Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T. J. Stiles

Author:T. J. Stiles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780307773371
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1994-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

IT TOOK TEN years of peace to reveal the true scale of the Civil War. Not the grand scale—that was obvious, perhaps too obvious. The massive clash of armies had created the misleading impression that this was a conventional war between two sovereign governments. The immensity of it masked the smallness of the scale on which the war was truly fought. Only the political struggles that came after revealed how intimate a conflict it had been all along.

In the Reconstruction South—particularly in the black majority states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—the enfranchisement of African Americans drove this point home. As blacks joined the Republican Party en masse, whites had to face the fact that they not only lived side by side with people who had worked to defeat them during the war, but that these people opposed their political plans as well. The conflict was no longer one of distant battles, but of grassroots struggles over town councils and county courthouses. White-supremacist violence became increasingly systematic as the 1870s progressed, coinciding with the rising assertiveness and self-confidence of black voters and officeholders. In Louisiana in early 1873, white paramilitaries attacked the tiny village of Colfax after a disputed election; a force of black men held the town for three weeks before they were forced to surrender. The attackers rounded them up and executed at least fifty of them. In Warren County, Mississippi, the white minority tried to oust the black sheriff in 1874; on December 7, a well-armed force of whites ambushed the sheriff and his supporters, killing as many as three hundred African Americans in the days that followed.16

In Missouri, the Civil War had been a personal matter from the beginning. Confederate support had been concentrated in certain regions, of course, particularly along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, but even there, communities had divided among themselves, household by household.* After a full decade of peace, people still remembered what their neighbors had done.

These memories burned with new life as Jesse James and his comrades seized headlines. In November 1874, for example, a man approached the circuit clerk of Daviess County, offering to identify the James brothers in the still-open murder case of John W. Sheets. The would-be witness was Frank Cooley, the old Radical Unionist from Lexington who had been a central figure in the 1866 affair that led to the death of Archie Clement. His offer was a hint that Jesse James had been present on that occasion, still bitterly remembered by partisans on both sides.17

In Clay County, fear intensified after the murder of Joseph W. Whicher. “You cannot get a word of information,” wrote Van Horn after a visit to Clay in early 1875, “save upon the condition that you religiously keep the name of your informer a secret—this being the prerequisite confidence to any conversation.” The terror stemmed not from the James brothers alone, but from the continuing division of society along wartime lines. “The ‘James boys’ have a very large acquaintance in the county,

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