Biographer T.J. Stiles

With its publication by the University of Missouri Press in 1966, William A. Settle, Jr.'s Jesse James Was His Name became the first scholarly study of its subject and remained the best one until the appearance of the book here reviewed. Author T.J. Stiles, an independent scholar who attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, scene of the most famous and disastrous James Gang bank-robbing foray, benefits from a large number of monographs and articles pertaining to Civil War-era Missouri unavailable to Settle, draws from far more and better primary sources, and displays a high level of literary and analytical skill. The result is a superb word-portrait of Jesse James, his crimes, and his times—one that is broad, yet deep in its scope, factually sound, perceptive in its judgments, and interesting, even entertaining, to read.

To be specific, Stiles enhances our knowledge and understanding of Jesse James in the following ways: (1) provides a thorough and penetrating account of Jesse's family background and in particular his mother's dominant influence; (2) places his career as a Confederate guerrilla in the overall context of the Civil War in Missouri; (3) demonstrates how James being guerrilla led to his not only becoming a bandit after the war, but also a symbol to pro-Confederate Missourians of their continued resistance to Unionist domination of their state; (4) reveals that Jesse was well aware of his symbolic status and knowingly exploited it; and (5) probably represents as definitive a description as the sources permit of the James Gang's criminal activities, of the futile efforts by various law enforcement agencies to apprehend or kill Jesse and his brother Frank, and why and how the governor of Missouri procured the assassination of Jesse by two members of his bandit band in 1882. No previous biographer has written as well, if written at all, about these matter as does Stiles.

The sole defects, all minor, in Stiles's are an over-reliance on the not-always-reliable Eric Foner's propagandistic Reconstruction, 1863-1877: America's Unfinished Revolution, assuming the historical validity of Michael Bellesiles's totally debunked debunker Arming America, and using at the outset of the book a curious quotation from Philip Caputo's overwrought tract, A Rumor of War, to the effect that "one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy"—a quotation made all the more curious by Jesse James having become a brutal killer at age sixteen! But, then, during the past fifty years, those who were once the villains of Reconstruction have become the heroes and vice versa; older and more experienced historians than Stiles also have been misled by Bellesiles's deceptions; and to his credit Stiles rejects applying to Jesse the British communist author Eric Hobsbawm's concept of the "social bandit"—i.e. a peasant who turns to banditry in order to oppose the oppression of capitalism in the style of Joseph Stalin who, upon becoming a Bolshevik, engaged in bank robbing. As for the brutality of nineteen-year-old American males, if true, perhaps that is all to the good, given the nature of the world.

In sum, Stiles's Jesse James will not be the last book about the legendary outlaw, but it will be a very hard one to beat.

A Note from T.J. Stiles
It is an honor receive such a positive review from Albert Castel, a pioneering and universally respected historian of the guerrilla war in Missouri, and a man of strong and independent judgment. I am grateful. His comments do raise a couple of issues, however, that are worth further comment.

First, it is an unfortunate accident that Mr. Castel's comments on the brutality of young American men ("if true, perhaps that is all to the good") appeared shortly before revelations of extraordinary mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq. That startling juxtaposition, however, demonstrates why I used the quotation from Mr. Caputo's A Rumor of War, a book I admire very much. (The words I refer to were actually spoken by an old soldier whom Caputo himself quotes.) Brutality, I believe, must be faced directly, and cannot be glossed over, whether it is conducted by a folk hero like Jesse James or members of the deservedly admired U.S. military. We cannot simply call those who become brutal "sadists," but must understand the circumstances and beliefs that lead to such abuses.

On to a scholarly issue: Mr. Castel is quite right to point out that Michael Bellesiles's work has been refuted. Bellesiles argues that Americans owned few guns from the colonial period until after the Civil War; his statistical evidence and many of his citations have been found to be false. When I was writing my book, however, Bellesiles had yet to be debunked, and had won the Bancroft Prize, one of the highest honors for a historian. I naturally turned to his work as I sought to understand why armed, daylight bank robberies were unknown before the Civil War.

By the time my book had been typeset, a full scholarly counterattack on Bellesiles's work had begun, with a series of critical articles in the William and Mary Quarterly. By then, I had my own doubts about his findings. For the final book, I removed any references to his debunked statistical evidence, and noted in the notes the "harsh criticism" that was now directed at his work. My findings, I noted, agreed with his only to the extent that there was a shortage of specifically military weapons at the outbreak of the Civil War. (That has always been obvious to anyone who has studied the war.) All of my conclusions about firearms rest on other sources, especially primary sources, that I found quite apart from Bellesiles's book.

By the time the paperback edition of my book was being prepared for publication, his book had been thoroughly refuted. I made further changes for the paperback, noting, "His work can only be a starting point for research; it has been found to be badly flawed at best, and a Bancroft Prize he won was rescinded." Much to my irritation, the publisher failed to make these changes in time for publication, though the British paperback edition includes them.

Why didn't I simply remove all references to his work entirely? After all, I could have done it without changing a single conclusion. But I decided that serious historians should be aware of it, together with clear warnings. As badly flawed and quite possibly fraudulent as it is, it does provide a starting point for serious research. I went through his endnotes and followed up a number of sources that proved useful (though they do not validate his work). A casual reader should stay away from his book and articles entirely; but a serious researcher on the subject of firearms and militia should investigate the sources Bellesiles cites--until a truly sound, comprehensive book on the subject is published. A good historian can make use of even a bad book. But no one should rely on Bellesiles himself as an authority.