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| Timeline: The Life and Death of Jesse James |
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1820 |
When Missouri enters the Union the balance between slave and free states is threatened. The Missouri Compromise allows Maine to separate from Massachusetts and be admitted as a free state; Missouri enters the Union as a slave state; and the remaining territory of the Louisiana Purchase, north of the 36-30 parallel, is closed off to slavery. |
1847 |
September 5: Jesse James is born in Clay County, Missouri, son of Baptist minister and slaveholder Robert James and his wife Zerelda. Jesse is almost five years younger than his brother Frank and two years older than his sister Susan.
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1848 |
March 5: President James Polk reports to Congress on the discovery of an "abundance of gold" in the California territory. Soon thousands of Americans are journeying west in hopes of making their fortunes.
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1850 |
April: Robert James leaves Missouri for California, ostensibly to preach in the gold mining camps. A few months later, he dies of cholera.
The Compromise of 1850 allows California to join the Union as a free state, but leaves the question of slavery to be decided by settlers in Utah and New Mexico. |
1854 |
May 30: Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act becomes law. Overturning the Missouri Compromise, the law opens the question of slavery in those two territories to popular vote. As a result, "border ruffians" will cross the border from Missouri to fight for slavery in Kansas. Northerners respond by forming the Republican Party to oppose slavery's extension anywhere it does not currently exist. Both pro- and anti-slavery forces will send settlers into the Kansas territory, and the conflict between them results in a period of violence known as "bleeding Kansas."
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1855 |
June: Anti-slavery activist John Brown moves to Kansas, where several of his sons have settled.
September 12: Zerelda James marries country doctor Reuben Samuel. |
1856 |
The Republican Party puts forth its first presidential candidate, John C. Fremont, who loses the election to Democrat James Buchanan.
May 21: A crowd of 800 pro-slavery Missourians ransacks the town of Lawrence, Kansas.
May 24: John Brown and his sons kill five pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. |
1858 |
Illinois Republican Abraham Lincoln runs against Senator Douglas. Although Lincoln loses the election, the Lincoln-Douglas debates on slavery attract widespread attention.
May: A Missouri gang kills nine anti-slavery farmers in Kansas.
December 20: Forces led by John Brown attack two homesteads in Missouri and free 11 slaves there. Brown later guides the slaves more than a thousand miles to freedom in Canada. |
1859 |
October: John Brown leads an unsuccessful raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in Virginia. Brown is caught, convicted, and hanged.
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1860 |
Lincoln is elected president in November, and in December South Carolina becomes the first Southern state to secede from the Union. |
1861 |
February 4: The Confederate States of America are formed in Montgomery, Alabama; Jefferson Davis is selected president.
March 4: Lincoln is inaugurated as the president of the United States. In Missouri, a convention assembles in St. Louis to decide whether the state should secede; despite support from militantly pro-slavery governor Claiborne Jackson, secession is eventually rejected by a vote of 98 to one.
April 12: Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and two days later Lincoln calls for 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion. These events revive secessionist feeling in Missouri.
April 20: Secessionists capture the federal arsenal in Liberty, Clay County, Missouri.
May: Eighteen-year-old Frank James travels to the nearby village of Centerville and joins the state militia, which soon comes under the control of Confederate supporter and former governor Sterling Price. Frank, like the rest of his family, supports slavery and the Southern cause, and he is soon part of an army battling U.S. troops across Missouri.
September: After successfully taking the key Western Missouri town of Lexington, Price's forces are driven off by a federal army commanded by Fremont. The tide turns against organized Confederate forces in the state; a provisional government keeps Missouri in the Union, Fremont declares martial law, and Price pulls back to southwestern Missouri. |
1862 |
February-March: Union troops drive Price's army out of Missouri, but pro-Confederate "bushwhackers" begin a guerrilla war against Union forces and civilians that will last for years. Frank James, sick with the measles, is captured by U.S. soldiers and then allowed to return home after taking a loyalty oath. But his Confederate allegiance does not change.
September: The battle of Antietam ends General Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the North. |
1863 |
January 1: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation frees all slaves throughout the Confederacy, but not in slave states like Missouri that have remained in the Union.
May: Frank leaves the family homestead and joins a group of "bushwhackers." Union troops later raid the farm and torture his stepfather until he reveals the location of the guerrillas. Frank and Jesse's mother Zerelda is arrested and released after signing a loyalty oath, but she has no intention of abiding by its terms.
July: Lee's second invasion of the North ends in defeat at the battle of Gettysburg, and Union general Ulysses Grant captures the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Although the tide of overall war has turned against the Confederacy, savage fighting continues within Missouri.
August 21: Frank James participates in a raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in which bushwhackers slaughter 200 civilians. In retaliation, a Union commander orders almost everyone living in four Western Missouri counties to leave. Union troops march through the zone, burning crops and farms. |
1864 |
April: Sixteen-year old Jesse joins the bushwhackers. Eventually he links up with William Anderson, a guerrilla so brutal and murderous he earns the nickname "Bloody Bill."
August: Jesse is shot by a farmer while trying to steal a saddle. He rejoins the bushwhackers in September.
September 27: Anderson, the James brothers, and the rest of their bushwhacker band commit repeated atrocities in and around the town of Centralia, slaughtering unarmed Union soldiers and collecting their scalps. Meanwhile, Union forces overcome Sterling Price and his army at Pilot Knob, Missouri.
October: Union forces set a trap for Anderson, killing him and many of his men. Bloody Bill's body is put on display in a local courthouse. Price suffers a decisive defeat at the battle of Westport, and his army withdraws from Missouri for good.
November: Lincoln is re-elected. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, who has recently captured Atlanta, Georgia, takes Savannah just before Christmas.
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1865 |
January: Zerelda James and her husband are banished to Nebraska by Union forces. A Missouri constitutional convention frees the state's slaves and begins work on a new constitution.
April 9: Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. Five days later, President Lincoln is assassinated.
May 15: Still fighting as a bushwhacker even though the Civil War is over, Jesse James is shot in the lungs by Union troops.
June: Voters approve the new Missouri constitution. It grants civil rights to the state's freed slaves and requires potential voters to first take an oath stating that they have not committed any one of 86 disloyal acts against the United States. The net result of this requirement is the disenfranchisement of three-quarters of Clay County's white males. Confederate sympathizers are removed from political and judicial offices across Missouri.
August: Zerelda James and her husband return to the family homestead in Missouri. Recovered from his wound, Jesse joins them in October, and Frank returns not long after. |
1820-1865 | 1866-1882
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