Bushwhacker
[3][4][5] In some areas, particularly the Appalachian regions of Tennessee and North Carolina, the term bushwhackers was used for Confederate partisans who attacked Union forces.
[17] Individual families, including that of Jesse and Frank James and the maternal grandparents and mother of future President Harry Truman, were banished from Missouri.
[24][25] Nearly twenty-five thousand rural inhabitants had to go to areas near Union camps or leave the state; their houses were burned to prevent them from returning; altogether, twenty-two hundred square miles of western Missouri became a desolation by the end of September 1863.
The Little Rock Arkansas Gazette wrote in August 1866: Wasted farms, deserted cabins, lone chimneys marking the sites where dwellings have been destroyed by fire, and yards, gardens and fields overgrown with weeds and bushes are everywhere within view.
[31] In October 1864, Anderson was lured into an ambush and killed in the ensuing battle by soldiers of the pro-Union Missouri State Militia under the command of Col. Samuel P. Cox.
During months of often intense combat, he battled only fellow Missourians, ranging from Missouri regiments of U.S. Volunteer troops, to state militia, to unarmed Unionist civilians.
The single confirmed instance of his exchanging fire with Federal troops from another state occurred a month after the 1865 surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, during a near-fatal encounter with Wisconsin cavalrymen.
In the course of the war, James' mother and sister were arrested, his stepfather tortured, and his family banished temporarily from Missouri by state militiamen— all Unionist Missourians.
This group became known as the James-Younger Gang, after the death or capture of the older outlaws (including Clement) and the addition of former bushwhacker Cole Younger and his brothers.
In December 1869, Jesse James became the most famous of this group when he emerged as the prime suspect in the robbery of the Daviess County Savings Association in Gallatin, Missouri, and the murder of cashier John W.
[36] During Jesse James's flight from the scene, he declared that he had killed Samuel P. Cox and had taken revenge for Bloody Bill Anderson's death.
Throughout James' criminal career, he often wrote to the newspapers portraying himself as a bushwhacker, and rallying the support of former Confederates and other Missourians who were harmed by Federal authorities during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
[37] After the end of the war in 1865, the Mason Henry Gang continued as outlaws in Southern California with a price on their heads for the November 1864 "Copperhead Murders" in the San Joaquin Valley of three men they believed to be Republicans.
In 1867, near Nevada, Missouri, a band of bushwhackers shot and killed Sheriff Joseph Bailey, a former Union brigadier general, who was attempting to arrest them.
