Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

This biography of Jesse James treats its subject right. The book gives the reader a rich background of what was going on in America and a serious look at who James was. Stile reveals that James' story has more to do with the Civil War and its aftermath than with the conditions that produced frontier outlaws. If you want to know the truth-and not the movie version of James' life-read this book. You'll come away with not only a greater understanding of who James was, but also what drives humans to do the most noble and the most horrible things.

After a century of glorification and hero-worship idolatry, fuelled by hollywood's total lack of interest in true history in favor of romantic swashbuckle and garbage, the Jesse James myth has finally been exposed for what it is: nonsense, masking the ruthless, murderous career of a racist and terrorist.T. J. Stiles has come into Missouri and painstakingly researched the real motives and events in the life of Jesse James. With a great, readable style and the dedication to facts of a professional historian, without bias, Mr. Stiles unmasks our modern 'robin hood' and exposes Jesse as the politically motivated arch-villain that he was.I loved his previous 'In Their Own Words' series, but Mr. Stiles has taken a great leap with this book to the foremost ranks of American historians. We need more Stiles!

I loved this book. I have had a fascination with the Civil War in Missouri, and Jesse James, for many years, and I have to say that this is far and away the best thing ever written on either topic.The book is brilliantly written, but it is also packed with new insights and new reseach. For example, the author uses probate records and newly discovered letters from Watkins Mill State Park to put new light on Jesse and Frank's father, Robert James, and on the hardships faced by Zerelda, his widow, after he died in the Gold Rush. Stiles does something that no one else has done before when he looks at the family's slaves, trying to understand their lives and how slaveowning made the James and Samuel family what it was. And the portrait of the Civil War in Missouri is genius. Stiles shows us that there was a lot more going on that simply Missourians fighting invading Kansans. He uses new sources, including a report by the Missouri state legislature and reports by the provost marshals (including some reports missed by everyone else who has written about Jesse James) to show how much the war there was a real neighbor-against-neighbor struggle that the James boys plunged into wholeheartedly. I could go on and on about the new insights Stiles has, such as the way he explains the differences between the various state militia forces as no one else has. When he gets to Jesse's bandit years, he uses governors' papers in the Missouri State Archives to show that the first bank the bandits robbed, in Liberty, was owned by the Radical Republican officials of Clay County where Jesse lived. Stiles explains something that I never realized: The bandits were really robbing express companies when they robbed trains, so the notion that they were Robin Hoods punching the big bad railroad companies in the nose is nonsense. He explains Jesse's letters to the press like no one else ever has, showing just how political a fellow he was. I could go on for much longer. Best of all, this book is beautifully written. The author doesn't force us to slog through every possibility when it comes to each robbery. He paints a portrait, then uses his footnotes to explain his reasoning. His reasoning is consistently sound--he's vivid, but he's not just making stuff up.Don't be fooled by any bad customer reviews. If you didn't know, there are a lot of Jesse James buffs who are glued to one version of his life, and don't like a really fresh, well-written account of his life by someone outside their club. The leading historians of Missouri and Western outlaws (including William Parrish, Christopher Phillips, and Richard Maxwell Brown) looked over the book before it was published, and they gave it a big thumbs up, as have such historians as James McPherson. This book is reseached like a doctoral dissertation, but it is written like a novel--not because the author is making it up, but because it is simply well-written.