"Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War" by T.J. Stiles

The latest and best-ever biography of Jesse James tears down the myth to reveal not a latter-day Robin Hood, but a greedy, press-savvy bandit.

By Allen Barra

Oct 15, 2002 | First-time biographer T. J. Stiles' "Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War" is perhaps the finest book ever written about this American legend. It is also a book that should have been unnecessary. With the possible exception of Billy the Kid, Jesse Woodson James is America's most famous outlaw. As Stiles points out, when James was killed on April 3, 1882, he was probably as famous as the president of the United States.

He is no less famous today. Jesse James has been the focus of countless movies, including everything from last year's execrable "American Outlaws" to three fine films: Walter Hill's "The Long Riders" (1980), Philip Kaufman's "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid" (1972) and Henry King's "Jesse James" (1939). He has inspired art both high -- three superb novels, "The Chivalry of Crime" by Welsh writer Desmond Barry (2000); Susan M. Dodd's "Mamaw" (1988), based on the life of Jesse's mother; and Ron Hansen's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (1983) -- and low, from dime novels in his lifetime to Pokémon characters in our own.

Why did someone whose legend is so much with us have to wait 120 years for a definitive biography?

The answer, as one soon discovers, is that the decades have added layer upon layer of iconography to the original Jesse James story. So many outlaws after Jesse, from Butch Cassidy to John Dillinger, have been seen as following in his footsteps that the path that leads us back to the original has been obscured (just as the path that would have led us from Jesse back to the bandit many compared him to, Robin Hood, has been all but erased). "Jesse James" eschews the usual trappings of the outlaw-buff variety; there are no tedious and irrelevant genealogical trees, no reliance on "Uncle Ned"-style history (as in "My Uncle Ned knew the real story ..."), and no irritating insistence on reinterpreting the entire saga in the light of new information that's unavailable to the public.

Which is not to say that Stiles hasn't discovered new sources -- or at least rediscovered old, forgotten sources. Stiles' interpretation of James' life and legend isn't revisionist; in many ways it's an old-fashioned biography that treats its subject with more reverence than the countless tomes written by Jesse's apologists. One might say that it's more reconstruction than deconstruction, as Stiles' major revelation, contrary to most recent accountings, is that the James story has more to do with the Civil War and its aftermath than with the conditions that produced frontier outlaws such as Billy the Kid.

Or, as Stiles writes, "Jesse James himself looked South, not West; he, his brother, and his bandit colleagues were proud products of the Confederate war effort." (Stiles perhaps errs in not differentiating the term "West" from "frontier." While it is true that Missouri, where James was born, was a slave state with an established market economy, it was nonetheless west of the Mississippi River and shared a number of characteristics with an overwhelmingly pro-Confederate state, Texas. Texas, while itself not entirely a frontier state, was undeniably part of the West. But Stiles' points survive his exaggerations.)

James was born in 1847, in what Stiles correctly calls "the most hotly ideological era in American history" and in the border state destined to be the site of the most vicious internecine fighting of the Civil War period. One does not have to sympathize with him to agree that the boy was fated at birth to be a killer.

His mother, Zerelda, was an overpowering figure and an ardent supporter of slavery and secession. (Jesse's father, a preacher, died in California trying to evangelize gold miners.) His older brother, Frank, rode with the infamous, bloodthirsty guerrilla leader William Clarke Quantrill. Throughout his early teenage years, young Jesse watched in horror as Unionist sympathizers, often his former neighbors, burned and looted the houses and farms of pro-Confederates, many of whom were murdered in cold blood. Atrocities committed by secessionists were equally, if not more, mind-numbing.

At 16, infuriated when his mother was arrested and forced to take a Union loyalty oath, Jesse joined the worst of all guerrilla leaders, Bloody Bill Anderson, and perhaps even took part in the most shocking mass murder of that time and place: the gunning down of a platoon of unarmed Union prisoners at Centralia. By the time he was 18, Jesse James was battle-hardened and fueled by an ideological rage, schooled in the ways of the bushwhacker by older, more jaded colleagues like Arch Clement and Cole Younger (whose fame for many years would rival Jesse's) to fight "not as a victim, but as a warrior in a cause." By the end of the war, he was living proof of Philip Caputo's statement from "A Rumor of War" (quoted by Stiles) that "One of the most brutal things in the world is your average 19-year-old American boy."

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