Postwar Border War

While the May 12-13 (1865) Battle of Palmito Ranch in Texas -- a Confederate victory -- is often called the last battle of the Civil War, homicidal violence plagued much of the South during Reconstruction and beyond, typically targeting freed slaves who sought to exercise their new civil rights.
Even the border states of Missouri and Kentucky proved hard to pacify. In Missouri, especially, as the famous career of Jesse James demonstrates, Confederate bushwhackers moved seamlessly into banditry, continuing to muddy the divides between war, peace and murder as they had been muddied by both sides since 1850s "Bleeding Kansas."
On today's date in 1865, not far south of St. Louis, US troops killed a man in a gang of store robbers led by bushwhacker Sam Hildebrand, who had a grim war record, and would continue his violent career until he was killed in 1872 in southern Illinois.