Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1847 – April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw, bank and train robber, guerrilla and leader of the James–Younger Gang. Raised in the “Little Dixie” area of Missouri, James and his family maintained strong Southern sympathies. He and his brother Frank James joined pro-Confederate guerrillas known as “bushwhackers” operating in Missouri and Kansas during the American Civil War. As followers of William Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson, they were accused of committing atrocities against Union soldiers and civilian abolitionists, including the Centralia Massacre in 1864.
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Jesse James
After the war, as members of various gangs of outlaws, Jesse and Frank robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains across the Midwest, gaining national fame and often popular sympathy despite the brutality of their crimes. The James brothers were most active as members of their own gang from about 1866 until 1876, when as a result of their attempted robbery of a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, several members of the gang were captured or killed.
They continued in crime for several years afterward, recruiting new members, but came under increasing pressure from law enforcement seeking to bring them to justice. On April 3, 1882, Jesse James was shot and killed by Robert Ford, a new recruit to the gang who hoped to collect a reward on James’s head and a promised amnesty for his previous crimes. Already a celebrity in life, James became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death.
Popular portrayals of James as an embodiment of Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, are a case of romantic revisionism as there is no evidence his gang shared any loot from their robberies with anyone outside their network. Scholars and historians have characterized James as one of many criminals inspired by the regional insurgencies of ex-Confederates following the Civil War, rather than as a manifestation of alleged economic justice or of frontier lawlessness. James continues to be one of the most famous figures from the era, and his life has been dramatized and memorialized numerous times.
Early life
Jesse Woodson James was born on September 5, 1847, in Clay County, Missouri, near the site of present-day Kearney. This area of Missouri was largely settled by people from the Upper South, especially Kentucky and Tennessee, and became known as Little Dixie for this reason. James had two full siblings: his elder brother, Alexander Franklin “Frank” James, and a younger sister, Susan Lavenia James.
He was of English and Scottish descent. His father, Robert S. James, farmed commercial hemp in Kentucky and was a Baptist minister before coming to Missouri. After he married, he migrated to Bradford, Missouri and helped found William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. He held six slaves and more than 100 acres (0.40 km2) of farmland.
Robert traveled to California during the Gold Rush to minister to those searching for gold; he died there when James was three years old. After Robert’s death, his widow Zerelda remarried twice, first to Benjamin Simms in 1852 and then in 1855 to Dr. Reuben Samuel, who moved into the James family home. Jesse’s mother and Samuel had four children together: Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fannie Quantrell, and Archie Peyton Samuel. Zerelda and Samuel acquired a total of seven slaves, who served mainly as farmhands in tobacco cultivation.
Historical context
The approach of the American Civil War loomed large in the James–Samuel household. Missouri was a border state, sharing characteristics of both North and South, but 75% of the population was from the South or other border states. Clay County in particular was strongly influenced by the Southern culture of its rural pioneer families. Farmers raised the same crops and livestock as in the areas from which they had migrated. They brought slaves with them and purchased more according to their needs.
The county counted more slaveholders and more slaves than most other regions of the state; in Missouri as a whole, slaves accounted for only 10 percent of the population, but in Clay County, they constituted 25 percent. Aside from slavery, the culture of Little Dixie was Southern in other ways as well. This influenced how the population acted during and for a period of time after the war.
After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, Clay County became the scene of great turmoil as the question of whether slavery would be expanded into the neighboring Kansas Territory bred tension and hostility. Many people from Missouri migrated to Kansas to try to influence its future. Much of the dramatic build-up to the Civil War centered on the violence that erupted on the Kansas–Missouri border between pro- and anti-slavery militias.
Slave-Owning Family
Jesse was born in Clay County, Missouri, on September 5, 1847, to Zerelda and Robert James, hemp farmers who owned six slaves. When the Civil War came, young Jesse watched his older brother Frank march off to fight for the rebellion — and likely chafed that he himself was too young to go.
Confederate Fighters
Frank’s activities with a band of pro-Confederate guerrillas brought the wrath of Union militiamen to the James family. Jesse was roughed up and his stepfather tortured for information. This may have been the spark that set off Jesse’s flame. In the spring of 1864, the lanky 16-year-old with sharp blue eyes joined a bloodthirsty guerrilla group led by “Bloody Bill” Anderson. They terrorized pro-Union enemies in the Missouri countryside. Still an impressionable teenager, Jesse participated in multiple atrocities, including the notorious Centralia massacre, in which 22 unarmed Union soldiers and a hundred other Union soldiers were butchered. These experiences helped define the man he would become.
Bold Robbers
Many, if not most, of the guerrillas returned to civilian life after the war ended, putting down their weapons and picking up their plows. But Jesse and Frank James felt no peace. The humiliation of Confederate defeat still gnawed at them, and the disenfranchisement of most ex-Confederates by the victorious Radical Republicans made Jesse feel like a victim.
He chose to continue fighting, targeting a bank in Gallatin, Missouri, thought to be run by the man who had killed Bill Anderson. On December 7, 1869, Jesse and Frank rode in during daylight, shot an unarmed cashier, and made off with some worthless paper. They made a daring escape through the midst of a posse sent to capture them. Later they declared that “they would never be taken alive.” For the first time, the newspapers mentioned Jesse James and he loved the attention. Soon he began tailoring his robberies to attract as much of it as possible, even leaving press releases behind.
The Legend Begins
Aided by an ex-Confederate soldier and newspaper editor named John Newman Edwards, Jesse began constructing a myth of himself as a heroic Southern fighter, a noble Robin Hood who helped poor Missourians crushed under the weight of Republican outrages. In letters that Edwards published, Jesse simultaneously proclaimed innocence for specific crimes while wearing the general outlaw’s mantle. “We are not thieves,” he wrote, “we are bold robbers. I am proud of the name, for Alexander the Great was a bold robber, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte.” It was indeed the stuff of legend; while Jesse certainly stole from the rich, there was no evidence he ever actually gave his gains to the poor.
American Civil War
After a series of campaigns and battles between conventional armies in 1861, guerrilla warfare gripped Missouri, waged between secessionist “bushwhackers” and Union forces which largely consisted of local militias known as “jayhawkers”. A bitter conflict ensued, resulting in an escalating cycle of atrocities committed by both sides. Confederate guerrillas murdered civilian Unionists, executed prisoners, and scalped the dead. The Union presence enforced martial law with raids on homes, arrests of civilians, summary executions, and banishment of Confederate sympathizers from the state.
The James–Samuel family sided with the Confederates at the outbreak of war. Frank James joined a local company recruited for the secessionist Drew Lobb’s Army, and fought at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in August 1861. He fell ill and returned home soon afterward. In 1863, he was identified as a member of a guerrilla squad that operated in Clay County. In May of that year, a Union militia company raided the James–Samuel farm looking for Frank’s group. They tortured Reuben Samuel by briefly hanging him from a tree. According to legend, they lashed young Jesse.
Northfield
During the early 1870s, Jesse and his gang robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains with near impunity. Sheltered by Confederate sympathizers, they eluded authorities again and again. Perhaps Jesse began to believe in his own invulnerability, because in September 1876 he badly overreached, attempting a bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota, some 500 hundred miles from his normal base of operations. The robbery was a disaster. The townsfolk had no tolerance for former rebels — they killed two of the robbers then and there, and hunted down the others. Only Jesse and Frank escaped, but they were forced to live in Tennessee under assumed names.
Gunned Down
Frank began to enjoy the quiet life, but Jesse was restless, unable to settle down with his wife Zee and son Jesse. He tried various moneymaking schemes, bought race horses — but none of it quenched his thirst for the spotlight. Jesse returned to crime in 1879, but by then ex-Confederates had taken over Missouri’s political reins, and the public had little patience for his banditry.
Jesse’s new gang, none of them ex-soldiers, were in it for the money, not the cause, and one of them happily conspired with Missouri’s governor to hunt the outlaw down and collect a $10,000 reward. On April 3, 1882, Jesse got a bullet in the back of the head. He died with few allies, but in later years the myth surrounding him grew so strong that it eventually crowded out the inconvenient truths of his own murderous life.
Death
Site at 1318 Lafayette Street, where James was killed. To the right is the top of Patee House, where his widow Zerelda stayed after his death. His house was subsequently moved to the Belt Highway and later to its current location on the Patee House grounds.
Jesse James’s home in St. Joseph, where he was shot (currently at the grounds of the Patee House)
With his gang nearly annihilated, James trusted only the Ford brothers, Charley and Robert. Although Charley had been out on raids with James, Bob Ford was an eager new recruit. For protection, James asked the Ford brothers to move in with him and his family. James had often stayed with their sister Martha Bolton and, according to rumor, he was “smitten” with her.
By that time, Bob Ford had conducted secret negotiations with Missouri Governor Thomas T. Crittenden, planning to bring in the famous outlaw. Crittenden had made capture of the James brothers his top priority; in his inaugural address he declared that no political motives could be allowed to keep them from justice. Barred by law from offering a large reward, he had turned to the railroad and express corporations to put up a $5,000 bounty for the delivery of each of them and an additional $5,000 for the conviction of either of them.
A woodcut shows Robert Ford famously shooting Jesse James in the back while he hangs a picture in his house. Ford’s brother Charles looks on.
On April 3, 1882, after eating breakfast, the Fords and James went into the living room before traveling to Platte City for a robbery. From the newspaper, James had just learned that gang member Dick Liddil had confessed to participating in Wood Hite’s murder.
He was suspicious that the Fords had not told him about it. Robert Ford later said he believed that James had realized they were there to betray him. Instead of confronting them, James walked across the living room and laid his revolvers on a sofa. He turned around and noticed a dusty picture above the mantle, and stood on a chair to clean it. Robert Ford drew his weapon and shot the unarmed Jesse James in the back of the head. James’s two previous bullet wounds and partially missing middle finger served to positively identify the body.
The death of Jesse James became a national sensation. The Fords made no attempt to hide their role. Robert Ford wired the governor to claim his reward. Crowds pressed into the little house in St. Joseph to see the dead bandit. The Ford brothers surrendered to the authorities and were dismayed to be charged with first-degree murder.
In the course of a single day, the Ford brothers were indicted, pleaded guilty, were sentenced to death by hanging, and were granted a full pardon by Governor Crittenden. The governor’s quick pardon suggested he knew the brothers intended to kill James rather than capture him. The implication that the chief executive of Missouri conspired to kill a private citizen startled the public and added to James’s notoriety.
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