Jesse James began at 16 to fight alongside some of the savage Confederate guerrillas. In the bloodshed that followed Civil War, we see James and his fellow guerrillas, with their gunfights and holdups, become part of the brutal struggle by the White South against racial egalitarianism and Federal power fostered by Reconstruction.

At sixteen, Jesse James began his fighting career by killing Unionist neighbours on their doorsteps. In the bloodshed and bitterness that followed the South's surrender at Appomattox, Jesse and his fellow guerillas, with their gunfights and hold-ups, became part of the intensely brutal struggle by the White South against the racial egalitarianism and Federal power fostered by Reconstruction.

In the first serious biography of Jesse James in forty years, T. J. Stiles paints a strikingly new and vivid portrait of the period before the American Civil War, during the conflict and its aftermath. With groundbreaking scholarship and dazzling reinterpretation, T. J. Stiles has refashioned one of the great legends of American history.