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Jesse James is perhaps the most notorious outlaw in the history of the United States of America. He first rose to prominence in the years following the Civil War as the result of his involvement in a bank robbery in 1869, during the course of which he shot and killed the bank cashier, erroneously believing him to be the militia officer who had shot "Bloody Bill" Anderson, a famous gang leader, during the Civil War. As James asserted this to be an act of revenge, he made it into the newspapers.
A sympathetic journalist by the name of John Newman Edwards, who was promoting the return of Confederacy in Missouri during the period, began to promote Jesse James as the ultimate American hero, a lone rebel attempting to single-handedly defy the imposition of Reconstruction on Missouri and the American south. James and his band of rebels persisted in robbing banks all over the American south and Midwest. He would also rob fairs and trains, often hamming it up for the crowd, contributing significantly to his own celebrity in the media.
Detective Allan Pinkerton went on a personal mission to capture and kill Jesse James, going so far as to track down the criminal at his homestead in 1875, killing the outlaw's younger brother and blowing his mother's arm off. According to Robert Dyer,
In early 1991, a Jesse James researcher named Ted Yeatman found an interesting letter among the papers of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The letter was written by Allan Pinkerton to a lawyer working for him in Liberty, Missouri, named Samuel Hardwicke. In the letter Pinkerton tells Hardwicke that when the men go to the James home to look for Jesse they should find some way to "burn the house down." He suggests they use some type of firebomb.
This plan backfired, in that it cemented the general public's sympathy for the rebel outlaw, which would endure well beyond his death in 1882.
Works Cited
Dyer, Robert. Jesse James and the Civil War in Missouri. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri
Press, 1994.
Stiles, T.J. Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. New York: Alfred a. Knopf, 2002.
Thelen, David. Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986
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