Review: Stiles, Jesse James (2002)

[truepenny]

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is both a biography of Jesse James and a social history of Missouri from about the 1850s to 1882, the year of James' death. As Stiles argues, the two are inextricably intertwined. Stiles makes no attempt to make Jesse James a sympathetic character, but he assesses him carefully and comes to the conclusion that, aside from being a ruthless, unrepentant killer, he was both politics-savvy and attention-hungry, combining his crimes with the rhetoric of the "Lost Cause" to make himself shockingly important in the politics of post Civil War Missouri. As always, my favorite chapter was the meta-analysis, where Stiles talks about the various narratives that have been laid over the figure of Jesse James, holding them up to James' biographical reality and discovering that none of them really fits.

This is a dense and cogently argued book that shines a pitiless light on the failure of Reconstruction as the backdrop to Jesse James' career.



View all my reviews