Background and career
Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1847 – April 3, 1882) was an American outlaw, bank and train robber, guerrilla and leader of the James–Younger Gang. Raised a Southern sympathizer in the "Little Dixie" area of Missouri, James and his brother Frank joined pro-Confederate guerrillas known as "bushwhackers" operating in Missouri and Kansas during the American Civil War. As followers of William Quantrill and "Bloody Bill" Anderson, they were accused of committing atrocities against Union soldiers and civilian abolitionists, including the Centralia Massacre in 1864. After the war, as members of various gangs of outlaws, the James brothers robbed banks, stagecoaches and trains across the Midwest, gaining national fame and often popular sympathy despite the brutality of their crimes. The brothers were most active as members of their own gang from about 1866 until 1876, when as a result of their attempted robbery of a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, several members of the gang were captured or killed. They continued in crime for several years afterward, recruiting new members, but came under increasing pressure from law enforcement seeking to bring them to justice. On April 3, 1882, Jesse James was shot and killed by Robert Ford, a new recruit to the gang who hoped to collect a reward on James' head and a promised amnesty for his previous crimes. Already a celebrity in life, James became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death. Popular portrayals of James as an embodiment of Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, are a case of romantic revisionism as there is no evidence his gang shared any loot from their robberies with anyone outside their network. Scholars and historians have characterized James as one of many criminals inspired by the regional insurgencies of ex-Confederates following the Civil War, rather than as a manifestation of alleged economic justice or of frontier lawlessness. James continues to be one of the most famous figures from the era, and his life has been dramatized and memorialized numerous times in media.
Jesse Woodson James was born on September 5, 1847, in Clay County, Missouri, near the site of present-day Kearney. This area of Missouri was largely settled by people from the Upper South, especially Kentucky and Tennessee, and became known as "Little Dixie" for this reason. James had two full siblings: his elder brother, Alexander Franklin "Frank" James, and a younger sister, Susan Lavenia James. He was of English and Scottish descent. Through his great-great-grandmother, Rachel Dorsey, James was a descendant of Edward I Longshanks. His father, Robert S. James, farmed commercial hemp in Kentucky and was a Baptist minister before coming to Missouri. After he married, he migrated to Bradford, Missouri, and helped found William Jewell College in the city of Liberty. He held six slaves and more than 100 acres (0.40 km2) of farmland. James' father traveled to California during the Gold Rush to minister to those searching for gold; he died there when James was three years old. After his death, his widow Zerelda remarried twice, first to Benjamin Simms in 1852 and then in 1855 to Dr. Reuben Samuel, who moved into the James family home. Jesse's mother and Samuel had four children together: Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fannie Quantrell and Archie Peyton Samuel. Zerelda and Samuel acquired a total of seven slaves, who served mainly as farmhands in tobacco cultivation.
The approach of the American Civil War loomed large in the James–Samuel household. Missouri was a border state, sharing characteristics of both North and South, but 75% of the population was from the South or other border states. Clay County in particular was strongly influenced by the Southern culture of its rural pioneer families. Farmers raised the same crops and livestock as in the areas from which they had migrated. They brought slaves with them and purchased more according to their needs. The county counted more slaveholders and more slaves than most other regions of the state; in Missouri as a whole, slaves accounted for only ten percent of the population, but in Clay County, they constituted twenty-five percent. Aside from slavery, the culture of Little Dixie was Southern in other ways as well, influencing how the population acted during and for a period of time after the war. After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, Clay County became the scene of great turmoil as the question of whether slavery would be expanded into the neighboring Kansas Territory bred tension and hostility. Many people from Missouri migrated to Kansas to try to influence its future. Much of the dramatic build-up to the war centered on the violence that erupted on the Kansas–Missouri border between pro- and anti-slavery militias.
After a series of campaigns and battles between conventional armies in 1861, guerrilla warfare gripped Missouri, waged between secessionist "bushwhackers" and Union forces, which largely consisted of local militias known as "jayhawkers". A bitter conflict ensued, resulting in an escalating cycle of atrocities committed by both sides. Confederate guerrillas murdered civilian Unionists, executed prisoners and scalped the dead. The Union presence enforced martial law with raids on homes, arrests of civilians, summary executions and banishment of Confederate sympathizers from the state. The James–Samuel family sided with the Confederates at the outbreak of war. Frank James joined a local company recruited for the secessionist Drew Lobbs Army, and fought at the Battle of Wilson's Creek in August 1861. He fell ill and returned home soon afterward. In 1863, Frank was identified as a member of a guerrilla squad that operated in Clay County. In May of that year, a Union militia company raided the James–Samuel farm looking for the group. They tortured Reuben Samuel by briefly hanging him from a tree. According to legend, they lashed young Jesse.
Frank eluded capture and was believed to have joined the guerrilla organization led by William C. Quantrill known as Quantrill's Raiders. It is thought that he took part in the notorious massacre of some two hundred men and boys in Lawrence, Kansas, an abolitionist stronghold. Frank followed Quantrill to Sherman, Texas, over the winter of 1863–1864. In the spring he returned in a squad commanded by Fletch Taylor. After they arrived in Clay County, sixteen-year-old Jesse joined his brother in Taylor's group.
Taylor was severely wounded in the summer of 1864, losing his right arm to a shotgun blast. The James brothers then joined the bushwhacker group led by William "Bloody Bill" Anderson. Jesse suffered a serious wound to the chest that summer. The Clay County provost marshal reported that both brothers took part in the Centralia Massacre in September, in which guerrillas stopped a train carrying unarmed Union Army soldiers returning home from duty and killed or wounded some twenty-two of them; the guerrillas scalped and dismembered some of the dead. The guerrillas also ambushed and defeated a pursuing regiment of Major A. V. E. Johnson's Union troops, killing all who tried to surrender, who numbered more than 100. Frank later identified Jesse as a member of the band who had fatally shot Major Johnson. As a result of the James brothers' activities, Union military authorities forced their family to leave Clay County. Though ordered to move South beyond Union lines, they moved north across the nearby state border into Nebraska Territory. After Anderson was killed in an ambush in October, the James brothers separated. Frank followed Quantrill into Kentucky, while Jesse went to Texas under the command of Archie Clement, one of Anderson's lieutenants. He is known to have returned to Missouri in the spring. At the age of 17, Jesse suffered the second of two life-threatening chest wounds when he was shot while trying to surrender after Clement's guerillas ran into a Union cavalry patrol near Lexington, Missouri.
