| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War. By T. J. Stiles. (New York: Vintage, 2002. xiv, 510 pp. Cloth, $27.50, ISBN 0-375-40583-6. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 0-375-70558-9.)
In this detailed and lively recounting of the life of Jesse James, T. J. Stiles has repackaged and extended familiar tales in provocative ways. The engaging results should be read alongside William A. Settle Jr.'s classic 1966 study, Jesse James Was His Name, which also took the wind out of the folkloric hero in an effort to achieve hard-headed realism.	1
Stiles paints a broad canvas, placing James in the wider political settings of the Civil War and Reconstruction. James had been a Confederate guerrilla during the war, and Stiles discusses at considerable length and with insight the best-known guerrilla bands of the war, William C. Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, and all, with whom the still-teenage Jesse rode. All of this is familiar territory, but Stiles often adds interesting new detail, at the same time limiting his picture by emphasizing one locale and one loose band of guerrillas while ignoring the statewide and nationwide phenomenon.	2
But Stiles's most original emphasis, the thesis that drives the book, is that Jesse James was an intensely political postwar neo-Confederate terrorist rather than a social bandit or just a plain thug. This argument is both stimulating and overstated.	. . .

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