Shooting down the myth

Jesse James: More terrorist than hero?
The Weekender

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On 24 August 1863, a column of Confederate irregulars from Missouri galloped into the town of Lawrence in the neighbouring state of Kansas. Lawrence was a neat, prosperous little town whose white inhabitants were famously anti- slavery; the guerrillas worked their way from house to house, slaughtering. They killed 200 people, virtually every man and boy in the place. One of the guerrillas was Jesse James's older brother, Frank.

On 27 September 1864, some of the same group attacked the town of Centralia, Missouri, and captured a railroad car containing 23 unarmed Union soldiers, going home on leave. They made them strip, then killed them all, along with a few other random passengers, scalping six of the bodies. This time Jesse, aged 16, was along too.

"The darker angels of our nature beat their wings throughout this book," writes TJ Stiles. He's not kidding. His intention is to wrest the life of Jesse James back from the Wild West themepark where it has resided for 100 years, away from the thick-layered movie iconography that has deadened the reality of the bullets.

Although the book is billed as a biography, it is really, as he says, a "Life and Times"; it's about the decades of the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, when modern America was born, and about what the career of a homicidal Missouri outlaw illuminates in them.

In fact, it belongs alongside the sombre, sumptuous narrative histories of the Civil War that American historians write as a form of national self-examination.

But in Missouri, the Civil War of the great battles, of the blue and the grey, of General Grant and General Lee, was far away, 1,000 miles to the east. Here, among low, wooded hills that rolled "like a rug pushed into a corner", the war was a vicious local quarrel, Bosnian in its intensity.

Pro-slavery and anti-slavery, pro-Confederate and pro-Union, Missourians murdered people whose names they knew, often on the victim's own doorstep.

Missouri Confederates like the James boys didn't take orders from the organised army of the Confederate States of America, and when the Southern generals surrendered at Appomatox in 1865, they kept fighting.

To begin with, their raids and robberies were just acts of savage resentment, by the sons of formerly prosperous slave-owning families. (Jesse grew up with slaves in the house, all bought as toddlers by his canny preacher father, because they were cheaper that way.)

But then, Stiles shows, they became something else. The celebrity face of the group now, because his older comrades had been killed, Jesse James entered into a loose alliance with an equally diehard newspaper editor, John Newman Edwards, of the Lexington Caucasian.

Together, with words from one and bullets from the other, they waged a calculated campaign against "Radical Reconstruction", the policy that in the late 1860s and early 1870s briefly saw Federal power being used to allow the liberated black population of the South to vote, and even to hold public office.

This was the same venomous reaction that led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in other states, and acts of paramilitary violence almost too disgusting to credit.

But though Missouri had had slavery, it didn't have many slaves, or Jesse James too would be remembered in history for massacres like the one in Hamburg, South Carolina, where black voting was discouraged with " cannon" fire. Instead, he targeted the infrastructure of Reconstruction: banks owned by local Republicans, farms where Union Army veterans were trying to settle.

He did the robbing and the killing, and Edwards provided the spin - telling his readers that Jesse James was a hero who articulated their own defiance .

The terrible thing is that they won. In Missouri, as elsewhere in the South, the exhausted Federal government gave up on racial justice, and a political deal was struck that ended hostilities between American whites at the cost of allowing a century of apartheid in the South.

Jesse James couldn't stop robbing: he was just a criminal in the last few years of his life. But before that, Stiles argues, the right term for him would be " terrorist", and the public tidyingaway of him into the comfy mould of a Wild West character was part of the greater process by which the trauma of the Civil War was tidied away in American public memory.

In short, the way Jesse James has been remembered is an example of Americans' amazing ability to regenerate their collective moral virginity. The story Stiles has to tell suggests he should instead be categorised with Timothy McVeigh.

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