The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Colonel Doniphan put his pencil away. “You’d better hope he does not.”

On Monday, April 17th, O. M. Spencer took his case to trial. The second-floor courtroom was as crowded then as it was on April 3rd, but there was little grandeur in the Fords’ progress through the gathered spectators now. Charley was angry and banged out of his way anyone who pressed close to him; Bob was grinning but fidgety and though he worked at aplomb and courage, it was read as arrogance.

For reasons of politics and prestige, Colonel Doniphan was unwilling to be the sole counsel to the Ford brothers, so he invited William Warner and W. A. Reed to collaborate with him, and they congregated with four deputies around the Fords in order to prevent any violence against the two who were sitting at the defendants’ table.

Judge William H. Sherman took his seat at the bench after one o’clock and once the court clerk crossed to the recorder’s table, O. M. Spencer stood and requested that Robert Newton Ford be the first arraigned. Bob rose and swayed a little as the prosecuting attorney read a grand jury’s accusation that on the third day of April, Ford had willfully, feloniously, and with malice aforethought, killed Jesse W. James and was now being summarily charged with murder in the first degree. Spencer turned to the prisoner and with great formality asked, “What plea do you make?”

Bob responded, “Guilty!” as if pestered by ceremonies, and then presumptuously sat down.

Spencer raised a second grand jury indictment and with some irritation and frustration read the name of Charles Wilson Ford, pronouncing a premeditated murder charge and receiving the same reply.

The courtroom was then filled with controversy and whisperings and Bob reveled in it. He swiveled in his chair and crouched around the deputies to wink at his brother Elias and at Henry Craig, wave to some reporters he’d met, and pugnaciously smile at those who clearly wished him ill. Doniphan nudged him around.

Judge Sherman ruminated for many minutes and inscribed some thoughts in his elegant longhand before sitting toward the bench and saying, “Under the circumstances, there is only one thing I can do and that is to pronounce sentence here and now. You have pleaded guilty to murder in the first degree, and it only remains for me to carry out the provisions of the law. It remains for others to say whether the sentence is carried out.” Sherman glanced at his writing and commanded, “Robert Ford, stand up.”

Bob smirked but arose.

“Have you anything to say as to why sentence should not be pronounced upon you?”

“Nothing,” said Bob.

The judge looked at him sternly but without passion or righteousness. He said, “Robert Ford, you have pleaded guilty before the court to the crime of murder in the first degree, and it becomes my duty to pass the sentence of death upon you. It is therefore the sentence of this court that you be taken to the Buchanan County Jail and there safely kept until the nineteenth day of May 1882, and at that time to be taken to some convenient place and hanged by the neck until you are dead.”

Bob then lazily slumped down in his seat and Charley was ordered to stand and receive the same sentence. Charley listened with aggravation and outrage that he might be executed without having fired a shot, but Bob simply laughed at the judge in a haughty and mocking way that he thought would be interpreted by correspondents as audacity and pluck. It was not.

Then Sheriff Thomas and the deputies and attorneys walked the Fords back to jail and checked all newspaper reporters for firearms before they were admitted. Bob was asked how he felt and he answered, “Bully.” Charley was asked if he’d actually hang and he answered, “Why, I should smile. The governor will attend to that part of the business; that’s in the contract.”

City Marshal Craig couldn’t abide the Fords any longer, so he collected the revolvers and rifles and articles that had been stored as evidence and carried them to 1318 Lafayette Street. Zee James received him graciously and served him sponge cake and coffee.

Meanwhile the Fords were packing their clothes in luggage that Elias had brought and were predicting that the pardon would come by evening. Bob wrapped his .44 caliber Smith and Wesson in yesterday’s newspaper but then weighed the gun with repugnance and gave it to young Cory Craig in gratitude for the many errands that boy had gone on. His only instructions were that Cory should get a gunsmith to engrave on the nickel sideplate: Bob Ford Killed Jesse James With This Revolver At St. Joseph, Mo. 1882.

Charley sat up from a nap and patted his pockets for cigarette papers. He’d apparently overheard the impromptu presentation, for he commented to Bob, “Your shoes must be starting to pinch.”

“I don’t need any mementoes,” said Bob. “I’ve already got everything fast in my head.”

At 3:45 p.m., Colonel John Doniphan climbed onto a box in the city marshal’s office and soberly read aloud to the assembled press a telegram in which the governor granted an unconditional pardon to Charles and Robert Ford.

Henry Craig ran to the jail cell and greeted the Fords with the news but few others joined him in congratulating the two.

ON APRIL 19TH, 1882, two days after his unconditional pardon and release from jail, Bob Ford was arrested in Richmond, Missouri, on the charge that he’d murdered Robert Woodson Hite, and Bob was obliged to beg two thousand dollars in bail from J. T. Ford, the father he’d always made efforts at forgetting. “Isn’t this typical?” Mr. Ford said with spleen and all too apparent pleasure. “You come to me crying and pleading and whimpering like a little girl, please give me the money, daddy, and I’m the one to clean things up.”

Bob glared as the elderly man jerked his shoestrings tight with a grunt. He said, “Maybe you’re the one I should have killed.”

Mr. Ford glanced with anger and fright at his youngest child and saw that the boy was grinning. He considered the garden outside his window as he often would when he composed his sermons and then pulled himself up from the overstuffed armchair and prepared to make a trip to town, only adding nastily, “How perfectly our good Lord put it in the parable of the prodigal son.” By the time the cashier’s check was made out, many customers at the Hughes and Wasson Bank had come by to say Bob shouldn’t take to heart the words of John Newman Edwards.

Edwards was then living in Sedalia, about sixty miles west of Jefferson City, and was managing editor of the Daily Democrat, which was singular among Missouri newspapers in its attenuated suspicions that Jesse James couldn’t have been killed in such a manner. Soon the corroborating evidence was overwhelming, however, and Edwards considered making a pilgrimage to Kearney to attend the funeral, but instead purchased six bottles of whiskey and “went to the Indian Territories.” And it was not until one week after the interment that the Sedalia Daily Democrat published his scathing philippic on the subject of the murder.

It began: “Not one among all the hired cowards, hard on the hunt for blood money, dared face this wonderful outlaw, one even against twenty, until he had disarmed himself and turned his back to his assassins, the first and only time in a career which has passed from the realms of an almost fabulous romance into that of history.”

He continued with a mixture of apology, reprimand, and angry screed, saying Jesse’s transgressions were outgrowths of the Civil War. “Proscribed, hunted, shot, driven away from among his people, a price put on his head, what else could he do, with such a nature, except what he did do?…He refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters. Would to God he were alive today to make a righteous butchery of a few more of th

em.”

Edwards called the murder “cowardly and unnecessary” and castigated the commonwealth of Missouri for having “leagued with a lot of self-confessed robbers, highwaymen, and prostitutes” in having a citizen assassinated without confirming “that he had ever committed a single crime worthy of death.” The government and the conspirators had succeeded, Edwards acknowledged, “but such a cry of horror and indignation at the infernal deed is even now thundering over the land that if a single one of the miserable assassins had either manhood, conscience or courage, he would go as another Judas and hang himself. But so sure as God reigns, there never was a dollar of blood money yet obtained which did not bring with it perdition. Sooner or later there comes a day of vengeance. Some among the murderers were mere beasts of prey. These, of course, can only suffer through cold blood, hunger, or thirst; but whatever they dread most, that will happen.”

Bob Ford read that commentary, of course—he’d acquired from Jesse the daily routine of reading every newspaper available. He read without much resentment its implicit denunciation of Crittenden, Craig, Wallace, and Timberlake (“sanctimonious devils, who plead the honor of the State, the value of law and order, the splendid courage required to shoot an unarmed man in the back of the head”) and its imputation of his sister Martha (“into all the warp and woof of the devil’s work there were threads woven by the fingers of a harlot”) but nothing upset and preoccupied him like the phrase whatever they dread most, that will happen. It seemed more than a simple curse; there was the ring of something presaging and prophetic about it, it was the sort of thing Jesse would say.

On May 13th a justice of the peace in Ray County accepted the two thousand dollars in bail along with Bob’s promise that he would be present for the court trial. Bob reportedly told him, “I keep my appointments, Your Honor.” Then Bob and Charley went to Kansas City with Sheriff Timberlake in order to supply further information about the James gang to the government. The journey was announced in the press against all instructions and a pro-James newspaper invited the public to greet the Fords “in some appropriate way” at the railroad depot. However, the sheriff let Charley and Bob jump from the caboose upon arrival, and they nipped around the train to a waiting carriage as Timberlake escorted two cuffed and camouflaged policemen through the gathering. One policeman was struck in the cheek with a rock and needed eight stitches to close the cut, the second policeman got into a fistfight and only Timberlake’s strong intervention kept him from getting disfigured.