a home they would ever know after leaving Newport.

  While for the vast majority of Missourians the formal end of hostilities meant a return to the peaceable pursuits of farming, manufacture, and commerce, for Frank and Jesse, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox marked the beginning of their long criminal careers. Having no marketable skills in the new peacetime economy, and with their only roots in Missouri being with the Samuels and their former guerrilla comrades, they soon embarked on an outlaw life, knowing, as John Newman Edwards wrote of them, “no law but the law of self-preservation.” (In this, the trajectory of their philosophical development was not so far removed from that of William’s great friend, the future Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who, according to Henry’s biographer Lyndall Gordon, “left the battlefields of the Civil War having lost faith in abolitionism and other causes based on morality. He had become a Darwinian who saw only a struggle for survival against forces of annihilation.”) Nonetheless, the apparent ease with which the James boys made the transition from quasi-military partisans in a declared war to out-and-out bandits during peacetime has been difficult for many scholars to fathom. Was it merely the unfortunate upshot of a volatile confluence of historical circumstance and personal temperament? Or could there also have been something in their upbringing—the seeds of a deep predilection for banditry—planted by none other than their pompously pious father? According to William’s biographer the psychiatrist Howard M. Feinstein:

  Henry [Sr.] expected society to give him what he had demanded from his father: generous support. And if the moral outcome was evil, it was not his doing, but the fault of social institutions. People were good, and were made evil only by an imperfect society. In his most radical frame of mind (in his thirties), James followed that premise to an extreme, declaring that criminals were really heroes because they expressed the God within, heedless of society’s strictures. In anticipation of Nietzs
che’s idea of the superman, he lauded the criminal who, “instead of contenting himself…with the bare supply of his physical wants…[has] instincts of infinitude…[that] drive him to seek their excessive gratification and…hurry him into vice and crime.

  Similarly, Henry’s biographer Lyndall Gordon noted that her subject’s father “came to believe in a radical equality of the soul (‘no difference between the most virtuous lady and the vilest prostitute’),” which she described as “a godlike position unencouraging to moral codes.” And even Henry David Thoreau, who had advocated civil disobedience in protest of the Mexican war during the late forties, felt that Henry Sr. went too far: “He charges society with all the crime committed,” complained the sage of Walden Pond, “and praises the criminal for committing it.”

  How could Frank and Jesse, in their formative years, have failed to absorb their father’s subversive message? And there was more: “In the eyes of this novel parent an interesting failure seemed far more worthy of appreciation than any ‘too obvious success,’” remarked Jean Strouse, who also observed that Henry Sr. “urged on all five of his children a strenuous individualism that stressed being extraordinary no matter what one chose actually to do.”

  In taking up the outlaw life, Jesse found not merely a way of making a living, but may well have felt he discovered his genius. During the decade following the war, in satisfying their “instincts of infinitude,” the James Gang blazed a trail of mayhem across the region, an epic catalog of the crime that began with the looting of the Clay County Savings Bank at Liberty, Missouri—the first daylight bank robbery during peacetime in U.S. history—and continued through the plundering of the Alexander Mitchell & Co. bank at Lexington, Missouri; the Hughes & Wasson bank at Richmond, Missouri; the Nimrod L. Long & Co. bank at Russellville, Kentucky; the Daviess County Savings Association at Gallatin, Missouri; the Ocobock Brothers’ bank at Corydon, Iowa; the Bank of Columbia at Columbia, Kentucky; the box office of the Kansas City Exposition, Kansas City, Missouri; the Ste. Genevieve Savings Bank at Ste. Genevieve, Missouri; a Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific train at Adair, Iowa; a stagecoach at Hot Springs, Arkansas; an Iron Mountain train at Gads Hill, Missouri; an omnibus stagecoach at Lexington, Missouri; a Kansas Pacific train near Muncie, Kansas; the Bank of Huntington at Huntington, West Virginia; and most recently, the Missouri Pacific Express at Otterville, Missouri.