Wild West Desperado Cast as Political Terrorist

nytimes ^ | October 10, 2002 | JANET MASLIN

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J. Stiles went to Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., a town famous as the site of the James-Younger Gang's final showdown. Not until much later would Mr. Stiles realize what deep interest the place held for him. He is now the author of a fascinating revisionist biography of Jesse James, one that takes issue with the traditional image of the "Wild West outlaw, yippin' and yellin' and shooting it out with the county sheriff," and with the folk-hero notion of James as a prairie Robin Hood.

In place of that, Mr. Stiles sees something more troubling and complex: "a transitional figure, standing between the agrarian slaveholding past and the industrial, violent, media-savvy future, representing the worst aspects of both." In his intricate, far-reaching portrait of this legendary desperado, Mr. Stiles presents James as a Confederate terrorist caught up in the wild political turbulence of his times. In the secessionist stronghold of Clay County, Mo., "he learned that his enemies were not invading Yankees, but the men who lived next door."

"Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War" underscores the particularly fierce factionalism that divided Missouri. (Paulette Jiles's recent novel "Enemy Women" also attests to the roiling Civil War chaos in Missouri.) In an account that outlines the thinking of many warring factions — from Red Legs to Paw Paws to jayhawkers and border ruffians — James and his older brother, Frank, could not have grown up in more polarizing circumstances. Their mother, Zerelda, was a slave owner who did much to encourage her sons' partisanship and feistiness. "The old woman would kill you if the boys don't," one ex-sheriff said of her.

Mr. Stiles has to reach somewhat to summon James's little-documented boyhood. The formidable-looking 16-year-old James whose photograph appears on the book's cover remains elusive. Mr. Stiles writes, "Jesse James remains, in many ways, a hidden figure whose life will always be half-known at best," even though he would later become the darling of overheated newspaper writers. (He once left his own news release at the scene of a crime.) But this book ably extrapolates the conditions that must have contributed to James's outlaw status.

He was radicalized by, among other things, the sight of abolitionist forces invading the farm of his mother and stepfather, nearly killing the latter. And his family's later exile from Missouri doubtless also contributed to his fury. As they fell under the Union-hating tutelage of William C. Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, the James brothers learned the guerrilla tactics that would shape their later exploits, and were also well educated in the ways of terrorist brutality. "You come to hunt bush whackers," read a note attached by one of their fellow outlaws to a victim's corpse. "Now you are skelpt." Collecting scalps had become one of their trademark atrocities.

Mr. Stiles maintains that while James was inexorably caught up in the Civil War militancy of these fighters, and in the intimidation tactics on which they relied, his later life of crime was something else again. "It has been customary for historians to assume that the Confederate guerrillas made a sudden and complete transformation into common criminals, that the end of the Civil War dropped onto the personal histories of Jesse James and his comrades like a meat cleaver, severing what was from what would be," he writes.

As the angry aftermath of the war continued long past the Confederate Army's surrender, James and his compatriots still sought to wreak political vengeance through robbery and bloodshed. But they also had been forced irreversibly into lives of high-profile, excitingly notorious crime. Thus came "the beginning of a remarkable — and remarkably successful — attempt to foster cognitive dissonance among the secessionist public," Mr. Stiles notes. James painted himself as both an innocent martyr and a firebrand who would never be taken alive.

This inevitably controversial biography is especially sharp-edged in analyzing the disparity between James's apparent and avowed motives. "As armed robbers, they could claim nothing else," Mr. Stiles writes about the bandits' claims of stealing from the rich and helping the poor, "though there is no evidence that they did anything with their loot except spend it on themselves." Still, the James brothers were aided and abetted by secessionist sympathizers who still regarded them as partisan fighters rather than thieves, and the gang courted that impression. Members of the James-Younger Gang were said to be disguised by Ku Klux Klan masks when they committed their first train robbery in 1873.

The James drawn by Mr. Stiles evolved in ways that suited his career. As the snub-nosed, sandy-haired young rebel known for riding fine horses and possessing piercing blue eyes, the book's James was initially a malleable and talkative figure. As he basked in the attention of the public and press (most notably John Newman Edwards, the Kansas City newspaper editor described here as "frothing"), he came to take a grander view of his exploits. Later in his life he lived to see the divisiveness of the Civil War beginning to heal and his self-justifying exploits becoming irrelevant.

After the ambitiously planned robbery in Northfield ended in a disastrous gunfight, James assumed a new identity as J. D. Howard and became a more bitter and marginalized figure. He posed as a farmer, but boasted and gambled in ways that raised some eyebrows. It is well-known legend that he was standing on a chair and dusting a picture when two assassins finally tracked him down.

"Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War" interweaves the story of this life with a rich, illuminating awareness of the outlaws' actions and their larger situation. "They knew how to strike back," Mr. Stiles says, "but they did not know how to win."

[Commander8]

I wouldn't call Jesse James a "Robin Hood", but I wouldn't call him a terrorist either. Basically James robbed banks to make himself rich.

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