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As as a member of a band of Confederate guerrillas operating in the contested borderlands of Kansas and Missouri, Jesse James had already seen men die violently. In the early summer of 1864, just after he had left his home in Missouri to join them, the guerrillas had ambushed a force of Union militia. They also assassinated at least eight civilians in Missouri that summer because they were believed to be Union sympathizers. Some were "slain before the eyes of their wives and children," according to a contemporary account. A slave was killed "for fun."
By the time James sat for his first portrait, he may already have taken a life. According to one of his acquaintances, in June 1864, James and his older brother, Frank, a hardened bushwhacker (as the guerrillas were often called), had shot down a suspected Unionist. His first experience of war, as T. J. Stiles points out in his provocative, heavily revisionist biographical study, was not that of a soldier fighting as part of a disciplined army, but as "a member of a death squad, picking off neighbors one by one."
The passage of time, the efforts of tireless apologists and the judgment-free creations of popular culture have simplified and sanitized the life of Jesse James. His actions as a guerrilla during the Civil War have often been glossed over, with the emphasis placed instead on his later, hectic career as an outlaw. He has become the most folkloric of 19th-century badmen, with the fictionalized portraits of his life presenting a daring bandit who robbed arrogant railroads and banks, distributed loot to the needy and defied the powerful in the name of the powerless. In this narrative, James is too great a hero to be bested by conventional means. Having outwitted or outshot all those sent against him, he is brought down not by his foes but by the lethal sycophant Bob Ford.
In Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, Stiles attempts to penetrate the layers of fabrications swaddling James to uncover something of the real man and his motives. As the editor of a series of anthologies on American history (including Civil War Commanders and Robber Barons and Radicals: Reconstruction and the Origins of Civil Rights), Stiles has developed considerable skills as a researcher, and he employs them quite impressively here, drawing on letters, newspaper reports, official documents, diaries and memoirs to recapture the complex and violent times in which Jesse James grew and flourished.
Not surprisingly, the figure that emerges bears only a passing resemblance to the legendary outlaw. This James is far more ruthless and manipulative. He is an impulsive killer, forged by the corrosive experience of guerrilla warfare, Southern intransigence and his own appetite for notoriety. Even his depredations after the war, Stiles argues, were inspired less by proletarian anger than by the desire to play a visible part in the Southern effort to defeat the goals of Reconstruction. Had he lived a century later, Stiles asserts, "he would have been called a terrorist."
James's life was shaped by a series of disruptions and disappointments. He was born in rural Missouri in 1847, and might have grown up as the privileged son of a community leader. His father, Robert, was a charismatic preacher, a successful farmer (of hemp, corn, hogs and sheep) and a slaveowner. When Jesse was 2, his father departed for the California gold fields and died soon after arriving there. His mother, the indomitable Zerelda, hurried into a second marriage with a wealthy, older man. It quickly failed, and the family's fortunes never recovered.
Zerelda's third husband, Reuben Samuel, was more pliant but less ambitious. The Civil War further devastated the family. Markets for farm products evaporated, cash disappeared, violence was a constant threat. Frank joined a group of guerrillas, and in the spring of 1863 brought them back to the family farm to rest after a series of raids. Union militia tracked the bushwhackers to the James farm, beat 15-year-old Jesse and tortured Reuben into leading them to the guerrilla camp. Most of the band escaped. If Jesse, having been raised in an adamantly anti-abolitionist family and very likely envying Frank's adventures, needed further incentive to go to war, the day's events provided it.
The conflict he plunged into in 1864 had almost nothing in common with the vast struggle being waged elsewhere. Jesse's war was, as Stiles notes, "small-scale, intensely personal, and intensely vicious." Southern Kansas and much of Missouri were battlegrounds for abolitionist and anti-abolitionist forces. A vexing number of factions hunted each other through the region's canebrakes and forests, staging ambushes, assassinating suspected enemies, spreading terror. Bands of Confederate guerrillas, sheltered and protected by Missouri's large population of Southern partisans, fought Union militia, regular Army patrols, bands of abolitionist guerrillas and even on occasion local militia who were pro-slavery but devoted to the preservation of the union. The Confederate guerrillas frequently carried the fight into Kansas.
The niceties of battle never applied here. To fervent abolitionists, the southern frontiersmen of Missouri were, as the historian Michael Fellman explains in Inside War, his study of the guerrilla campaigns in that state, examples of "impoverished barbarism," their degraded condition a result of the slave system. They were "beasts who had to be expunged if free white civilization were to be implanted." To pro-slavery firebrands, abolitionists were a morally corrupt "foreign foe," evil hypocrites attempting to reverse or destroy the God-given "natural, good order of society." In this absolute battle of good and evil, almost anything was permissible--and even necessary.
Crops, homes and entire towns were burned. Every man, armed or unarmed, was a potential combatant and thus fair game. Men were shot down in their fields, on their doorsteps, while on the road. Captives were routinely executed. As the war grew more bitter, even murder was insufficient. More and more mutilated corpses--scalped or beheaded, bodies slashed or genitals severed--were reported.
Frank James had been among the several hundred bushwhackers under Quantrill who attacked, looted and burned the town of Lawrence, Kan., shooting down some 200 men and boys in 1863. In September 1864, Jesse and Frank, part of a group of bushwhackers led by the psychopathic Bloody Bill Anderson, held up a train in the town of Centralia, looted it and, when they found 23 unarmed Union soldiers on board, killed all but one. Several were scalped. Stiles vividly details the lengthy series of attacks, pursuits, ambushes and murders that the James brothers participated in until the war's end. The collapse of the Confederacy in 1865 left the James boys and their fellow guerrillas feeling particularly vulnerable.
Since they were not members of a recognized army, the possibility existed that they might be tried for their crimes by the radical Republican administration in Missouri. They might also face private vendettas, attempts by family members to avenge the dead. The actions of the new Republican administration in Missouri and throughout the South added further tinder to an explosive situation.
The federal government was perceived as being determined to dismantle most Southern institutions, and to give blacks in the South an equal footing in political and economic life. "In the face of political revolution and private revenge," Stiles writes, "in the face of former slaves who now carried muskets and asserted their freedom, it was only a matter of time before the bushwhackers resisted." When they did so, Stiles notes, it was inevitable that they would use the same methods they had employed during the war, "ranging from robbery to intimidation to murder."
It was at this point that the restless Jesse, who had seemingly relished the adventures and mortal gambles of the war years, began to become identified with the fury of a defeated South. Former guerrillas, including the James brothers, carried out what is believed to be the first daylight robbery of a bank in America in 1866, escaping from Liberty, Mo., with $58,000 after killing a bystander. Between this robbery and his death in 1882, James would take the lead in a long series of robberies of banks and trains. The violence of the war years would carry over into the robberies, leaving bank tellers, bystanders, railroad personnel and even some of his own gang dead.
Jesse James' story reminds me of the ignorami who explain their actions as, "see what you made me do."
His allegiance and action during the war were no better nor worse than any other. That can be given. His actions after were something else. Bad railroads and banks. Good Jesse. Robin Hood. Bull-doodoo. He's part of the universal myth of the "really nice" bad guy.
Jesse James is remembered only because he invented a few new twists to robbery and that's the kind of noo-noo the public likes to believe. The fact remains that he was the equivalent of our more recent and justly villified John Dillinger, Willie Sutton, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, Machine-gun Kelly and, if he had any brains: Capone.
Jesse was not a hero. He was a low-life master-outlaw. A myth. A jagged tooth that we can't resist probing with our tongues.
Yet we fail to mention 60,000 northern outlaws who tore Georgia in half. We hear nothing about the thousands "slain before the eyes of their wives and children" for no reason. We hear even less about the slaves killed "for fun" by northern soldiers UNDER ORDERS.
I don't at all excuse Jesse James actions, I'm just saying "remove the plank from your own eye, that you may see clearly to remove the speck from your brothers eye".
Yet we fail to mention 60,000 northern outlaws who tore Georgia in half. We hear nothing about the thousands "slain before the eyes of their wives and children" for no reason. We hear even less about the slaves killed "for fun" by northern soldiers UNDER ORDERS.
I don't at all excuse Jesse James actions, I'm just saying "remove the plank from your own eye, that you may see clearly to remove the spank from your brothers eye".
Good stuff DB. But that dog don't hunt.Those "northern outlaws" who tore the heart out of Georgia were nothing like the the James boys.
Dawna: The book sounds really good. Mr. Stiles seems to have really dug in and thoroughly researched his subject. I have read about what's now called "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid", which was Hollywood-ized in a movie with Robert Duvall as Jesse, and Cliff Robertson as Cole Younger. It was the James/Younger gang's last robbery. Jesse, still harboring a serious grudge against the North, wanted to go all the way up that far north and rob the bank, for several reasons, one of which was to tell the Yankees that he was still unhappy about the outcome of the war. The robbery was fouled up beyond belief, and a bank teller, Joseph Heywood, was shot and killed by Jesse. (Shane, you're probably well aware of this episode.) Just about everybody in the gang was caught or killed except Frank and Jesse IIRC. When I lived in Rochester, MN I visited the bank several times. Jesse lives on in infamy there. Every year on September 7th, they close off Main street and re-enact the robbery. The bank still stands as a museum with photos of some of the dead would-be robbers lying in coffins with proud posse members posing next to them. The bank is almost exactly as it was on Sept 7, 1876, the day of the robbery, with the original oak floors and all.
PS: IIRC, Shane correct me if I'm wrong, Cole and Jim Younger were caught and sent to Stillwater, MN to serve time. Jim, I believe, died of TB in prison, and Cole was released after serving approx 25 years. Cole was shot multiple times during his capture, but survived.
I was raised in country that glorified the James gang. When the few survivors fled Northfield, they crossed into Dakota territory where they were pursued, shot at quite numerously and, as legend has it, escaped by leaping a chasm, leaving the pursuers behind. This is now called Devil's Gulch, and the vaunted leap, while possible, is obviously doubtful.
Just a few miles off I-90 in a one-horse town called Garretson, you can find this little gem. Get out of your car, walk the trails. It is also quite rich with aboriginal legend.
Just one of those little side trips that are well worth making if you are so inclined to head to the hills this summer.
Long ago, for only a few years, I lived within 15 miles of Garretson, but never got to see the Leap. One family legend came from a great grandmother, born 1867, who said Jesse James had stopped overnight at her family's remote farmhouse in South Dakota when she was very young, and paid for his lodging with gold. However, as I grew older I came to the opinion that probably many people made those claims, something like "George Washington slept here".
What really struck me in this review of the book was the quote from Michael Fellman: To fervent abolitionists, the southern frontiersmen of Missouri were, as the historian Michael Fellman explains in Inside War, his study of the guerrilla campaigns in that state, examples of "impoverished barbarism," their degraded condition a result of the slave system. They were "beasts who had to be expunged if free white civilization were to be implanted." To pro-slavery firebrands, abolitionists were a morally corrupt "foreign foe," evil hypocrites attempting to reverse or destroy the God-given "natural, good order of society." In this absolute battle of good and evil, almost anything was permissible--and even necessary.
This struck me because another ancestor WAS a Missouri frontiersman, arriving there in the 1830s. He and his family were Confederate supporters to the extent of their abilities and as far as I know the direct ancestor didn't go on any savage, slaughtering raids, but supplied food and shelter to bushwhacker groups. I am confident my direct ancestor didn't ride with them because he was in his early 90s during the war. I never met him, but imagine he was a tough, tenacious pioneer who survived and thrived.
By the way, I've had many opportunities to tour the Jesse James house in Missouri and haven't taken them because I don't want to contribute money or time to somebody I consider a criminal.
Garretson is situated about two miles into SD from the Minnesota border. The aptly named Split Rock runs just west of town and the Gulch itself is on a branch of that stream. Indian legend has it that one of the more powerful gods struck the ground with his tomahawk and created the quartzite gap.
The "leap" itself is about 10 feet across but about 30 feet down to a pool that has yet to yield its depth. Slippery quartz underlies both sides. If that horse didn't fall on its patoot, taking off or landing, I'll never believe it could be done. By the way, with some regularity on Halloween, the bridge mysteriously ends up in the gulch although I think lately that some will shoot your sorry butt for thinking about it.
Sockknitter, 15 miles would put you in Baltic, or maybe Pipestone. Heaven forbid you should have lived in **** Rapids or Brandon. Do come back and tell me where and when you lived in that corner of the world.
The WPA build a dam across the Split Rock back in the 30's. Take four more miles downstream and there is the Palisades State Park. Quartzite towers to 40 or more feet on both sides of the stream. King and Queen Rocks were popular climbing way back when. Queen Rock was relatively easy. King was a bit harder.
With the popularity of cliff climbing of late, had a group come in and drive spikes. I think they got out of town safely, but wouldn't swear to it. Generations have climbed those rocks without spikes and weren't about to put up with those who would use them. Don't know for sure, but I'll swear that my grandfather climbed them and I know my son did. Hey. They were there.
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