History's Greatest Lies by William Weir

Author:William Weir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rockport Publishers
Published: 2009-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

BUSHWHACKERS VS. JAYHAWKERS

Jesse James came into the world at the perfect time and in the ideal place to forge a career as the most famous outlaw of his time. He was born in 1847 to Robert and Zerelda James in Clay County, Missouri, which had become a slave state under the Missouri Compromise.

When Jesse was seven years old, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, overturning the 1820 Missouri Compromise and opening up the possibility for Missouri and Kansas to outlaw slavery by popular vote. More than three-quarters of Missouri’s population was pro-slavery, but the less-settled Kansas territory was up for grabs.

The territories soon descended into violent struggles between the two sides. As abolitionist settlers from the Eastern states descended upon Kansas and Missouri en masse to swing the vote their way, slavery supporters earned their nickname “bushwhackers” by raiding abolitionist settlements, with anti-slavery “jayhawkers” responding in kind. In 1855, John Brown conducted his bloody raid in Kansas, murdering five pro-slavery settlers, after which the two sides entered into a minor terror-style war, ten years before the Civil War broke out.

The James family, which owned seven slaves, lived in the middle of it all. Clay County was only one county away from the Missouri-Kansas border, with the relatively heavily populated Kansas City just to its south. Jesse’s father Robert, a Baptist preacher, had left the home in 1850 to spread the Word in the gold mining camps, and he died of cholera within three months.

Their mother, Zerelda, remarried twice, was an unapologetically vocal supporter for the Confederate cause. That, combined with her oldest son’s bushwhacking exploits, put the James’ farm in the sights of Union intelligence gatherers during the Civil War. (The fact is, Zerelda did pass information to Confederate guerillas whenever she could.)

On more than one occasion, Union sympathizers harassed the family. Once, in the summer of 1863, a group of local Union militiamen—not Union troops, but Federalist-supporting citizens who had formed their own group, much as Quantrill and Anderson had done—arrived on the farm looking for information on the whereabouts of the Confederate raiders. Jesse and a slave were tending to the tobacco crops when the militiamen suddenly appeared. They grabbed Jesse by the scruff of the neck and dragged him across the field to the house. Zerelda characteristically approached them head-on, shouting obscenities at her hated neighbors-turned-enemies.

Ignoring Zerelda and her man-sized bravado, they focused their attention on the more timid half of the couple, Zerelda’s third husband, Ruben Samuels. The militiamen had come prepared. They took out a noose, put it around Samuels’ neck, and pulled it tight, threatening to hang him if he didn’t provide information. Samuels pleaded ignorance to every question they shouted at him.

Their patience at an end, the militiamen threw the other end of the rope around a tree branch and pulled Samuels off the ground. They let their kicking, choking victim down before he was strangled to death, but Samuels suffered a permanent injury to this throat. Jesse could only sit and watch this brutality with horror—and hatred.

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