The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  Cole’s present concern was that Henry knew too damn much. The last thing the gang needed was another blabbermouthed loose cannon rattling about the countryside to be picked up and grilled by the Pinkertons or the St. Louis police. Nor was it lost on the vainglorious Youngers that this rank newcomer was already commanding a “cranial premium” comparable to their own. As Cole saw their dilemma, they could either expel the writer, with the consequent risk of his being captured and interrogated, or draw him more deeply into the new operation, in which case his inexperience might pose a dire threat to both himself and the rest of the gang. Frank argued for including Henry in the new plan, less out of any fraternal solidarity than as a way of keeping an eye on him. Cole, whose true preference doubtless ran along the lines of offing the author then and there, grudgingly concurred.

  Henry was thus let in on the gang’s subsequent deliberations and given a crash course in some of the finer points of horse-and-revolver work. Instead of reading, writing, and engaging in leisurely book chat with Elena, he began passing his cherished summer afternoons blasting away with a Colt .45 at rows of empty booze bottles perched along the farm’s split-rail fences. Under Frank and Jesse’s anxious (and occasionally amused) tutelage, the novelist was duly instructed in such useful gunfighter’s moves as “fanning” the hammer of his six-shooter and avoiding getting shot through the heart by jumping to the left when confronted by an enemy armed with a revolver, on the grounds that a pistol wielded by a right-handed assailant tends to swing to the assailant’s left. Henry was also encouraged to sharpen his equestrian skills. Though he once declared himself “a stranger to the mysteries of horse flesh,” like any well-bred nineteenth-century gentleman, Henry James liked to think of himself as at least a competent rider. (“He had never been much of horseman, but he knew how to stay in the saddle,” wrote Leon Edel.) The difference between Henry’s notion of horsemanship and that of his western brothers was the difference, in the author’s literary terms, between being able to crank out a readable letter to a newspaper and producing an elegant full-length novel. Frank and Jesse could ride hell-for-leather for hours or days on end over rugged terrain with little apparent fatigue or discomfort. They apprised Henry of such secrets of the craft as riding switchback across hill faces or dismounting to go straight up or down them; trying to keep to a trot so as not to wear out the animal; using a sheepskin saddle pad to cushion the rough ride and absorb the horse’s sweat; choosing a lightweight saddle like the McClellan cavalry model that could be quickly adjusted to fit any horse one might have to appropriate along the way; and always carrying a spare horseshoe, nails, and a hammer for on-trail emergency blacksmithing. One afternoon the brothers even tried, over Henry’s strident protestations about his fragile spine and ample girth, to teach the writer the old Comanche Indian trick of “laying low” in the saddle and shooting from beneath his mount’s neck—a maneuver Frank swore had saved his life on numerous occasions but which, on this one, nearly cost Henry his.

  Falling off a horse turned out to be the least of the traumas that Henry James was to suffer during this period. One bright moonlit night a couple of weeks into his intensive initiation in the outlaw arts, the author awoke to the call of nature and abandoned his bedroll to relieve himself in the bushes behind the barn. He may have been still half asleep from his arduous exertions of the day, but what he observed no doubt brought him brusquely to full Jamesian consciousness.

  Much has been written about the voyeuristic strain in the works of Henry James, who, as Leon Edel remarked, “invariably preferred to see rather than be seen.” It was a motif for which W. Somerset Maugham chided the author long after his death: “Poor Henry, he’s spending eternity wandering round and round a stately park and the fence is just too high for him to peep over and they’re having tea just too far away for him to hear what the countess is saying.” On this occasion Henry’s voyeurism was not so much literary as literal, and we can only imagine the degree of shock and/or excitement with which he greeted the scene of his supposed wife and his outlaw brother going at it buck naked under the stars. Indeed, it is entirely possible that until that moment Henry James had never in his life witnessed—and most certainly had never participated in—any carnal act more intimate than a familial hug or a chaste social peck. Coming upon the couple in flagrante delicto no doubt made an indelible impression on the sensitive author, and it may well have supplied the donnée for the famous scene in Daisy Miller in which Winterbourne spies on Daisy’s scandalous assignation with her cicerone in the ruins of the Coliseum—the moment when the narrator prudishly judges her to be “a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect.”

  Nor, as it happened, was Henry James the only clandestine observer of that stimulating spectacle.

  Throughout July 1876, William Pinkerton had been receiving field reports of an attractive young blonde staying at the Samuel farm, rumored in some accounts to be the wife of the notorious belletristic bandit Hank James. The detective, naturally, was quick to divine the true identity of the lady in question and to appreciate the use to which he might put this juicy morsel of intelligence. Being as much a player in the public relations game as Jesse James, Pinkerton had become concerned that in nabbing and debriefing Hobbs Kerry, Chief McDonough and the St. Louis police department had gotten a leg up on the agency in cracking the James Gang case. (While in principle the Pinkertons were supposed to cooperate with official law enforcement, the private detective—especially in light of his recent contretemps with Asa Hite—desperately desired to put himself at the forefront of any triumph over the gang, both for the greater glory of the agency and to convince the railroad and express companies footing the bill that he and his private eyes were earning their keep.) He thus determined that the moment had arrived to head out to Missouri and sniff around a bit for himself.

  To reconnoiter the territory, he had assumed the persona of an itinerant Jewish peddler. In the decade following the Civil War, such alien characters had become relatively common denizens of the region, schlepping their bundles of yard goods, needles, threads, notions, tinware, and other household sundries from farm to farm. They were warmly welcomed by the isolated housewives of that era before the advent of national mail-order catalogs. Although the detective’s rendition of a Yiddish accent would never have passed muster in the teeming streets of New York or Chicago, it was sufficiently bizarre to be taken for the real thing in Clay County, Missouri. Even heavily disguised, Billy Pinkerton must have been aware that he was assuming an enormous risk in daring to snoop around anywhere in the vicinity of Castle James. The threat that Jesse had issued after the firebombing of the place two years before—warning Pinkerton that if he ever showed his “Scottish face” in these parts, he would meet “the fate of Lull and Whicher”—had technically been directed against Pinkerton’s father, Allan; but the son—whom Jesse had always suspected of having personally led that disastrous raid—obviously would have been as splendid a trophy for the gang as the agency’s founder.

  Arriving at the farm on that sultry summer night, Pinkerton was hoping to pick up a general sense of the lay of the land; he didn’t expect to hit pay dirt on his very first foray into enemy territory. But while scouting the outbuildings of the homestead, he spotted Henry James standing in the bushes behind the barn with, as the detective later reported back to Chicago, “his generative member in hand, fully exposed.” Following the author’s line of sight, the detective took in the torrid tableau of Jesse and Elena rolling in the hay, and his excitement at this scene was at least as much professional as erotic: In one fell swoop, he had not only pinned down the whereabouts of the elusive Jesse James, he had gotten the goods on Henry James and Elena Hite as well.

  The lovers, of course, were well out of earshot of both Henry James and William Pinkerton. Had these secret spectators been able to hear as well as see, they would have become even more thoroughly enlightened, for it was on this night, as Jesse and Elena lay in each other’s arms gazing up at t
he celestial fireworks of the annual Perseid meteor shower, that the outlaw spun a full account of his “sordid transmogrification” from a New England child of privilege into a desperate western bandit—much of it the truth, the rest pure self-serving horseshit.

  Chapter Five

  The James boys’ odyssey into outlawry, as Jesse recounted to Elena that soft starlit night, effectively began in 1860 at the Sanborn Academy in Concord, Massachusetts, where the younger pair of brothers had been sent in realization of yet another of Henry Sr.’s quixotic educational enthusiasms. The academy, headed by Franklin B. Sanborn, was one of the first coeducational boarding schools in the nation’s history. “I can’t but felicitate our native land,” Henry Sr. gushed to a friend, “that such magnificent experiments go on among us.” Nor did it hurt that the school had been commended to Rob and Wilky’s father by no less eminent an advocate than Ralph Waldo Emerson, or that its student body boasted the offspring of some of the cream of Yankee intelligentsia—among them Emerson’s own son Edward, his daughters, Ellen and Edith, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian. Louisa May Alcott’s sister Nan was the drawing instructor, and Henry David Thoreau was often on hand to take the boys and girls on guided nature walks.

  Besides being radical in its mixing of the sexes, the Sanborn Academy in those years was also a hotbed of vehement anti-slavery sentiment. Franklin Sanborn had been one of the “Secret Six” coconspirators of the militant abolitionist John Brown, who, the year before the younger James brothers enrolled, had been hanged for attempting to instigate a slave uprising in Virginia by leading a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. (One of Brown’s daughters was a classmate of the James boys.) “In the eyes of Wilky and Bob,” wrote their biographer Anna Robeson Burr, “there could have been no greater hero than John Brown, and no doubt they listened with hunger to the accounts of his visit to Concord before their own arrival.”

  Nonetheless, Rob had never wanted to attend Sanborn, nor indeed any academic institution. Julian Hawthorne described the future outlaw in his high school years as “robust and hilarious, tough, tireless as hickory, great in the playground, not much of a scholar.” In fact, at the age of fourteen, Rob had confided to William that what he really wanted to do in life was run a dry-goods store, a vocation for which he may well have been better suited than for book learning, and which, had he pursued it, might well have spared the country considerable mayhem in the decades to come. After only a single year at the academy, Rob refused to return the following fall, insisting on staying at home with the family in Newport, Rhode Island, where William and Henry were studying art with William Morris Hunt. In Newport, “Rough Rob,” as William teasingly dubbed his youngest brother, passed much of his time sailing his boat the Alice, at one point even threatening to run away to sea. Wilky managed to put in another year at Sanborn before dropping out to enlist in the Union army.

  But as Rob and Wilky were itching to get out of school, William and Henry were angling to get in. Neither of the older James brothers saw themselves as fit for military service, on the grounds of ill health. While helping to put out a fire at a Newport stable in 1861, Henry had sustained what the family’s biographer R.W.B. Lewis called “the most famous injury in American literary history.” This was the trauma to which the novelist cryptically alluded in his autobiography as “a horrid even if an obscure hurt,” a coy characterization of his infirmity that subsequently gave rise to much catty conjecture, including Ernest Hemingway’s wild speculation that Henry had been emasculated. The truth, however, was almost certainly neither quite so lurid nor so grave. Leon Edel argued convincingly that what the writer had sustained was most likely a garden-variety lower-back injury—“a slipped disc, a sacroiliac or muscular strain”—painful, no doubt, but hardly the catastrophe of castration. Indeed, when Henry Sr. trundled his suffering son up to Boston for a consultation with “a great surgeon, the head of his profession there,” the prominent doctor treated his young patient “but to a comparative pooh-pooh,” leaving Henry ever thereafter “to reckon with the strange fact of there being nothing to speak of the matter with me.”

  Hypochondria among the Jameses, as we have seen, was more than a familial affliction; it was something of a competitive sport. Not to be outdone by his brother’s inscrutable impairment, William managed to come up with a stunning litany of no less recondite complaints of his own, including eyestrain, headaches, backaches, and “nervousness of temper”—none of which, as Lewis pointedly observed, impeded the young sufferer from “reading assiduously in literature, science, and philosophy, and expressing himself as articulately as ever on many a subject.” Nor did William’s manifold symptoms deter him from signing on with Louis Agassiz for that arduous and stimulating expedition up the Amazon in the spring of 1865, just as the war was safely winding down.

  Yet given the obscurity of their infirmities, William and Henry must have felt a need to avoid the appearance of an unseemly idleness at a time when so many of their contemporaries were risking life and limb in the Union’s defense. To this end, the older James brothers apparently saw attending Harvard as a rigorous-seeming alternative to taking up arms. William enrolled in the university’s Lawrence Scientific School in the fall of 1861, and Henry entered its law school the following year. In opting for the groves of academe over the fields of battle, the senior pair had the blessing of their father, who, despite his vigorously professed belief in abolition and the Union cause, was initially dead set against any of his sons’ joining the army. “No existing government,” he wrote, “nor indeed any now possible government, is worth an honest human life and a clean one like theirs…. I tell them no young American should put himself in the way of death until he has realized something of the good of life: until he has found some charming conjugal Elizabeth or other to whisper his devotion to, and assume the task if need be, of keeping his memory green.”

  However, as his younger boys approached enlistment age, Henry Sr. altered his tune. On the day when Rob went off to sign up for duty, with his two older sons safely ensconced on the Cambridge campus, he wrote to a friend: “I cannot but adore the great Providence which is thus lifting our young men out of indolence and vanity, into some free sympathy with His own deathless life.”

  The youthful bandits-to-be were hardly passive victims of their father’s vacillations. Their own adolescent antsyness, idealism, and appetite for adventure—and not of the intellectual sort—obviously played no small role in fueling their fervor to enlist, as, no doubt, did the changing political climate of the nation at large. With the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, President Lincoln hoped to inspire a resurgence of the patriotic passion that had galvanized the Union in the opening months of the war (and perhaps to put off having to resort to a draft); while in the more intimate sphere of the James household, the younger pair of brothers, having lived their entire lives in the long shadows of their older, more gifted siblings, doubtless hoped that by volunteering for military service, they might get to bask in the warm glow of the family limelight for a change.

  The first to go was the “adipose, affectionate” Wilky, who joined the Massachusetts 44th Infantry in September 1862, at the age of seventeen. After a few weeks of drilling on the Cambridge Commons, his regiment shipped out for New Bern, North Carolina, where the raw recruit discovered that he possessed a veritable lust for combat. Within a couple of months, he was promoted twice, first to corporal, then swiftly to sergeant. In a letter home written after a skirmish near Kinston, North Carolina, on December 14, Wilky described a hail of bullets whistling over his head “as if all the devils of the Inferno” were milling about him. He concluded, “I don’t think Sergeant G.W. has ever known greater glee in all his born days.” He also discovered that he had a previously unsuspected appetite for literature and began to acquire the signature erudition of the future killer/scholar Frank James. “The young man who had hitherto shown such an aversion to reading books,” wrote Lewis, “could now be observed, on rest
periods between marches, reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables….”

  Wilky’s enlistment was supposed to have entailed only a nine-month commitment to the colors, but in the winter of 1863, Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts launched one of the boldest experiments in American military history: the establishment of an all-black regiment of Union soldiers, the storied Massachusetts 54th Infantry. Frederick Douglass, a former slave and the nation’s leading black abolitionist, two of whose sons joined the new regiment, proudly proclaimed that “once the black man gets upon his person the brass letters ‘U.S.,’ a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.” The men of the 54th were keenly aware that all eyes would be upon them—and that not a few Americans (in the North as well as the South) were hoping they would fail. There was even a call in Congress to equip the black infantry with pikes instead of firearms. Lieutenant G. W. James—he had been promoted yet again—with his certified combat experience, manifest abolitionist bona fides, and sterling social pedigree, was tapped to serve as an officer in the newly formed unit. In accepting his commission, Wilky was putting himself in substantial jeopardy, greater even than the significant peril he had faced by joining the army in the first place. Shortly after the establishment of the 54th, the Confederate Congress had issued this daunting proclamation: