Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies (31 page)

Brothers Frank and Jesse James in about 1870, just after they had become infamous bank robbers

The former colonel John Edwards also had been a proud Confederate. He had served as adjutant to General Joseph Shelby, commanding a division and organizing an extremely successful intelligence operation. Rather than surrender at the conclusion of the war, Edwards fled to Mexico with Shelby and about a thousand men and remained there for several years. When amnesty was granted to most Confederate soldiers, he returned and founded the
Kansas City Times,
a highly political newspaper that championed former Rebel leaders. In its pages, he railed against the corruption, oppression, and criminality of the Republican government, urging ex-Confederates to fight for political power.

Edwards’s objective was to restore a sense of pride in the defeated Rebels, and Jesse James proved the perfect symbol for him. As he once wrote of James, “We called him outlaw, and he was—but fate made him so. When the war closed Jesse James had no home … hunted, shot, driven away … a price upon his head—what else could a man do … except what he did? When he was hunted he turned savagely about and hunted his hunters,” adding at another time, “They are outlaws through no fault or crime other than participating in a civil war that was not successful. [They are] now so wantonly and unjustly hunted and denounced by all who have partisan passions to gratify.”

According to Edwards’s newspaper, and the other journals that joined him, rather than a bank robber, train robber, thug, and killer, Jesse James was a political symbol: He was the courageous representative of the defiant South; a man so noble in defeat that he might have “sat with Arthur at the Round Table”; a man of the Confederacy who struck back against the excesses of the carpetbaggers by robbing their banks and their trains—but was careful not to
trouble innocent people. It worked: The general public had no love for either the banks or the railroads, which were controlled by fat cats in the North and the East who cared not at all for the troubles of the poor workingman. All Jesse James was doing was fighting back for all the people who had no fight left in them. He became the nation’s most revered outlaw.

The journalist John Edwards, whose purple prose transformed the bank robber Jesse James into a Southern hero

Jesse James readily accepted the mythical role that Edwards had created for him, regularly writing letters to the paper claiming to be innocent of the crimes he was accused of committing, describing his latest exploits, and even leaving press releases at the scenes of his crimes. His tawdry life has been romanticized in literature, theater, and music, and it is accurate to claim that Jesse James wrote the first chapter in the colorful history of American outlaws.

But the question remains: How accurate—if at all—was Edwards’s portrayal? Was there, in reality, any political motivation behind James’s life of crime, or was he simply a bad guy who served a symbolic purpose? Was he a hero of the downtrodden South, or was he the same person once described by Robert Pinkerton as “the worst man, without any exception, in America. He is utterly devoid of fear and has no more compunction about cold blooded murder than he has about eating his breakfast”?

He certainly was a son of the Old South. Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County, Missouri, an area known as “Little Dixie,” in 1847. His father, Robert James, was a farmer and Baptist minister who was prosperous enough to own six slaves. But the lure of gold drew
him to California, where he died. It appears that the James boys got their character from their mother, Zerelda James, who hardly fit the definition of a genteel Southern belle. She was a big woman, strong both physically and in temperament. After her husband’s death, she married twice more, the second time to Dr. Reuben Samuel, with whom she had four children and owned seven slaves. Zerelda was a practical woman; after Jesse was killed, for example, she profited by selling pebbles off his grave as souvenirs—being careful to replenish those stones each morning so as not to disappoint her customers.

Jesse James’s father, Baptist minister Robert S. James, was a founder of William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, while his mother, Zerelda, was a strong woman who eventually sold pebbles from her son’s grave site as souvenirs.

She also was a staunch supporter of the Confederacy. Missouri was a border state, and in the years before war erupted, it was bitterly divided between abolitionists and the proslavery faction—which included Zerelda James and her family. As part of the Missouri Compromise, Missouri had been admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1820, while Maine was admitted as a free state. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened up those two Indian territories to settlers, ruling that the people who lived there would vote on whether these territories would permit slavery. In Kansas, each side set up a state government—and then organized militias to protect its supporters and enforce its orders. In a prelude to the Civil War, the free-state Kansas Jayhawkers and the mostly proslavery Missouri bushwhackers fought a vicious war. Although these two groups supposedly were fighting for their political beliefs, many of the men on both sides were just bandits who used these ideals as an excuse for arson, looting, beatings, and even wholesale murder.

When the Civil War began in April 1861, Missouri officially remained in the Union and declared itself neutral but actually sent troops and supplies to both sides. With Zerelda’s encouragement—and wearing the clothes she’d sewn for him—eighteen-year-old Frank James set off to join the Rebels. After he was captured and sent home by Union troops, the local militia forced him to sign an oath swearing loyalty to the Republic. Instead of honoring that oath, he hooked up with Quantrill’s Raiders, an especially violent group of bushwhackers. Utilizing guerrilla tactics tailored to each situation, small bands of William Quantrill’s men attacked Jayhawkers, Union troops, and pro-Union civilians, in an attempt to drive them out of the territory. They were known to use disguises—including dressing in Union uniforms to infiltrate their ranks—and to organize well-planned attacks and stage ambushes. And, like regular military units, on occasion they did not hesitate to attack towns and kill civilians.

Frank James was an intelligent young man who loved Shakespeare and had once dreamed of going to college and becoming a teacher; instead, he earned a reputation as a fearsome guerrilla fighter. Between raids, he would return to the family farm and regale his relatives with tales of his attacks on Yankees. Jesse certainly listened in awe to his older brother’s stories—and although he had hoped to follow his father into the ministry, he instead began dreaming of joining his brother in the fight to preserve their way of life.

The young guns: portraits of twenty-one-year-old Frank and sixteen-year-old Jesse taken during the Civil War

Attempting to stop these hit-and-run raids, Union troops arrested anyone who had aided or abetted the Raiders, especially the female relatives of known guerrilla fighters. They were held in a three-story house in Kansas City. Four of these women were killed and others were badly injured when the building collapsed in August 1863. Quantrill retaliated by bringing all of his small bands together—an estimated four hundred men—and attacking the town of Lawrence, Kansas. Frank James joined this massacre, which resulted in at least a quarter of the town being burned to the ground and the cold-blooded murders of 150 men and boys. Irate Union troops set out to find and punish the killers.

Jesse James was plowing the family’s fields when a Union patrol arrived and demanded to know where his brother was hiding. Sixteen-year-old Jesse refused to answer—and was beaten and horsewhipped. His stepfather Reuben Samuel was tortured, suspended from a tree, then dropped several times until he gave up the information. He barely survived. Apparently the bluecoats found Frank James’s band, but he managed to escape. When he rejoined the militia, his younger brother was riding with him.

After the Lawrence massacre, Quantrill’s Raiders split into three large bands, and Frank and Jesse James rode with Bloody Bill Anderson’s eighty-man army. The savage lessons they learned fighting with Anderson would be put to use after the war ended.

Anderson had joined Quantrill after Union militiamen had hanged his father and uncle. His three sisters were among the Kansas City hostages; in the collapse, one of them died and the other two suffered injuries that would plague them for the rest of their lives. Whatever humanity Anderson had at that point disappeared, and as he once said, “I ask no quarter and give none.” He was known to torture captives, scalping them and cutting off their ears. Anderson and his teenage lieutenant, Archie Clement, who became known to authorities as “Bill Anderson’s scalper and head devil,” served as young Jesse James’s mentors. “Little Arch,” as the latter was known, was only a bit over five feet tall and was full-up angry at the world.

Jesse James was with them when they rode into the town of Centralia, Missouri, in
September 1864, a few weeks after six of Anderson’s men had been killed and scalped by federal troops. Bloody Bill’s men stopped a train and captured twenty-two of General Sherman’s soldiers on their way home on furlough. They were stripped, lined up, and shot numerous times; then their bodies were mutilated. A witness described the event as “a carnival of blood.” About one hundred fifty Union soldiers were sent to track Anderson down; instead, his men ambushed the patrol and killed every member of it, even the wounded. Jesse James received credit for killing the patrol’s commander, Major A. V. E. Johnson. Then, in a truly mad frenzy, the Raiders disemboweled, scalped, crushed, and decapitated the bodies of their victims.

Bloody Bill Anderson became a guerrilla in 1862 after Jayhawkers hanged his father and his uncle, stole all their possessions, and burned their home to the ground.

At sixteen, Jesse James was probably the youngest participant in these atrocities. A month after the Centralia massacre, three hundred men of the Missouri state militia, led by Major Samuel P. Cox, found Anderson’s camp near Orrick, Missouri. In the ensuing gun battle, Anderson was shot twice in the back of his head. Among his possessions was a rope in which he had tied a knot for each man he killed personally; Cox’s men counted fifty-four knots. After Anderson’s body was photographed as evidence of his death, his head was severed and mounted on top of a telegraph pole.