In this brilliant biography T. J. Stiles offers a new
understanding of the legendary outlaw Jesse James. Although he has
often been portrayed as a Robin Hood of the old west, in this
ground-breaking work Stiles places James within the context of the
bloody conflicts of the Civil War to reveal a much more complicated
and significant figure.
Raised in a fiercely pro-slavery household in bitterly divided
Misssouri, at age sixteen James became a bushwhacker, one of the
savage Confederate guerrillas that terrorized the border states.
After the end of the war, James continued his campaign of robbery
and murder into the brutal era of reconstruction, when his reckless
daring, his partisan pronouncements, and his alliance with the
sympathetic editor John Newman Edwards placed him squarely at the
forefront of the former Confederates’ bid to recapture political
power. With meticulous research and vivid accounts of the dramatic
adventures of the famous gunman, T. J. Stiles shows how he
resembles not the apolitical hero of legend, but rather a figure
ready to use violence to command attention for a political cause—in
many ways, a forerunner of the modern terrorist.