T. J. Stiles

by Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

  Before the smell of burning gunpowder could dissipate over the corpse, the Ford brothers darted out of the house as Zee ran in from the kitchen. Charley paused long enough to tell her that the pistol had gone off by accident. “Yes,” she replied in grief and fury, “I guess it went off on purpose.” They ran to the telegraph office to wire the news to Sheriff Timberlake in Clay County, Police Commissioner Craig in Kansas City, and Governor Crittenden in Jefferson City. Then they went to the office of the town marshal, Enos Craig, only to learn that he had already gone to the scene of the crime. So they returned, identified themselves, and narrated their deed with cold-blooded candor. After Jesse had climbed on a chair to dust the pictures, Charley had winked at Bob. Silently they had drawn their revolvers. Bob, a bit quicker, fired the fatal shot. The distraught Zee confirmed her husband’s identity for the startled marshal and fast-arriving reporters.

  The Fords, Timberlake, Zee, and Zerelda all testified at a coroner’s inquest immediately following the murder, relating details of the bandit’s private life and criminal activities over the last few years. Zerelda in particular captivated the gathering. “Is that the body of your son?” the coroner asked her. “It is,” she replied. Then she burst into tears, sobbing, “Would to God it was not.” Despite the later claims of a large corps of pretenders, there was never any doubt about the identity of the corpse. (And it was confirmed more than a century later by a DNA test on the remains.) After Zerelda concluded her testimony, she moved to the door, where she spotted Liddil. “Traitor, traitor, traitor!” she raged. “God will send vengeance on you for this. You are the cause of all this—oh, you villain! I would rather be in the cooler as my poor boy is than in your place.”1

  Throughout April, the Missouri press seemed to carry little else but coverage of the killing. Relatives came forward with their stories; neighbors spoke up; old wartime comrades gave interviews. More details about Liddil’s revelations appeared, and even Governor Crittenden responded to questions. With the names of all the recent gang members verified, charges were dropped against the young men arrested after the Blue Cut raid, now standing trial in Jackson County, and a man convicted in the Mammoth Cave robbery was pardoned by the governor of Kentucky. And the personality of Jesse James emerged more distinctly. Brother-in-law T. W. Mimms, for example, dismissed George Shepherd’s claim that Frank was the real thinker and had written the famous missives to the newspapers. While Jesse had had his schooling cut short, Mimms said, “he read the newspapers constantly, and frequently wrote letters. He would dash off a letter without pausing once, and would never read it over.” He added, “Jesse was of a roving disposition, restless and daring. He liked some reckless expedition, and was a wonderful horseman. He could ride 100 miles a day without any trouble.”2

  On April 6, two thousand people came to Kearney for the funeral of the famous outlaw, hoping to get a glimpse of his corpse. As the service progressed at the Baptist church, followed by a burial in the yard outside the house where Jesse had been born, Zerelda played to the crowd. “She is a woman of great dramatic power,” the Kansas City Times observed. “The James family are nothing unless dramatic or tragic.”3

  “I have no excuses to make,” declared Crittenden, “no apologies to render to any living man for the part I played in this bloody drama, nor has Craig nor has Timberlake. The life of one honest law-abiding man however humble is worth more to society and a state than a legion of Jesse Jameses.” Many who had actually lived side by side with the outlaw and his family agreed; to them, it seemed as if a demon had been exorcized from the community. “I shall ask $500 more for my property,” declared W. J. Courtney, the former Liberty marshal. “It is a great relief and a great blessing to Kearney to have Jesse James dead. I don’t mind saying so much.” In Liberty, a mass meeting gathered on May 1 to offer wholehearted approval of the governor’s actions; it selected six men to draft a statement to that effect, including Samuel Hardwicke, long since returned from exile.4

  Others were not so quick to reconcile the ends with the means. “It is revolting in the extreme,” Rabbi Elias Eppstein of Kansas City wrote in his diary, “to contemplate upon the fact, that a mere boy lures himself into the friendship of a man to abide his time and opportunity to assassinate him for blood-money.… The death of J. J. is a happy event in the annals of Missouri—but the manner of his going is a stroke into the face of morality and civilization.” The governor claimed that he had never sanctioned plans to kill the outlaw, but he promptly pardoned the Ford brothers when they were convicted of murder in St. Joseph. (Bob was later acquitted in Ray County of Wood Hite’s murder.) Crittenden also prompted the railroad companies to turn in the reward money, which, according to press reports, he distributed to Timberlake, Craig, Liddil, and the Fords.5

  In all the sputterings of disapproval in the press over Crittenden’s methods, one voice of outrage sounded above them all. On April 13, John Edwards published a roaring obituary in the Sedalia Democrat, heralding his friend of many years and railing against his murder. “We called him outlaw, and he was; but fate made him so,” he wrote. “When the war closed Jesse James had no home. Proscribed, hunted, shot, driven away from among his people, a price put upon his head—what else could the man do, with such a nature, except what he did do? … He refused to be banished from his birthright, and when he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters. Would to God he were alive to-day to make a righteous butchery of a few more of them.” Edwards lacerated the killing as “cowardly and unnecessary,” saying “this so-called law is an outlaw.” Nine days later he insulted the governor in the sternest way he knew, by comparing the assassination plot to the thinking behind Radical Reconstruction.6

  Edwards, however, pursued a pragmatic course amid the bluster. He quickly began a fund to raise money for Jesse’s widow and children. (The dead man had left surprisingly little cash behind, and all the stolen valuables that could be identified were soon returned to their rightful owners.) He also began secret negotiations with the governor for the safe return of Frank James. As early as May 29, 1882, word of the talks leaked to the press, but they dragged on through the summer months. “Be perfectly quiet,” Edwards wrote to Frank on July 17. “There is nobody particularly anxious to find you, although the sooner we can settle this thing the better.” Progress was slowed by the editor’s drinking binges. “I have just returned home from the Indian Territory,” he wrote on August 1, using his personal euphemism for an extended drunk. “I have been to the Governor myself, and things are working. Lie quiet and make no stir.”7

  On October 5, after a formal exchange of letters with the governor, Frank and Edwards arrived in Jefferson City for the surrender ceremony. Crittenden waited in his office in the capitol building with a party of journalists, representatives of the express companies, and state officials, including the treasurer, auditor, adjutant general, and a supreme court justice. “The hands of the clock on the south wall of the office were close upon the hour of 5,” a reporter wrote, “when the expectant ears of those present heard the sound of footsteps entering the rotunda of the building. A moment later the well-known form of Maj. John N. Edwards appeared in the open doorway.” Behind him came the erect figure of Frank James, whom Edwards formally presented. “This brief introduction,” the writer continued, “brought face to face the Executive of Missouri and the noted outlaw, whose name has been a terror in this State and is familiar throughout our land, if not the whole world. It was a scene without precedent in the annals of the State, and to all present was intensely interesting and dramatic. To all appearances, Frank James was the coolest and least moved man in the room.”

  James deftly unbuckled his belt and held out his holstered revolvers. “Governor, I am Frank James,” he said quietly. “I surrender my arms to you. I have removed the loads from them; they are not loaded. They have not been out of my possession since 1864. No other man has ever had them since then. I now give them to you personally. I deliver myself to you and the law.” As
Frank explained later that day, Crittenden’s comments to the press in the wake of Jesse’s death had impressed him. “I told my wife then that I believed that Governor Crittenden would deal fair and square with me,” he remarked, “and would do what McClurg and Woodson had refused to do. I had a conviction then that Governor Crittenden would be fair and impartial if I surrendered.”8

  Frank’s calm and cultivated appearance captivated the press and public alike, leading to some grumbling by Republicans. “There was a surrender at Jefferson City the other day,” commented the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, “but whether it was Frank James to the State of Missouri or the State of Missouri to Frank James, is not entirely clear.” Indeed, the nature of Jesse’s death, Frank’s admirable conduct, and the passage of time had made the surviving James brother positively respectable. After William Wallace and other prosecutors sorted through the various charges and decided to put him on trial for the Winston train robbery, Edwards managed to arrange a phalanx of defense attorneys that included some of the leading men in the state, including former congressman John F. Philips and former lieutenant governor Charles P. Johnson. (Johnson had ordered Detective Flourney Yancey to pursue the James brothers after the Lexington stage robbery in 1874.)9

  The Republican press, long attuned to the place of the bandits in Democratic politics, saw Johnson’s participation in Frank’s defense as an electoral maneuver. “This being interpreted,” opined the Globe-Democrat, “means that … he will stand forth as the candidate of the Edwards-James wing of the Democratic party for Governor of Missouri.” In reality, Frank’s trial would further the ongoing erosion of wartime enmities that had long divided the party. When the case went to trial in Gallatin on August 21, 1883, Crittenden actually testified for the defense (as did Jo Shelby, who appeared in court visibly drunk); his fairly friendly role in all these transactions earned him Edwards’s lasting gratitude. He later suffered at the hands of his enemies within the Democratic ranks, but this stemmed from the issue of railroad regulation far more than for his part in the death of Jesse James. Edwards, too, was declining in political influence. At the time that Frank surrendered, Edwards started a new daily newspaper, only to have it fold within six months; he did not return to the editorial ranks for most of the next year.

  After a dramatic sixteen-day trial, Frank was acquitted. The prosecution had been forced to rely primarily on the testimony of Dick Liddil, thanks to the death of Clarence Hite, and the defense had deftly created reasonable doubt. The verdict undercut the outstanding charges, including the murders of Westfall and Sheets. Then the state supreme court issued a ruling that called into question the right of Liddil, as a convicted felon, to testify. On February 11, 1884, Wallace dropped the prosecution of Frank in connection with the Blue Cut robbery. In April he stood federal trial for the Muscle Shoals raid; in this case, however, he was in fact innocent, and he easily won acquittal. In February 1885, he was to have been tried for the 1876 Missouri Pacific robbery, but the key witness died, and the prosecution dropped the case.

  On March 18, 1885, Edwards sent Frank a triumphant letter. He had just been to see Crittenden’s successor as governor, former Confederate general John S. Marmaduke. “Tell Frank James from me to go on a farm and go immediately to work,” he quoted the governor as saying. “Tell him to keep out of the newspapers. Keep away from the fairs and fast horses, and to keep strictly out of sight for a year.” Then he explained the promise that came with this stern request. “I am here to say to you that under no circumstances in life will Gov. Marmaduke ever surrender you to the Minnesota authorities, even should they demand you, which I am equally well satisfied, will never be done.”10

  In the end, Jesse’s death redeemed his brother’s life. Both symbolically and, to a great extent, in reality, the two had existed as a mythic pair of opposites, their fates inextricably linked. Jesse had been impetuous, Frank quiet and studious; Jesse had fumed about politics and thrust himself into the headlines, while Frank had sought Shakespeare and solitude; Jesse had been unable to relinquish a life in crime, while Frank had grown weary of his refugee existence. Jesse’s assassination severed the bond, and generated enough sympathy to free his older brother to live his life in peace.

  As it was for Frank James, so it was for his beleaguered home state. “I think the days of lawlessness & train robbing in Missouri are about over,” one man wrote to his brother in the East, almost a year after Jesse’s death, “and if any peaceably disposed persons from the hillsides of New England desire to occupy the rich fertile prairies of that great state it will be perfectly safe for them to do so. And for my part I hope many may choose to do so, for … they will also be the means by which Missouri will be able to take first place in the great sisterhood of states.”11 So long an outcast in the Union, seen as a place of vicious guerrillas and untouchable bandits, Missouri finally emerged as a state that was simply, refreshingly normal.

  IF THE DEATH of Jesse James unveiled the small truths—his identity, his crimes, the names of late associates—it shrouded the larger truths about his life and significance. In a sense, this was because he died too late. He had outlived the issues that had brought him to public attention, so that his personal fame now eclipsed the causes he represented. He seemed archaic and out of place, like a fossil of a strange sea creature found in the middle of the continent—the ocean that once sustained him unknown to observers, having long since disappeared. The farther from his birthplace, the less the real reasons for his notoriety were seen or understood.

  For example, The Nation—a respectable voice of mainstream opinion, published in New York by cosmopolitan Republicans—thought Jesse James was merely an accomplished criminal whose career illustrated the “curiously medieval flavor” of life in the primitive West. “In fact, the James territory,” The Nation added, “which includes the adjacent corners of four States, is a region which seems closely to resemble in its religious and moral condition a Frankish kingdom in Gaul in the sixth century.… He served as a guerrilla in the war, and when peace was concluded became a common bandit of the Greek or Italian type,” the editors noted. “His operations, however, extended over an area, and conducted with a boldness, which make the most famous of the Greeks or Italians seem a petty knave.” To The Nation, the outlaw’s fame simply grew out of his success. “In fact, when we consider the extent of country over which his jurisdiction extended, the character of his crimes, the long period during which he enjoyed impunity, and the smallness of the force with which his blows were struck,” they concluded, “we must admit him to be the greatest robber of either ancient or modern times.”12

  Some historians, too, have taken essentially the same view. In 1959, British historian Eric Hobsbawm took up the question: When is a criminal more than a criminal? In response, he created a concept that has dominated the scholarly debate over Jesse James: the social bandit. He elaborated his ideas in Bandits, in which he placed Jesse in precisely the same context used by the editors of The Nation in 1882, that of European brigands. Social bandits, he writes, are “a special type of peasant protest and rebellion.… They are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped, and supported.”

  Hobsbawm specifically names Jesse James as an example of the noble robber, the basic category of social bandit. The noble robber’s image defines his relationship with the peasantry, he argues, listing nine characteristic traits that seem to have been drawn, in part, from the James myth. The noble robber begins his career as a victim of injustice; he rights wrongs; he steals from the rich and gives to the poor; he kills only in self-defense or for just revenge; he remains in the community; he is helped and admired by the people; he dies by treason; he is “invisible and invulnerable”; and he is not an enemy of the ruler, but only of the local gentry.13

  The social bandit the
sis has come under fierce attack.14 Like all big, provocative ideas, this one tends to break down when specific cases are examined in detail. In the American context, the most important critique comes from Western historian Richard White. “The shortcomings of a literal reading of Hobsbawm are obvious,” he writes. “Jesse James could not be a peasant champion because there were no American peasants to champion.” Nor can the social bandit concept be saved by claiming that Jesse was a defender of a traditional society of self-sufficient homesteaders. White notes, “Both the outlaws and their supporters came from modern, market-oriented groups and not from poor, traditional groups.”15

  And yet, White accepts the fact that Jesse was a popular figure, best described as a social bandit, and he struggles to explain it. Perhaps, White muses, Jesse can be explained “as an exotic appendage of the agrarian revolt of post–Civil War America.” This happens to be Hobsbawm’s position. “U.S. rural society did not share the city enthusiasm for railroads, partly because it wanted to keep out government and strangers, partly because it regarded railroad companies as exploiters,” Hobsbawm argues. He calls banks the “quintessential public villains,” saying that bank robbery “marks the adaptation of social banditry to capitalism.” White counters by observing that Missouri farmers were highly organized by the 1870s in such bodies as the Grange and the People’s Party, which specifically denounced banditry. Instead, he weakly posits that Jesse and others reflected “masculine virtue,” attracting respect as “strong men who could protect and revenge themselves.”16

  Despite the great strengths of White’s argument, this is not a satisfactory explanation. There are unspoken assumptions behind the social bandit concept that must be addressed. When Hobsbawm insists that social bandits are products of the peasantry, he is not simply being descriptive; he speaks from a theoretical model of how societies work, and what makes a peasant a peasant. To be specific, it is a Marxist model. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx argues that self-sufficiency is the defining characteristic of the peasantry. “Their mode of production isolates them from one another, instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse.… Each individual peasant family … produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society.” Though the peasants are alike, their extremely limited economic relations mean that they have no sense of themselves as a class; they are merely piled up next to each other “as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes.” This has grave political consequences. “They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name.… They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”17