Politics at the point of a pistol Jesse James was motivated first by Confederate passion and only then by greed and an acquired taste for violence, says Paul Johnson

From: The Sunday Telegraph London | Date: December 22, 2002| Author: | Copyright information

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War

by T. J. Stiles

Jonathan Cape, pounds 20, 510 pp

pounds 18 ( pounds 1.99 p&p) 0870 155 7222

JESSE JAMES , born in 1847 on a Missouri farm, was a teenage fighter in the American Civil War and during the 1870s, with his elder brother Frank, ran the most ferocious gang in American history. They specialised in holding up trains and robbing banks, and Jesse in particular mastered the burgeoning art of public relations, writing persuasive letters to the press and working in harness with sympathetic newspaper editors to portray himself as a Robin Hood figure.

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