T. J. Stiles Read online

  Acclaim for T. J. Stiles’s

  Jesse James

  Winner of the Ambassador Book Award

  “Elegantly rendered and compelling.”

  —Jay Winik, The Washington Post Book World

  “Stiles has combed a wealth of contemporary sources and imbues this story with the drama it deserves.”

  —Eric Foner, Los Angeles Times

  “Carries the reader scrupulously through James’s violent, violent life.… When Stiles, in his subtitle, calls Jesse James the ‘last rebel of the Civil War,’ he correctly defines the theme that ruled Jesse’s life.”

  —Larry McMurtry, The New Republic

  “Wonderful.… An important new biography.”

  —John Mack Faragher, The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC)

  “[A] bold, myth-bashing account of the brutal life and times of the outlaw-icon.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A fascinating challenge to old legends.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “A dazzling work of American history.… James emerges, stripped of his Robin Hood folk mythology, as a more complex and pivotal figure than earlier histories have allowed.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  “Arresting and powerful.”

  —The Richmond-Times Dispatch

  “This gripping biography of one of the most famous American outlaws clarifies the development of modern violence and proves that the simplistic Jesse James of western movies falls far short of the historical mark.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Perhaps the finest book ever written about this American legend.”

  —Salon

  “The book is quite simply outstanding.… [Stiles is] a writer whose allegiance is not with the easy and obvious but with the subtle and defiantly humane.”

  —The Guardian

  “As gracefully written as a novel, and convincingly argued throughout, this is biography at its finest.”

  —BookPage

  “Stiles spent four years examining James’s deadliest weapon: his politics.… James emerges as no mere robber, but as a proslavery ‘terrorist’ who remains wildly misunderstood.”

  —Time Out

  “In hard-eyed, exhilaratingly physical language … T. J. Stiles takes us beyond the usual interpretation of the outlaw’s notorious life and into a far more challenging understanding of the man.”

  —The Bloomsbury Review

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2003

  Copyright © 2002 by T. J. Stiles

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

  Vintage and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Stiles, T. J.

  Jesse James : last rebel of the Civil War / T. J. Stiles

  p. cm.

  1. James, Jesse, 1847–1882. 2. Outlaws—West (U.S.)—Biography. 3. West (U.S.)—Biography. 4. Guerrillas—Confederate States of America—Biography. 5. Missouri—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Underground movements. 6. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Underground movements. I. Title.

  F594.J27S76 2002

  364.15’52’092—dc21

  [B]

  2002025493

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77337-1

  Author photograph © Brice Hammack

  Maps by David Lindroth, Inc.

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To Nadine, for

  everything

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Prologue

  PART ONE: ZION: 1842–1860

  CHAPTER ONE The Preacher

  CHAPTER TWO The Widow

  CHAPTER THREE The Slaves

  PART TWO: FIRE: 1861–1865

  CHAPTER FOUR Rebels

  CHAPTER FIVE Neighbors

  CHAPTER SIX Terror

  CHAPTER SEVEN Horror

  CHAPTER EIGHT Exile

  PART THREE: DEFIANCE: 1865–1876

  CHAPTER NINE A Year of Bitterness

  CHAPTER TEN The Guerrillas Return

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Death of Captain Sheets

  CHAPTER TWELVE The Chivalry of Crime

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Invisible Empires

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Allies and Enemies

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Persistence of Civil War

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Ambition

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Anabasis

  PART FOUR: FATE: 1876–1882

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Resurrection

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Assassins

  CHAPTER TWENTY Apotheosis

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations Used in the Notes

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Also by T. J . Stiles

  I consider Jesse James the worst man, without any exception, in America. He is utterly devoid of fear, and has no more compunction about cold blooded murder than he has about eating his breakfast.

  —Robert A. Pinkerton,

  Richmond Democrat

  November 20, 1879

  [Jesse James] laughed and remarked that he might have to go under eventually, but before he did he would shake up the country.

  —Robert Ford,

  St. Louis Republican

  April 7, 1882

  You’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.

  —Philip Caputo,

  A Rumor of War

  Illustrations

  Insert starting on this page

  Robert James

  Zerelda Samuel

  The James-Samuel farm

  A Missouri River steamboat

  The St. Louis waterfront

  General Sterling Price

  General Order No. 11

  Escape to freedom

  Three Missouri guerrillas

  Jesse James as a bushwhacker

  The James brothers and their leader

  William “Bloody Bill” Anderson

  Major A. V. E. Johnston

  General Joseph O. Shelby

  Major John N. Edwards

  “Bloody Bill” Anderson in death

  Insert starting on this page

  The Radical Triumph: A tribute to emancipation in Missouri

  The Origins of Radical Reconstruction: President Johnson as Iago

  The Confederate Reaction: The Ku Klux Klan

  President Ulysses S. Grant

  A locomotive, coal tender, and baggage car

  Governor Thomas C. Fletcher

  Governor Silas Woodson

  Governor Charles H. Hardin

  Allan Pinkerton

  Jesse James as an adult

  Zee Mimms James

  Adelbert Ames

  Northfield, Minnesota

  The Scriver block

  Interior of the First National Bank

  The bandit casualties

  Governor Thomas T. Crittenden

  Governor Crittenden’s reward proclamation

  Scene of the assassination

  Jesse James in death

  Maps

  Civil War Missouri

  The Civil War

  Western Missouri Du
ring the Civil War

  Western Missouri After the Civil War

  The Bandit Region

  The Northfield Raid

  Prologue

  The rumor rolled through the town of St. Joseph, Missouri, like floodwaters, reaching the reporter’s ears around ten o’clock on the morning of April 3, 1882. He grabbed his notebook and ran onto the street, which was already saturated with the news, the sidewalks alive with disbelieving chatter. Within a few minutes, he joined a river of people flowing uphill to the story’s source: a modest house on the corner of Thirteenth and Lafayette Streets, “a frame building, a story and a half high,” he wrote, “in a little grove of fruit trees.” He pushed his way through the crowd of gawkers and moved inside.1

  He stepped straight into a strange and dreamlike scene: a little girl—a mere toddler—and a seven-year-old boy, standing silent and afraid in the kitchen; their slender, trembling mother, at once hateful, angry, and grieving, words tumbling out of her mouth in a blend of pleas and screams; and teeming strangers, reporters and onlookers, who crowded into her home. Next to the door in the front room was the center of this vortex: a man, “lying upon the floor cold in death,” the reporter wrote, “blood oozing from his wounds.”

  The wails, the babble of words, the murmuring of the crowd suddenly stopped as two young men appeared. They stepped past the body, approached a town marshal who stood close by, and offered to surrender. They had killed this man, one of them declared, and now they expected their reward. The lawman looked at them in astonishment. “My God,” he said, “do you mean to tell us that this is Jesse James?”

  “Yes,” the pair replied in unison.

  “Those who were standing near,” the reporter wrote, “drew in their breaths in silence at the thought of being so near Jesse James, even if he was dead.”

  Here in this little house, in this otherwise commonplace domestic setting, one of the great mysteries of the age had appeared incarnate. Every one of the onlookers knew the name Jesse James. He was a figure as publicized as the president. And yet he was also a shadow, a man who lived underground eternally and was literally a legend—formed of rumors and stories, bearing an unknown relationship to fact. Even his own children did not know his identity; they knew him by another name. As the marshal pressed the widow to confirm that this was indeed Jesse James, her boy wailed in confusion, “God Almighty may strike me down if it is not Pa.”

  And so the crowd drew in their breaths, stunned at the enormity of this event: the immense, dangerous, mysterious force known by the name of Jesse James was now revealed, though cold and still. So many questions would now go unanswered, so many events unexplained. But the mysteries that lay undiscovered at the feet of that newspaperman and the surrounding crowd were not all the same as those hidden from us now. We want to know, as they did, the demons that danced in his head; we want to know the details of his loves and hates, his daily life and epic crimes. But as we stand on this side of the historical canyon, we must strain our eyes to glimpse what those people in St. Joseph saw so clearly: the public impact, the overarching significance, of his outlaw career.

  A single fact illustrates the problem. From the end of the Civil War to the hour of James’s death, the governors of Missouri proclaimed rewards for the capture of criminals more than three hundred times; perhaps four of these proclamations touched on Jesse and his brother Frank. Those hundreds of other outlaws, along with hundreds more who failed to attract gubernatorial attention, committed murders, broke out of jails, robbed stages, banks, and trains, even killed a U.S. marshal and burned a county courthouse—but every one has been forgotten, except for the James brothers and their confederates.2 The obvious question is, Why? Why should one set of criminals be so much more memorable than another?

  Every attempt to understand Jesse James has stumbled on this question, because the real key to explaining him is to explain the world he lived in. “The Life and Times” is the classic formulation of the biography, of course, appearing in many a subtitle, but rarely has the interconnection of subject and context been so critical as in this particular case. James lived underground from the age of sixteen, scrupulously avoiding scrutiny, yet his half-hidden life was rife with symbolism. He became an emblem of conflicts that were as real and raw to his contemporaries as a bad burn. He made old wounds ache again; he reminded the public of precisely where the blows had fallen, where the social fabric had been torn. He not only represented forces larger than himself, he made them concrete, understandable, undeniable.

  But what forces, what conflicts, what wounds? Almost all examinations of this famous outlaw by serious historians have been in studies devoted to particular topics—industrialization, the Civil War, the phenomenon of banditry around the globe—leaving us with an incomplete picture, at best. The antiquarian research of the large and dedicated fraternity of Jesse James admirers has turned up many details on the man, his family, and his crimes, but has left the all-important context unaddressed. The one truly scholarly biography, the landmark Jesse James Was His Name, by the late William A. Settle, Jr., inevitably suffers from age.3 (A great deal of historical research has come to light in the more than thirty years since that book’s publication.) But it also stumbles on a critical point where our subject and his context meet: To what extent was Jesse James a participant in his rise to legend, in his symbolic role in the public eye?

  In these pages, answers will be given to all these questions. Here, the greatness of his image is seen to emerge from the greatness of the issues that flowed through his life. Some of the central questions and conflicts in American history defined his existence: the fight over slavery and abolitionism, the great catastrophe of the Civil War, the revolution of freedom represented by emancipation and Reconstruction, the spread of railroads and industrialization, and the first signs of a corporate economy. The social and political fire fueled by all these things burned at a white heat in Jesse James’s homeland of western Missouri—a border state tucked into the Midwest, sharing traits of the industrial Northeast, the family-farm Northwest, and the slave-driving South. Here, every political issue was personal, every conflict real and concrete, every dispute bitter.

  Would slavery spread? Would the slave states secede? Would emancipation mean equality for African Americans? Would the South be revolutionized into the model of the North? The James family debated such questions long before Jesse was born, and he threw himself into the storm over them at the tender age of sixteen, when he joined the gangs of Confederate guerrillas that battled Union forces in Missouri. With the coming of peace, he and his fellow “bushwhackers,” as they were known, continued their wartime ways, and emerged as central figures in the state’s political struggle over Reconstruction. Like the Ku Klux Klan and other groups of rebel veterans in the Deep South, the bushwhackers served as irregular shock troops in the Confederate resurgence after the war—though in border-state Missouri, the bushwhacker bandits usually played a more symbolic role, one cultivated by the influential newspaper editor John Newman Edwards.4

  Jesse James was not an inarticulate avenger for the poor; his popularity was driven by politics—politics based on wartime allegiances—and was rooted among former Confederates. Even his attacks on unpopular economic targets, the banks and the railroads, turn out on closer inspection to have had political resonances. He was, in fact, a major force in the attempt to create a Confederate identity for Missouri, a cultural and political offensive waged by the defeated rebels to undo the triumph of the Radical Republicans in the Civil War. His robberies, his murders, his letters to the newspapers, and his starring role in Edwards’s columns all played a part in the Confederate effort to achieve wartime goals by political means (to use historian Christopher Phillips’s neat reversal of Clausewitz’s dictum).5 Had Jesse James existed a century later, he would have been called a terrorist.

  Terrorist? The term hardly fits with the traditional image of him as a Wild West outlaw, yippin’ and yellin’ and shooting it out with the county sheri
ff. But he saw himself as a Southerner, a Confederate, a vindicator of the rebel cause, and so he must be seen in the context of Southern “outlaws”—particularly the Klan and other highly political paramilitary forces. Even more important, he was not simply a puppet of John Edwards, but an active participant in the creation of his own legend. Edwards’s glorification of the bushwhacker bandits only began after the publicity-minded James rose to leadership and began to demand attention on his own. An avid student of current affairs, he sometimes outdid his editor friend in his public attacks on the Radical Republicans (to Edwards’s evident alarm). Was he a criminal? Yes. Was he in it for the money? Yes. Did he choose all his targets for political effect? No. He cannot be confused with the Red Brigades, the Tamil Tigers, Osama bin Laden, or other groups that now shape our image of terrorism. But he was a political partisan in a hotly partisan era, and he eagerly offered himself up as a polarizing symbol of the Confederate project for postwar Missouri.6

  There remains, of course, the straightforward power of his story. His is a tale of ambushes, gun battles, and daring raids, of narrow escapes, betrayals, and revenge. Even his oddly alliterative name seems to have been conjured up by a novelist of overripe adventures. But an accurate understanding of his world can only add to the drama. When we look at his life in its proper setting—if we see it as did that crowd that held its breath around his body on Thirteenth and Lafayette—we see that the life of Jesse James was as significant as it was thrilling.

  This is, at bottom, a story of how Americans have hated Americans, how Americans have killed Americans, how both winners and losers refused to forget or forgive. It is a story of the Civil War and what it left unsettled—the open-ended consequences that still shape our lives. It is a story of murder, atrocity, and terrorism, of the hunger for revenge, of struggles for power and freedom and the definition of freedom. The darker angels of our nature beat their wings throughout this book, for they often guided the life of, the hunt for, and the celebration of Jesse Woodson James.

  He promoted himself as a Robin Hood; his enemies derided him as a common thug. His sudden death froze those masks in place, leaving later generations to consider him either as myth or anti-myth, unaware that each characterization is equally empty. This book cannot make the dead man speak, but it can take the masks away, pull a syllable or two from his lips, and set them amid the chorus of his contemporaries. In the end, he emerges as neither epic hero nor petty bully, but as something far more complex. In the life of Jesse James, we see the place where politics meets the gun.