Thursday, April 3, 2008

Jesse James, September 5, 1847 to April 3, 1882


Today is one of those days where my love of music (especially American traditional and folk music), love of American history and Missouri heritage all come together in a perfect storm.

It was on this day 126 years ago that Zerelda James second son - Jesse Woodson James - was shot dead in St. Joseph, Missouri. Jesse's father, Robert, was a well known and successful preacher in western Missouri. He was among the founders of the small religious university William Jewel College in Liberty, MO. He died in 1850 in California and left his family to fend for themselves in one of the most violent periods and violent locales in American history.

There are few characters in the history of the United States that are as fully blanketed in mythology than Jesse James. Those that are not among the Founding Generation often tend to be outlaws, Americans apparently love a good Robin Hood tale. James though was no Robin Hood.

James was a man of his time. Ante-bellum western Missouri was a violent place with very bloody border skirmishes between pro-slavery Missourians and Free Staters in Kansas. James was too young to participate in the pre-Civil War bloodshed but as a teenager he rode with the infamous and deadly pro-slavery guerrilla force known as Quantrill's Raiders.

Indeed the members of the James Gang honed their murderous skills while riding with William Quantrill during the Civil War and when the war ended and Missouri was in taters they began their reign of terror over the Midwest United States.

To remember James accurately would be to remember him as a Confederate sympathizer, a cold-blooded murderer and a Reconstruction-era agitator for a renewed Confederacy. James biographer T.J. Stiles explains in his excellent book Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War,
Jesse James was not an inarticulate avenger for the poor; his popularity was driven by politics - politics based on wartime allegiances - and was rooted among former Confederates. Even his attacks on unpopular economic targets, the banks and the railroads, turns out on closer inspection to have political resonances. He was, in fact a major force in the attempt to create a Confederate identity for Missouri, a cultural and political offensive was waged by the defeated rebels to undo the triumph of the Radical Republicans in the Civil War. His robberies, his murders, his letters to the newspapers, and his starring role in Edwards' columns all played a part in the Confederate effort to achieve wartime goals by political means. Had Jesse James existed a century later he would have been called a terrorist.

Terrorist? The term hardly fits with the traditional image of him as a Wild West outlaw, yippin and yellin and shooting it out with the county sheriff. But he saw himself as a Southerner, a Confederate, a vindicator of the rebel cause, and so he must be seen in the context of the Southern "outlaws" - particularly the Klan and other highly political paramilitary forces... Was he a criminal? Yes. Was he in it for the money? Yes. Did he choose all his targets for political effect? No. He cannot be confused with the Red Brigades, the Tamil Tigers, Osama Bin Laden, or other groups that now shape our image of terrorism, But he was a political partisan in a hotly partisan era, and he eagerly offered himself up as a polarizing symbol of the Confederate project for postwar Missouri.

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