Jesse Woodson James (1. Jesse James (Wikipedia)Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1. April 3, 1. 88. 2) was an American outlaw, gang leader, bank robber, train robber, and murderer from the state of Missouri and the most famous member of the James- Younger Gang. Already a celebrity when he was alive, he became a legendary figure of the Wild West after his death. Some recent scholars place him in the context of regional insurgencies of ex- Confederates following the American Civil War rather than a manifestation of frontier lawlessness or economic justice. Jesse and his brother Frank James were Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War. They were accused of participating in atrocities committed against Union soldiers.
After the war, as members of one gang or another, they robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains. Despite popular portrayals of James as a kind of Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, there is no evidence that he and his gang used their robbery gains for anyone but themselves.
The James brothers were most active with their gang from about 1. Northfield, Minnesota, resulted in the capture or deaths of several members. They continued in crime for several years, recruiting new members, but were under increasing pressure from law enforcement.
On April 3, 1. 88. Jesse James was killed by Robert Ford, who was a member of the gang living in the James house and who was hoping to collect a state reward on James' head. Jesse James Farm in Kearney. The original farmhouse is on the left and an addition on the right was expanded after Jesse James died. Across a creek and up a hill on the right was the home of Daniel Askew, where Askew was killed on April 1. Askew was suspected of cooperating with the Pinkertons in the January 1.
James's original grave was on the property but he was later moved to a cemetery in Kearney. The original footstone is still outside, although the family has replaced the headstone. Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County, Missouri, near the site of present day Kearney, on September 5, 1. Jesse James had two full siblings: his older brother, Alexander Franklin . James, of Welsh ancestry, was a commercial hemp farmer and Baptist minister in Kentucky, who migrated to Bradford, Missouri after marriage and helped found William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. He was prosperous, acquiring six slaves and more than 1. Robert James travelled to California during the Gold Rush to minister to those searching for gold.
Reuben Samuel, who moved into the James' home. Jesse's mother and Reuben Samuel had four children together: Sarah Louisa, John Thomas, Fannie Quantrell, and Archie Peyton Samuel. Missouri was a border state, sharing characteristics of both North and South, but 7.
South or other border states. Clay County was in a region of Missouri later dubbed .
Farmers raised the same crops and livestock as in the areas they migrated from. They brought slaves with them and purchased more according to need. The county had more slaveholders, who held more slaves, than in other regions.
Aside from slavery, the culture of Little Dixie was Southern in other ways as well. This influenced how the population acted during and after the American Civil War.
In Missouri as a whole, slaves accounted for only 1. Clay County they constituted 2. After the passage of the Kansas- Nebraska Act in 1. Clay County became the scene of great turmoil, as the question of whether slavery would be expanded into the neighboring Kansas Territory came to dominate public life. Numerous people from Missouri migrated to Kansas to try to influence its future.
Much of the tension that led up to the Civil War centered on the violence that erupted in Kansas between pro- and anti- slavery militias. Civil War. The Civil War ripped Missouri society apart and shaped the life of Jesse James. After a series of campaigns and battles between conventional armies in 1. A bitter conflict ensued, bringing an escalating cycle of atrocities by both sides.
Guerrillas murdered civilian Unionists, executed prisoners and scalped the dead. Union forces enforced martial law with raids on homes, arrests of civilians, summary executions and banishment of Confederate sympathizers from the state. The James- Samuel family took the Confederate side at the outset of the war. Frank James joined a local company recruited for the secessionist Drew Lobbs Army, and fought at the Battle of Wilson's Creek, though he fell ill and returned home soon afterward. In 1. 86. 3, he was identified as a member of a guerrilla squad that operated in Clay County.
In May of that year, a Union militia company raided the James- Samuel farm, looking for Frank's group. They tortured Reuben Samuel by briefly hanging him from a tree. According to legend, they lashed young Jesse. It is thought that he took part in the notorious massacre of some 2. Lawrence, Kansas, a center of abolitionists.
Actually, this retelling of the life of outlaw Jesse James is only as true as its predecessor, the highly fanciful 1939 Tyrone Power-Henry Fonda starrer Jesse James.
Frank James followed Quantrill to Texas over the winter of 1. In the spring he returned in a squad commanded by Fletch Taylor. After they arrived in Clay County, 1.
Jesse James joined his brother in Taylor's group. The James brothers joined the bushwhacker group led by Bloody Bill Anderson. Jesse suffered a serious wound to the chest that summer. The Clay County provost marshal reported that both Frank and Jesse James took part in the Centralia Massacre in September, in which guerrillas killed or wounded some 2.
Union troops; the guerrillas scalped and dismembered some of the dead. The guerrillas ambushed and defeated a pursuing regiment of Major A. V. E. Johnson's Union troops, killing all who tried to surrender (more than 1. Frank later identified Jesse as a member of the band who had fatally shot Major Johnson.
Though ordered to move South beyond Union lines, instead they moved across the nearby state border into Nebraska. After Anderson was killed in an ambush in October, the James brothers separated. Frank followed Quantrill into Kentucky; Jesse went to Texas under the command of Archie Clement, one of Anderson's lieutenants. He is known to have returned to Missouri in the spring. Jesse James suffered the second of two life- threatening chest wounds. After the Civil War.
At the end of the Civil War, Missouri was in shambles. The conflict split the population into three bitterly opposed factions: anti- slavery Unionists, identified with the Republican Party; the segregationist conservative Unionists, identified with the Democratic Party; and pro- slavery, ex- Confederate secessionists, many of whom were also allied with the Democrats, especially the southern part of the party. The Republican Reconstruction administration passed a new state constitution that freed Missouri's slaves. It temporarily excluded former Confederates from voting, serving on juries, becoming corporate officers, or preaching from church pulpits. The atmosphere was volatile, with widespread clashes between individuals, and between armed gangs of veterans from both sides of the war.
Jesse recovered from his chest wound at his uncle's Missouri boardinghouse, where he was tended to by his first cousin, Zerelda . Meanwhile, his old commander Archie Clement kept his bushwhacker gang together and began to harass Republican authorities. These men were the likely culprits in the first daylight armed bank robbery in the United States in peacetime. This bank was owned by Republican former militia officers who had recently conducted the first Republican Party rally in Clay County's history.
One innocent bystander, a student of William Jewell College (which James's father had helped to found), was shot dead on the street during the gang's escape. After their later robberies took place and they became legends, there were those who credited them with being the leaders of the Clay County robbery.
The last eighteen years in the life of Jesse James, showing his home life in Missouri, his experiences with Quantrill's raiders, his career of banditry. When a Wells Fargo bank is robbed in Missouri, Jesse James and his gang are suspected. Jim Hardie disguises himself as a photographer and attempts to locate the outlaws. The True Story of Jesse James (1957) Full Crime Movie . Louis Mann 5,767 views.
No concrete evidence has surfaced to connect either brother to the crime, or to rule them out. Shortly afterward, the state militia shot Clement dead, an event James wrote about with bitterness a decade later. While they later tried to justify robbing the banks, these were small, local banks with local capital, not part of the national system that was an object of popular discontent in the 1. The robbery netted little money, but it appears that Jesse shot and killed the cashier, Captain John Sheets, mistakenly believing him to be Samuel P. Cox, the militia officer who had killed . James's self- proclaimed attempt at revenge, and the daring escape he and Frank made through the middle of a posse shortly afterward, put his name in the newspapers for the first time. It marked the first time he was publicly labeled an .
- On this day in History, Outlaw Jesse James is born in Missouri on Sep 05, 1847. Learn more about what happened today on History.
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Crittenden set a reward for his capture. Edwards, a former Confederate cavalryman, was campaigning to return former secessionists to power in Missouri. Six months after the Gallatin robbery, Edwards published the first of many letters from Jesse James to the republic, asserting his innocence. Over time, the letters gradually became more political in tone, denouncing the Republicans and voicing James' pride in his Confederate loyalties. Together with Edwards's admiring editorials, the letters turned James into a symbol of Confederate defiance of Reconstruction.
Jesse James's initiative in creating his rising public profile is debated by historians and biographers, though the tense politics certainly surrounded his outlaw career and enhanced his notoriety. With Jesse James as the public face of the gang (though with operational leadership likely shared among the group), the gang carried out a string of robberies from Iowa to Texas, and from Kansas to West Virginia. They robbed banks, stagecoaches, and a fair in Kansas City, often in front of large crowds, even hamming it up for the bystanders. On July 2. 1, 1. 87. Rock Island train in Adair, Iowa and stealing approximately $3,0. For this, they wore Ku Klux Klan masks, deliberately taking on a potent symbol years after the Klan had been suppressed in the South by President Grant's use of the Force Acts.