T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Jesse’s relationship with Edwards has clouded the question of whether he was his own man, at least as far as he was a public figure. After all, the newspaperman was absolutely essential to the outlaw’s prominence. Edwards’s florid storytelling and exaggerated praise created a mythic aura that Jesse’s exploits alone would not have sustained. Equally important were his lengthy editorials that explicitly tied the bandit to politics, and made them central symbols in the Confederate campaign to recapture Missouri both politically and culturally in the 1870s. Other editors followed his lead. And Edwards operated as the gang’s inside man in the Democratic Party, lobbying legislators in Jefferson City and even, it was rumored, writing the original amnesty bill in 1875.

  The bond between Edwards and James, however, was a partnership, not puppetry.31 Jesse James was a highly political man who was intensely aware of his effect on Missouri politics. This should not be surprising. Even if he were merely the typical product of his society, he would have had strong opinions about politics. He came, as well, from an intensely partisan family, as seen by his mother’s oft-expressed opinions—she, who criticized a Democratic gubernatorial candidate for his Union war record, and attacked Republican newspaper editor Robert T. Van Horn by name. Jesse not only fought in the war, he belonged to a group that continued to confront the Radical government after it was over. He read the newspapers continually, as both gang members and relatives attested. And Jesse’s famous letters returned again and again to politics, hammering away at Radicals, President Grant, and the North in general. Edwards undoubtedly polished some of them. But during their robberies, the bandits repeated the same phrases seen in those letters.

  There is little doubt Jesse himself was responsible for his famous statements to the press. As his brother-in-law noted, he was a compulsive correspondent. His missives to newspapers with no connection to Edwards echoed the same political themes. When he wrote to the Nashville Republican Banner in 1875, for example, he attacked “the Radical papers in Missouri” for persecuting him and pleaded for sympathy from Democratic newspapers in the South, “the land we fought for for four years to save from northern tyranny.” He even analyzed the legislature’s vote on the amnesty resolution, noting that all the Confederates in the Missouri House had endorsed it. When he wrote to the Kansas City Times in 1876, in a letter that was clearly untouched by Edwards, he dwelt at length on state and national politics, arguing that a Democratic Congress would vindicate him.32 Again and again, he looked beyond his personal circumstances to generalize politically. He was, after all, a bandit who tried to wager on Minnesota’s presidential vote just prior to the Northfield robbery and bantered intelligently about Garfield’s new cabinet before the Muscle Shoals holdup.

  This was why Edwards formed an alliance with Jesse specifically. Edwards did not simply pick out one bandit to glorify—Jesse thrust himself forward. As he revealed in comments to Bob and Charley Ford just before they killed him, he temperamentally craved publicity, planning his robberies with at least one eye on their effect on the public. Even the hostile Kansas City Journal of Commerce noted that Jesse and his companions “were no common thieves or vulgar robbers, but had an ambition to make themselves famous.”33 Of course, he was also extraordinarily good at what he did, as were his brother and the Youngers. Though they were often unlucky in the amount of their plunder, they carried out complex operations with cold-blooded skill—even playing to the crowd as they did so. But if Jesse James had simply been a successful criminal, he would have remained a footnote to history; indeed, he would probably not have survived for long, since he would have had no grassroots support. He was, first and foremost, a distinctly political hero who actively pursued a role in public life.

  It was also a role he played to great effect. The repercussions of banditry in Missouri can be seen in two ways: in economic terms, and in its effect on politics. Did property values and immigration in western Missouri drop because of the outlaws? It is impossible to say, since the outlaws began to receive widespread publicity just as an economic depression swept over the country. A substantial number of residents, however, firmly believed that banditry hurt the state economically. The Republican Party made this claim a virtual joist in its campaign platforms throughout the 1870s, and the Democratic ex-marshal of Liberty gleefully announced that his property was worth $500 more once Jesse was assassinated. Frank James himself publicly took satisfaction in later years that he and his brother had frightened Yankee Republicans away from Missouri. But there can be no question that the outlaws helped realign politics in Reconstruction Missouri. Between Edwards’s opinion making, Jesse’s letters, the dramatic effect of their supposedly victimless holdups, and the blundering Pinkerton raid of 1875, the bandits galvanized the pride and political assertiveness of former rebels. They helped create a Confederate consciousness in what had been a mainly Unionist state, as reflected in the growing clout of the rebel caucus of the Democratic Party, the rising number of former Confederate officeholders (eventually including both U.S. senators), the amnesty resolution of 1875, and the new constitution of the same year. More broadly, the social and political revolution of Radical Reconstruction was arrested in Missouri. Jesse was far from the sole cause of all this, but he played a highly visible part, as he well knew.34

  Instead of an unreflective champion of apolitical small farmers, Jesse James was an intensely partisan and articulate hero of one specific segment of a politically sophisticated population. Certainly he took credit for some of the mythic qualities of the noble robber: a career supposedly born of injustice, an avowed determination to rob the rich rather than the poor, and invulnerability to the law (or private detectives). But in his political consciousness and close alliance with a propagandist and power broker, in his efforts to win media attention with his crimes and his denunciations of his enemies, he resembles a character well known to our times. In many respects, Jesse James was a forerunner of the modern terrorist.

  Hobsbawm actually has a name for this kind of romantic political killer, who belongs to the modern world yet adopts the myth and methods of Robin Hood: the expropriator.35 Here, perhaps, is where we should place Jesse James: a transitional figure, standing between the agrarian slaveholding past and the industrial, violent, media-savvy future, representing the worst aspects of both.

  SO MUCH CAN be said for Jesse James; but what does Jesse James say about us? Numerous accounts have been written of the imagined outlaw, the folklore, fiction, and dramatizations that have sprung up about Jesse James.36 But what does his actual career reveal about American history and society? If he is a window on our past, what do we see when we peer into him deeply?

  The motto of the United States is “E pluribus unum”: One out of many. But James’s life illustrates how bitterly divided Americans have been in the course of their history. His story reveals the Civil War not as a clash between sections, a collision of armies and sovereign governments, but as a savage neighbor-against-neighbor struggle, waged between people of the same race, religion, ethnicity, and regional background. Here was the Civil War as truly a civil war, with lasting repercussions. Throughout Jesse’s later career, we see the anger and enmities resulting from the conflict, both in high politics and in personal decisions to offer shelter to the outlaws or provide aid to the Pinkertons. Historians rightly look for deeper causes for surface events, but the James story shows how the legacy of the Civil War was a powerful force in and of itself for decades after it ended. The story challenges the great myth of American progress, the idea that we have made a steady march toward ever-greater freedom and equality, peacefully resolving our differences and quickly reconciling after Appomattox.37 It demonstrates the intense bitterness of our past political disputes, and a startling willingness to resort to bloodshed that both led to the Civil War and was fed by it.

  Paradoxically, however, this tale also reveals the integration of the nation’s past. The life of Jesse James is, in many ways, an African-American story. His entire existence was tightly
wrapped around the struggle for—or, rather, against—black freedom. Raised in large part by an African-American woman in a mostly black household, he had a father who battled abolitionists in the Baptist church, a mother who kept two black children in virtual slavery after the war, a guerrilla unit that casually murdered African Americans, and a bandit career that pitted him openly against Radical Republicans. Missouri’s white population was too badly divided to make race alone the starkest aspect of Jesse’s public image, yet it formed a patina that covered it all. At the beginning of his life, the secessionist movement in Missouri emerged from an especially intolerant faction that had mobilized to defend slavery in the 1850s; toward the end of his life, he selected as his target Adelbert Ames, one of the nation’s leading spokesmen for racial equality.

  His strange, tangential part in the struggle over race and freedom also illuminates the rise of violence in American life. His career emerged from the conjunction of two grim forces: a new, more lethal, more affordable firearms technology, and a complete disruption of political and social codes of conduct. Before the Civil War, most firearms were handmade by local gunsmiths. Rapid-firing handguns, designed to kill people, were relatively uncommon. There was so little demand for Samuel Colt’s revolutionary revolver that his Patent Arms Manufacturing Company went bankrupt in 1843. The Civil War changed all that by putting firearms in the hands of millions of men, fostering mass production of revolvers, and launching a new marketing offensive by weapons makers. On May 5, 1865, with scattered skirmishes still flaring in Missouri, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton wired a striking message to the military commander there. “Gun manufacturers are applying for leave to sell guns and ammunition to the loyal people of Missouri,” he wrote. “Is there any objections to opening the trade to the sale of fire-arms and ammunition, and under what restrictions, if any?” There were neither objections nor limitations, and weapons sales soon began. Before long, there set in the habit of mass revolver-carrying that startled observers in 1866.38

  Citizens began to carry firearms, however, because the war had destroyed the social conventions and political institutions that had contained private disputes. Violence had always been present in American life, of course, especially in the Southern backcountry, but it had been limited both by society and technology; black-white disputes, for example, were largely channeled through the person of the slaveholder. The Civil War unleashed new means of killing along with new battle lines of race and politics, creating a pandemic of murder. This was obvious to everyone in the case of the Ku Klux Klan or armed squads of Redeemers; it was less obvious in the case of Jesse James, yet his blood-soaked career belonged to this same continuum. Historian Richard Maxwell Brown has found that even late-nineteenth-century gunfights in the far West regularly pitted partisans of the Union against those of the Confederacy, showing how widespread the impact of the Civil War was on American ways of violence.39

  Jesse James remains, in many ways, a hidden figure whose life will always be half-known at best. We can only wonder how he was affected by the domineering presence of his mother, or the early death of his father, or his poor treatment at the hands of his first stepfather. By any measure, however, he was a complex individual. He was a loving husband, father, and son; he had a ready smile, an outgoing manner, and a mischievous sense of humor; and he was deeply imbued with the Baptist religion, leading him to voice regrets more than once about his chosen path. He was also a foulmouthed killer who hated as fiercely as anyone on the planet. He was political, well read on current events, skillful in manipulating the press; he was also a compulsive thrill seeker who could not bear to abandon the criminal life. It is true that he was daring, brave, and capable of astonishing feats of endurance; but it is also true that most of his homicide victims after the Civil War were unarmed and helpless, as were many of the men he murdered as a teenage guerrilla. So why do so many still worship him as a hero?

  Cultural critics and social commentators have often explored what later generations of Americans have chosen to see in Jesse James. The unanswered question, however, is what they have chosen not to see. In the decade after the Civil War, more than half of the population rejected the causes represented by the Missouri outlaw. Slavery, Southern separatism, even racism had been discredited to some extent after the Union victory. But time erodes all virtues. Even before the final restoration of white supremacy in 1877, faith in Radical ideals had begun to fade in the North, sandpapered away by the economic depression and Democratic intransigence. “By the turn of the century,” Eric Foner writes, “Reconstruction was widely viewed as little more than a regrettable detour on the road to reunion.”

  Early-twentieth-century historians, led by Columbia University’s John W. Burgess and William A. Dunning, wrote openly racist accounts of the period. In a book on Mississippi, for example, a Dunning student named John W. Garner systematically attacked the career of Adelbert Ames. He was forced to admit that even Ames’s “political opponents testify to his personal integrity,” but he had a ready response. Ames, Garner wrote, suffered from “over-confidence in the mental and moral ability of the black race, so far as their ability to govern themselves was concerned. He did not know that a superior race will not submit to the government of an inferior one.”40 Slightly later, historians such as Howard Beale concentrated on the material interests that lurk behind politics; the focus on Missouri, for instance, shifted to such topics as the origins of the Populist Party. In this interpretive environment, Jesse James easily lost his status as a divisive figure. In death, the public’s memory of him was reshaped along with its memory of all of Reconstruction, emerging as a comforting tale of a proto-Progressive Robin Hood who—in one famous story—held up a banker to return a mortgage to a poor widow.41

  It was a process helped along by the sheer banality of the lives and deaths of his family and friends in the decades after his assassination. Edwards died in 1889 in Jefferson City, widely heralded but past his prime. Zee died in 1900, after struggling against poverty for eighteen years. Frank spent twenty years in relative obscurity, working as a horse-race starter, livestock trader, and doorman at a St. Louis burlesque house; then he began to make stage appearances. Cole Younger was paroled in 1901, then pardoned in 1903 and allowed to leave Minnesota. He and Frank then formed a traveling show, “The Great Cole Younger and Frank James Historical Wild West.” Neither man starred in the actual productions, and the venture lasted less than a year. Zerelda died in 1911, after years of charging tourists to see the farm, and Frank moved in. He died there in 1915. Younger passed on at Lee’s Summit a year later. The two old outlaws had outlasted almost everyone they had ever known. Bob Younger had died of tuberculosis in prison in 1889, and Jim killed himself in 1902. The Ford brothers had disappeared from view after touring in their own show, “How I Killed Jesse James.” Charley Ford shot himself in 1884, and Bob was murdered in Colorado in 1892. Dick Liddil died of a heart attack in 1901. Jesse’s children, Jesse Edwards James and Mary James Barr, appeared in the 1920 movie Jesse James Under the Black Flag. Jesse, Jr., became a lawyer in Los Angeles, while Mary settled across the road from the Samuel farm.42

  All that remained was the apotheosis of Jesse James. In his time, he had been a polarizing symbol, a figure hated and loved but never viewed with indifference. To the extent that American society today is admirable—and less than admirable—it largely owes to the battles that defined his life. In death, however, he became bland and empty, drained of his true significance by a people who no longer wished to dwell on their divisions. Jesse James never apologized for what he was, and that alone should give us pause as we consider who we, as Americans, have been.

  Acknowledgments

  There is an old saying that you can never go home again. I’m not sure why it has such currency; in my experience, you can’t avoid it. Home, in my case, is Northfield, Minnesota, where I attended Carleton College. The building that housed the First National Bank in 1876 is still there, as is the Ames mill. Every September, the to
wn celebrates the annihilation of the James-Younger gang. I never gave it much thought when I was there; indeed, I had no particular interest in Jesse James at the time, or for many years afterward. But life so often moves in unexpected circles.

  As with locations, so with my chosen discipline. I learned to love history at an early age because of its dramatic power, its abundant stories of great events and the individuals who shaped them. Later, in my professional studies, I learned to love its explanatory power. “History from the ground up” was the cry, fostered by a sense that the real past could be found at the grass roots. I departed academia, however; my absence may have spared me the pressures of the profession—the rush to find ever narrower and more specialized fields of study, so that one might make a mark. So when I returned to writing history, it was with the sensibility of a synthesizer: I still appreciated academic insights, but I also had that love of a good tale that first attracted me to the discipline, and I wanted to bring the two together. Jesse James gripped my imagination because he offered a remarkable way of combining story and study; his eventful life is a classic American drama, one that illuminates many of the central themes and conflicts of U.S. history.

  I should address one aspect of this subject that is beyond the scope of the text, but inescapable nonetheless. Unlike almost any other figure in American history (except for a few presidents, generals, and entertainers), Jesse James has a fervent popular following. Collectors, researchers, and outright fans have devoted decades to the study and even veneration of this man. In some cases, such as the work of Robert J. Wybrow, Milton F. Perry, and Ted P. Yeatman, they have turned up invaluable facts and sources; this book would be incomplete without their efforts. I do not belong to this fraternity, however, and its members may have mixed emotions about the biography I have written. I hope that they welcome it. I think they will agree that Jesse James is worthy of far more attention by professional historians than he has hitherto received. For my part, I have tried to provide an honest assessment derived from a broad understanding of his times. Many will find their preconceptions challenged by my findings. So be it. But I have taken Jesse James very seriously; rather than debunking him, I have found him to be more significant than perhaps even his admirers realize.