This thinking is the stuff that holds together Hobsbawm’s concept of the social bandit. Marx stresses the primary importance of economic relations, and economic interests. From these, all politics springs. And since peasants have such limited economic lives, he argues, they must be primitive or backward politically. These two points are indispensible to any understanding of the social bandit, and whether the concept applies to Jesse James. “Bandits belong to the peasantry,” Hobsbawm writes. “They cannot be understood except in the context of … peasant society.”
If social bandits can only emerge from a self-sufficient agrarian society, then the primitive nature of the people necessarily limits the political sophistication of the outlaw. Hobsbawm makes this point again and again. He calls the archtypical noble robber—including Jesse James—“an extremely primitive form of social protest, perhaps the most primitive there is. He is an individual who refuses to bend his back, that is all.” The Robin Hood type of outlaws “are very far from modern guerrillas … partly because they are organizationally and ideologically too archaic.” He writes that “traditional primitive rebels are united by a common and inherited set of values and beliefs about society so strong as hardly to need, or to be capable of, formal articulation.” This limited outlook prevents them from thinking politically; they—and their supporters—can only picture the injustices of the world, and their resistance to it, in extremely personal terms.18
White tries to junk the outward trappings of Hobsbawm’s argument—his use of the word “peasantry”—but he retains the hidden assumptions behind it, depicting Jesse James and his colleagues as politically unsophisticated individuals. White says they suffered from a “stubborn refusal to envision the social problems enmeshing them in anything but personal terms,” guaranteeing that their social impact would be small. Michael Fell-man, a historian of Missouri’s guerrilla conflict, makes much the same argument. He notes that the Confederate bushwhackers, including those who turned bandit, described their actions in terms of individual retribution against wrongs. “Almost no ex-guerrillas generalized politically beyond this personal [vision],” he writes. “These men were limited to the intellectual discourse to which they had access.” On this point, White and Fellman virtually paraphrase Hobsbawm, who writes, “Bandits, except for their willingness or capacity to refuse individual submission, have no ideas other than those of the peasantry … of which they form a part.”19
Having drained the outlaws of all powers of higher reasoning, all three historians attribute their importance to the eye of the beholder. “I would stress,” writes Fellman, “that it was not the actual bandit but the emblematic nature of the guerrilla-outlaw figure that gave him such force in popular culture.” Hobsbawm has made precisely the same point repeatedly in his work.20
There are important insights throughout these arguments, but the reality of rural Missouri was far different from the simple, apolitical society imagined by Hobsbawm (let alone Marx), and the real outlaw was far from an inarticulate symbol created by others. When the unspoken assumptions are cleared away, a truly substantial Jesse James emerges, strikingly more significant—and purposeful—than historians have imagined.
First the society: the Civil War created the most politically active population in perhaps all of American history, and nowhere more than in badly divided Missouri. Levels of participation reached remarkable heights; electoral activity permeated daily life, inflated by intense partisanship; virtually all newspapers aligned themselves with political parties—even factions within parties—and covered politics at length and in detail. Nor were these humble farmers incapable of expressing their class interests. Such groups as the Grange and the People’s Party articulated clear and plausible responses to rural economic difficulties, and the Greenback Party, far from being a bunch of backward inflationists, advanced sophisticated solutions to a very real shortage of currency in the countryside, such as the interconvertible bond conceived by Alexander Campbell.21
It was in this highly political rural world that Jesse James won widespread sympathy. Significantly, popular support for him and his confederates was at its lowest when the connection between banditry and politics was weakest (1867 through 1869, and 1879 through 1882) and reached its height when the connection was strongest (in 1866 and 1870 through 1876, with a peak in 1874 and 1875).
But what exactly was the connection to politics? Here we have to wave away another Marxist assumption—that all politics is ultimately economics. Hobsbawm and David Thelen, for example, think that the outlaws were popular because they struck at businesses that oppressed the traditional farmer, forcing him to give up self-sufficiency. But, as argued earlier, this was not so. The bandits’ families and their supporters farmed for profit; they belonged to an agricultural sector long integrated into national markets. One searches in vain through Missouri of the 1870s for defenders of traditional self-sufficiency. The Grangers opposed monopolies as barriers to market access; they did not complain about the intrusion of capitalism itself. Greenbackers and other populists did not attack banks; they attacked the structure of the national bank system, the maldistribution of national banknotes, the deflationary return to the gold standard. No one saw brigandage as a way to counter these problems. In 1872, for example, a letter to the Liberty Tribune groaned that it was actually “the good farmer” who was “the scape-goat of … bank robbers.” It is significant that the bandits stopped raiding Missouri banks as they reached the zenith of their popularity, opting for railroads instead.22
But, significantly, Jesse James did not rob railroads. He robbed express companies, which oppressed no one; few farmers ever had contact with them, since they handled small, expensive, high-priority shipments, not freight. The railway corporations generally ignored the bandits, only acting in 1881 at the urging of Governor Crittenden, and after the rare murder of one of their employees. It was the express companies that funded the Pinkerton detectives, and it was the state governors who obsessed over the outlaws, whom they correctly saw as a political problem.
In the near-endless newspaper columns devoted to the famous outlaws, only a few lines related their public impact to economic questions. Neither their opponents nor their supporters condemned or praised them for attacking controversial businesses. This is not to say that their choice of targets played no role in their popularity, but it was much more complicated than the crowd cheering them on for striking a villain. By (usually) robbing impersonal institutions, they were not seen as victimizing the average man or woman. And there was the heroic aura they generated by going after outsized foes. Both factors could be heard in the comments of Mattie Hamlett to the outlaws when they held up the Lexington stage in 1874. “I’m astonished to see you have come down to such small work,” she said. “I thought you never did anything except on a big scale.” Their selection of targets thus created a strong favorable impression, but that does not mean that this stemmed from public resentment of those they robbed. As Scott Reynolds Nelson has shown, Ku Klux Klansmen in the Southeast made the railways the focus of political fury that had little to do with anger at railroads as such; these business institutions became the axis of political violence, rather than the specific target.23
Of course, the public did grumble about the powerful railway corporations, and took some satisfaction at the embarrassment they suffered when their trains were stopped with impunity. The Kansas City Times expressed this in a backhanded way in arguing that Jesse James should give himself up. “The bold highwayman who does not molest the poor or the ordinary traveler, but levies tribute on banks and railroad corporations and express monopolies,” the editors wrote, “is not generally such an object of popular detestation that he cannot secure a fair trial in our courts. It is the horse thief, the ravisher, the stealthy murderer of the innocent and helpless that fall victims to mob law.”24 So the bandits’ choice of institutions as their primary targets was essential to maintaining their popularity—but it was not the driving force, the engine that propelled the
m into political debate.
In this intense, sophisticated political environment, what made Jesse James and his colleagues heroes was simply a matter of war. The debate that raged over them revolved monotonously around their roles as Confederate heroes, as undefeated champions of the Lost Cause, as galvanizers of rebel resentments. Wartime allegiance alone can account for their importance. At the moment when they were most central to Missouri politics, when newspapers and politicians took public stands in favor of them, they were the central issue in a struggle between the Union and Confederate wings of the Democratic Party, factions that were ideologically identical in every respect except the sides they took during the Civil War. Of course, many Confederates frowned on Jesse James—he was a criminal, after all—but virtually every one of his grassroots supporters was a former rebel. As the hostile Kansas City Journal of Commerce noted, “There is not a man of average intelligence in this county who does not know that these outlaws have been harbored and befriended … by men who harbored and befriended them during the war, and by nobody else, and for no other reason.” And all of the newspapers that sympathized with him were secessionist-aligned—the Lexington Caucasian, for example, along with John Edwards’s publications—framing their favorable commentary strictly in terms of Confederate political aspirations.25
Of course, the politics of the Lost Cause were far from simple. The sentiments that animated ex-Confederate Democrats included deep-seated racism in the face of emancipation and civil rights laws; a fierce resentment of the political restrictions imposed by the constitution of 1865; anger at Congress’s treatment of the South and Radical Reconstruction generally; a longing for the conditions of the antebellum era; and a conservative vision of both government and private life. But the impact of the Civil War as a searing social and political event cannot be overstated. In Missouri, more than anywhere else, neighbor literally fought neighbor, invading homes, looting, burning, and murdering unarmed partisans of the other side. It would be remarkable indeed if wartime allegiance had not become a defining element in postwar politics. Could the average farmer or merchant honestly be expected to forget the fact that his neighbor stole his horses, killed his son or brother, or burned his house? With peace, the rebels saw their cause delegitimated and their service cited as a reason to bar them from politics. Small wonder that, however bad their cause might have been, they sought to overturn the Radical legacy, win power as a group within the Democratic Party, and find for themselves a place of glory.
Indeed, Confederates waged their struggle on a broad front, fighting to win respect in politics, to achieve social standing, and to realign Missouri’s sense of itself as a Southern state in popular culture. This is part of the reason why Jesse James’s main advocate, Edwards, framed his praise for the outlaw in such personal terms. He positioned Jesse within the Southern tradition of honor, of the right to defend both self and home with deadly force. “It was his country,” he wrote in Jesse’s obituary. “The graves of his kindred were there. He refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters.” This was not just a defense of Jesse—it was an argument in favor of the entire Confederate endeavor in Missouri, and an assertion that the state was an inheritor of Southern cultural traditions. It was the culmination of a long fight for the identity of a badly splintered border community, stretching beyond the war to the campaign of border ruffians against dissenters, back to the debate between slaveholders and abolitionists in Robert James’s own church.26
All this turns scholarly assumptions about the bandits upside down. “At the center of popular support for the bandits,” David Thelen argues, “was the belief that they sought to reunite the community and reassert tradition.” In fact, the reverse was true: the outlaws were popular because they divided the community, asserting the pride and power of a group created by the Civil War itself. Jesse James was not seen to be standing against corporations so much as against fellow Missourians, those who had taken up arms for the Union and possessed a northward-looking vision. This remained true to the very end of his life. “Would to God he were alive today to make a righteous butchery of a few more of them,” Edwards wrote in his obituary. On the streets of St. Joseph, Jesse’s supporters expressed their feelings after his assassination by repeatedly shouting, “Hurrah for Jeff Davis!”27
Those cheers for the Confederate president, in far northwestern Missouri, remind us that Jesse James’s career also played out in a national context. Too often his actions have been seen in light of frontier criminals, men such as Billy the Kid or Butch Cassidy. But Jesse James himself looked South, not West; he, his brother, and his bandit colleagues were proud products of the Confederate war effort. Moreover, this was the period of the greatest outbreak of political violence in all of American history. Confederate veterans returned home to find a social and political revolution breaking out. Like German and Italian veterans after World War I, they banded together to suppress it. Their efforts included assassination of officeholders and political leaders; raids on black homes to intimidate assertive African Americans; and, finally, outright insurrection. Organized mass violence played a primary role in overthrowing state governments from Louisiana to South Carolina, while Ku Klux Klan raids occurred in outlying states such as Texas, Kentucky, and Missouri itself. In Missouri, however, Unionism had such a broad base of support in the white population—and the black population was so small—that anti-Reconstruction violence was necessarily fractured, and waged on a far smaller scale than in the Deep South.28
“It is easy to forget,” writes George C. Rable in his important study of this era, “that political violence was accompanied by ordinary crime.”29 This was true of the Missouri bushwhackers during and after the Civil War. In 1866, Archie Clement led the former Bill Anderson gang into a yearlong confrontation with the state government by robbing a distinctly Radical bank in Liberty—in essence, the business headquarters of the Republican Party in Clay County. The struggle that ensued resembled low-intensity warfare at times; indeed, citizens across the political spectrum feared that a second civil war would erupt. It culminated in the bushwhackers’ armed occupation of the town of Lexington on election day, followed by Clement’s death at the hands of Bacon Montgomery’s militia detachment. During this tumultuous year, no one saw the robberies carried out by Clement’s men as simple crime. They placed them in the context of guerrilla warfare and political violence. They had no context of daylight bank robbery, as exists today. In this setting, bushwhacker violence could only be seen as political in nature.
“They continued the war after the war ended,” observed the Democratic Kansas City Times, “such, at first, was their declared purpose, and, in a measure, so executed.” The Republican Kansas City Journal of Commerce agreed. “Their exploits all partook of a semi-military character, and could only have resulted from experience.” These contemporaries grasped the Reconstruction context in which the outlaws operated. Richard White asked the wrong question when he pondered whether the outlaws were “an exotic appendage of the agrarian revolt of post–Civil War America.” Rather, Missouri’s outlawry was an appendage of the Southern-separatist, white-supremacist revolt of the former Confederacy. The Journal of Commerce expressed this crudely but effectively. “If some man from abroad was to meet Jesse James and shoot him down in the road, he would not fare half so well before a jury as the man who ‘killed a nigger in self defense,’ while he was armed with a revolver and the ‘nigger’ with his bare hands, only,” it fumed. “There is not a dispassionate, honest man of forty years of age in Jackson county, who has lived here ten years, who does not know it is but the fact.”30
After Clement’s death, however, his followers degenerated into simple robbers. Their confrontation with the state had failed; the Radicals had emerged stronger than ever, and former Confederates found themselves frozen out of politics. Only after Jesse James’s emergence in 1870 as the leading bushwhacker-bandit personality—occurring simultaneously w
ith his befriending of Edwards and the return of the rebels’ right to vote—did the outlaws once again become a political force. And this raises a critical question: To what extent was Jesse James a conscious agent in the making of his public image? Did he win fame by virtue of simply being there? Or was he a self-aware actor on the political stage? Hobsbawm, White, and Fellman say he was a creation of others, a dream given form by the frustrated hopes of the mob. But the outlaw himself tells us otherwise.
The extent to which Jesse James was operational leader of the bandits may never be determined for certain. Though he was much more of an extrovert than his brother and clearly held sway in later years, the gang probably operated largely by consensus before it was decimated in 1876. But there can be no question about Jesse’s centrality to the bandits’ political role. His was the name that appeared on the famous letters to the press; he was the bandit specifically cited by newspaper editors and politicians; he was the one singled out by Edwards for special coverage and special praise.
T. J. Stiles Page 53