Shooting down the myth

On 24 August 1863, a column of Confederate irregulars from Missouri galloped into the town of Lawrence in the neighbouring state of Kansas. Lawrence was a neat, prosperous little town whose white inhabitants were famously anti- slavery; the guerrillas worked their way from house to house, slaughtering. They killed 200 people, virtually every man and boy in the place. One of the guerrillas was Jesse James's older brother, Frank.

On 27 September 1864, some of the same group attacked the town of Centralia, Missouri, and captured a railroad car containing 23 unarmed Union soldiers, going home on leave. They made them strip, then killed them all, along with a few other random passengers, scalping six of the bodies. This time Jesse, aged 16, was along too.

"The darker angels of our nature beat their wings throughout this book," writes TJ Stiles. He's not kidding. His intention is to wrest the life of Jesse James back from the Wild West themepark where it has resided for 100 years, away from the thick-layered movie iconography that has deadened the reality of the bullets.

Although the book is billed as a biography, it is really, as he says, a "Life and Times"; it's about the decades of the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, when modern America was born, and about what the career of a homicidal Missouri outlaw illuminates in them.

In fact, it belongs alongside the sombre, sumptuous narrative histories of the Civil War that American historians write as a form of national self-examination.

But in Missouri, the Civil War of the great battles, of the blue and the grey, of General Grant and General Lee, was far away, 1,000 miles to the east. Here, among low, wooded hills that rolled "like a rug pushed into a corner", the war was a vicious local quarrel, Bosnian in its intensity.

Pro-slavery and anti-slavery, pro-Confederate and pro-Union, Missourians murdered people whose names they knew, often on the victim's own doorstep.

Missouri Confederates like the James boys didn't take orders from the organised army of the Confederate States of America, and when the Southern generals surrendered at Appomatox in 1865, they kept fighting.

To begin with, their raids and robberies were just acts of savage resentment, by the sons of formerly prosperous slave-owning families. (Jesse grew up with slaves in the house, all bought as toddlers by his canny preacher father, because they were cheaper that way.)

But then, Stiles shows, they became something else. The celebrity face of the group now, because his older comrades had been killed, Jesse James entered into a loose alliance with an equally diehard newspaper editor, John Newman Edwards, of the Lexington Caucasian.