Twenty-two years old in 1864, Jane lived in Twapitty Township of Mississippi County, about mile a from the Mississippi River opposite Cairo, Illinois. One of her friends or acquaintances, Mary “Polly” Ann Bryant, lived in the same vicinity. However, on August 18, 1864, Polly Ann appeared at the Union post in Charleston, the seat of Mississippi County, to give a statement against Jane.
Exactly what caused Polly Ann to turn against her friend is not clear, but she said had been at Jane’s home about a year earlier, during the month of August 1863, when Jane came home from Cairo. Mr. Hancock asked his daughter whether she had gotten caps and powder, and she replied that she had about a gross of caps and four pounds of powder. Jane’s clothes were muddy from riding horseback, and her father told her she should go change.
Polly Ann accompanied Jane into the bedroom and saw her undress. Polly Ann saw a piece of calico fastened around Jane’s waist containing percussion caps and four calico sacks fastened to her hoops containing gunpowder. Polly Ann asked who they were for, and Jane replied that they were for her sweetheart, James Fugate, and another friend. She cautioned Polly Ann not to tell anyone or she would know who did. Miss Bryant kept her peace for a year, but now she’d decided to tell what she knew.
Fugate was a suspected bushwhacker, who was on parole after a run-in with Union authorities. In late August, both he and Jane Hancock were arrested and questioned. Charged with smuggling, Jane was sent to St. Louis, and she was committed to Gratiot Street Prison on the evening of September 1. Griffin Frost, held prisoner at the same location, noted her arrival in his journal, saying, “She is rather good looking, and seems to be intelligent.” Frost heard the black man who cooked for the prison officers say about Jane, “When they get to be putting such pretty young ladies as she in prison, they must be nearly played out.”
Jane was interrogated on September 2, the day after she was committed to the prison. Se denied smuggling supplies across the river from Cairo for the use of bushwhackers. In fact, she didn’t even know any guerrillas. She had known some young men before the war whom she’d heard had become bushwhackers, but she had not seen them since they left home. The only things she’d ever brought back from Cairo were items for her own family and friends like sugar, calico cloth, needles, and shoes. She admitted she had one brother in the Confederate army, but she said she herself was a Unionist and wanted to see the South whipped.
After learning that Jane Hancock had been arrested and sent to St. Louis as a prisoner, over thirty citizens of Cairo signed a petition asking for leniency for the young woman. The men said they believed Jane to be a loyal citizen and that the charges against her were false, having been made “through malice, hatred, and ill-will.” They thought that Jane should be released and “returned to her friends.” The petition reached St. Louis on September 3 and was added to her file.
It was almost a month later, however, before Union authorities took any action in her case. On September 28, judge advocate Lucien Eaton, noting that the charge against Jane was an old one and was “hardly sustainable” in view of her apparent good character, recommended her immediate release. The provost marshal general seconded the recommendation, and on October 1 General William Rosecrans ordered Jane released upon her taking an oath.
Jane walked out of prison the same day and presumably returned home, but what happened to her after that has not been traced. Some of her relatives, however, still lived in Mississippi County years later.
This is a condensed version of a chapter in my Lady Rebels of Civil War Missouri book. https://amzn.to/3AyGkOx
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