Jesse James had been shot in the chest during the War and was nursed back to health by his first cousin who he later married.
With that, much of the wealth in the James family vanished and the boys turned to crime.
The Emancipation Proclamation hadn’t affected the state, which had remained officially neutral during the war, but in 1866 the 13th and 14th Amendments abolished slavery in every territory. The end of the war saw Missouri occupied and under martial law. Public Domain Jesse James (right) poses with brother Frank James (seated) and Charles Fletcher Taylor (left) Frank is wearing a “Civil War studio costume.” The James farm led a quiet life for the next decade or so, though that quietude did not mean peace. The elder James then died in California in 1850, never having made the fortunes he was hoping for, and his widow took three-year-old Jesse James and his older brother Frank James back to the family farm where she remarried within a couple of years. When his six slaves and 100 acres failed to make him a millionaire there, he packed light and moved to California to get in on the Gold Rush. When his hemp farm didn’t pan out in Kentucky, Robert James moved to Missouri to try his hand at cotton. Jesse James’ natural father, Robert, was a slave-owning Baptist preacher from Kentucky who was always looking for the next big score that would make him rich. This was around the same time and place where author Mark Twain would later set his picturesque novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, though there wasn’t a lot of whitewashing and river rafting going on in the James family.
Jesse Woodson James was born in Missouri on September 5, 1847. Public Domain The James’ family home in Clay County, Missouri.
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