Crime dressed up as heroics

Patrick Skene Catling

JESSE JAMES: LAST REBEL OF THE CIVIL WAR by T. J. Stiles Cape, £20, pp. 510, ISBN 022406925X Lee's surrender at Apponratox was not really the end of the civil war. The Confederacy lives on, if only in romantic Southern imaginations. The Rebel yell resounds and the Stars and Bars waves over every football stadium and electoral hustings in Dixieland, and Jesse James is still a legendary folk hero.

Did you see Tyrone Power as Jesse James in the eponymous 1939 movie? It is often rerun, as if to keep the myth alive, depicting Jesse as a teenage outlaw in a crusade of vengeance after Unionists murdered his mother in the family's Missouri farmhouse. Jesse's older brother Frank played a supporting role. In fact, as T. J. Stiles relates in this admirably diligent, unnecessarily lengthy biography, Jesse's mother outlived him by 29 years, having spent the last of them running the dear old homestead as a tourist attraction.

Stiles writes most readably when his prose is plainly utilitarian. Sometimes he reaches for metaphors and other special effects. Promising 'a story of murder, atrocity and terrorism, of the hunger for revenge, of struggles for freedom and the definition of freedom', he warns that 'the darker angels of our nature beat their wings throughout the hook'. Whose nature? He should speak for himself.

When he tries to take off on flights of fancy, his own wings seem leaden. Acknowledging repetitiveness, he says Jesse and his partners 'repeated the same scenes and replayed the same themes of this Sisyphean war, all under a brilliant canopy of red, yellow and orange leaves that signalled the approaching end of the year'. That autumn, they did the same things again and again. Editorial culling might have helped. The story is sufficiently dramatic and significant without Fine Writing.

Jesse Woodson James was born in 1847 in Clay County, in the rural north-west of Missouri, in a small town misnamed Liberty. Clay County was one of the state's few counties where at least one person in four was a slave. Even Jesse's father, the Rev. Robert James, a Baptist minister, owned half a dozen slaves, a woman in her thirties and five children between the ages of two and II. Black children could be bought cheap, and of course their value increased as they grew able to work.

Robert James died when Jesse was three. His mother soon remarried. Jesse's stepfather turned him out of their home. After one failure, she remarried again, and could afford to return to the family farm. At the age of 16, Jesse joined a band of bushwhackers, guerrillas who 'equipped themselves', Stiles writes, 'through smuggling, theft and plundering the Union dead', and stealing horses whenever need ed. Jesse became an expert horseman and pistol shot, campaigning against abolitionists of slavery and advocates of postwar reconstruction. His cause was ostensibly an attempt to maintain the principles of the defeated Confederacy. Murdering politically incompatible neighbours and looting their farms, he learned that lawlessness could be very profitable.

Stiles tells in exhaustive detail how Jesse's criminal career, in partnership with his brother and others, prospered and escalated. They became specialists in robbing banks and holding up trains. At first they wore the hoods of the recently established Ku Klux Klan, then conducted raids masked by ordinary kerchiefs. Local newspapers that opposed the intrusion of Radical Republicans supported the bandits as what one historian called 'defenders of traditional society against outside forces of industrialisation'.

The secessionist, white-supremacist Lexington Caucasian claimed that Missouri led the nation in the 'heroic splendour and perfect sangfroid of her gallant highwaymen'. John Edwards, editor of the Kansas Cily Times, became the James brothers' foremost propagandist, portraying them, according to Stiles, as 'the embodiment of the Confederate ideal'. In a celebrated editorial headlined 'The Chivalry of Crime', Edwards wrote that one raid was 'a feat of stupendous nerve and fearlessness that makes one's hair rise to think of it . chivalric, poetic, superb'.

Jesse wrote semi-literate letters to sympathetic editors to popularise the myth that he was a Robin Hood whose gang was 'robbing the rich for the poor', although, as Stiles points out, 'there is no evidence that they did anything with their loot except spend it on themselves'. Jesse was an ardent gambler, especially on horse-racing.

Jesse married the wonderfully named Zee Mimms in 1874, but their domestic life was frequently disrupted by urgent moves from house to house and his absences on business. The unreconstructed public idolised him. However, when rewards for his capture, dead or alive, reached $10,000 two young new recruits to the gang, Charley and Bob Ford, conspired to kill him. In St Joseph, Missouri, on 3 April 1882, Charley succeeded.

The last chapter is titled 'Apotheosis'. Edwards published an extravagant eulogy to the dead outlaw:

Proscribed, hunted, shot, driven away from among his people, a price put on his head — what else could the man do, with such a nature, except what he did do?

Stiles notes that the civil war altered American society by

putting firearms in the hands of millions of men, fostering mass production of revolvers, and launching a new marketing offensive by weapons makers.

As Jesse James might well have commented, 'Eeee-hah!'