Guerrilla into Criminal

Letters

Vol. 25 No. 12 · 19 June 2003

From T.J. Stiles

In his review of my book, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, Richard White (LRB, 5 June) fails to mention that he is the author of an influential analysis of Jesse James, which I criticise at length. In it he claimed that Civil War loyalties played no role in James's popularity and attributed this to his 'masculine virtue', saying that his gang won respect as 'strong men who could protect and revenge themselves'. This omission sets the tone for his essay. It was not my purpose, as he claims, to explain 'why, a century and more after his death … James should be remembered and commemorated'. The Jesse James of folklore has been analysed often and well. I sought to understand why he was commemorated during his lifetime. There are several other misrepresentations.

White writes that 'there was no Reconstruction in Missouri,' a statement that is central to his attack on my book. He can assert this only by limiting his definition of Reconstruction to the Congressional acts relating strictly to the military administration of ten Confederate states. No historian of Reconstruction would accept this.

White's only evidence for his claim that 'Stiles exaggerates the suffering of Western Missouri' during the Civil War is the 1870 Federal census, which shows the state rebounding from its wartime loss of population. However, I discuss at length the postwar influx of immigrants from the North, along with the return of wartime refugees. The newcomers, I argue, heightened grassroots tensions which encouraged James's popularity. White also claims that I 'will have none of' the argument that Jesse James's family was persecuted in the war, and faced retaliation afterwards. This is simply false. What I say in the book is that the family moved to the Confederate side before any suffering had been inflicted on them.

According to his review, I cast 'robbery after robbery as either a symbolic political statement aimed at overthrowing Reconstruction or as an attempt to influence Missouri politics'. This is a distortion, and one that becomes bald misrepresentation when White claims that I depict the omnibus robbery of 1874 as an attempt to embarrass the Governor. I do indeed find political aspects to some robberies, but note that most were not directed against symbolic targets. A point of my argument that White ignores is that the outlaws' symbolism was often confused.

White implies that if I had read such contemporary journals as Railway Age 'with their complaints about robberies' I would have realised that the railroad corporations hated the outlaws. I did read Railway Age and other industry journals, and discovered that the railroad press made virtually no mention of the James-Younger gang's crimes, although the journals of the express companies (which handled fast deliveries, such as cash for banks) discussed them at length. In the outlaws' initial wave of train robberies, in 1876, they struck no railroad twice, and robbed passengers only once. In that case, I found clear evidence that the railroad did not attempt to apprehend the bandits. It was the express companies that hired the Pinkertons and other detectives. I expected to find anti-railroad sentiment behind popular support for James during his lifetime, and reciprocal hatred from the railway corporations; I found none.

Most important, White claims that I eliminated all possible explanations for banditry but politics. This isn't correct. I repeatedly state that plunder for its own sake was the foremost motivation in each crime. I do claim that Civil War loyalties and Reconstruction politics were central to James's identity and popularity, but try to avoid the common fallacy that James's criminal nature cancelled out his political nature – that he could not be both a violent felon and a man with strong partisan opinions. I argue that what separated James from virtually every other bandit of his era was his attempt to cast himself in a political light.

T.J. Stiles
New York

Vol. 25 No. 14 · 24 July 2003

From Andrew Shankman

Richard White (LRB, 5 June) says that because Missouri remained in the Union during the Civil War it was never defeated and so never reconstructed. The best work on Reconstruction sees it as beginning in 1863, meaning that it can be viewed as an assault on the society and culture resulting from slavery and not merely as a set of laws and Constitutional Amendments following Confederate defeat. But even the more traditional dating, which has Reconstruction begin in 1865, allows historians to include Missouri. The state remained in the Union primarily because pro-slavery Missourians believed that the Republicans would not interfere with slavery in states where it was legal, merely prevent its spread into new territories. The Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862 freed all the slaves in those areas remaining in rebellion after 1 January 1863 (those areas, in other words, that the Union did not control) and kept slavery legal in the areas it did control (primarily Kentucky and Missouri). Between 1863 and 1865 the vast majority of slaves became free, in large part as a result of Union victories in rebel areas. So when the 13th Amendment, declaring slavery unconstitutional, was passed in December 1865, it was confirming the already existing freedom of more than 90 per cent of former slaves. The Amendment made most difference in states untouched by the Emancipation Proclamation: Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri. It is entirely plausible that pro-slavery Missourians felt betrayed, and championed Jesse James, as T.J. Stiles argues in the book White reviewed, for striking back at those denying them the Constitutional right to enslave.

Andrew Shankman
Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago