Jesse James....

 “We will burn your train to cinders,” is running through my head this morning, a line from the chorus of “A Train Robbery,” a song written by Paul Kemmerly about Jesse James’ life.  

My singing partner Jesse McCuin and I just performed that song and six others from Kemmerly’s  album Jesse James, where the characters in the story were sung by Levon Helm, Johnny Cash, Emmy Lou Harris and other fine country singers.  The album is unique, wonderful, and available through the San Joaquin Valley Library System.

Hearing “A Train Robbery” on Levon Helm’s album Dirt Farmer (also available through the SJVLS) started us down this path.  It wasn’t my favorite, but Jesse was captivated and that led us to Kemmerly’s album and several books written about the famous bank/train robber’s life.  As a Northerner, my only image of Jesse James and his gang was a bunch of bandits on horseback.  Jesse McCuin, with roots in Oklahoma and Arkansas, had been raised with a more favorable image:  a rebel hero.  But until we started reading, neither of us realized how the other Jesse’s story was rooted in the Civil War and the fight over slavery. 

And that fight, we discovered, was actually about the way land would be farmed in America.  In essence, slavery was an industrial form of agricultural production that pre-dated mechanization.  It was an economic answer to the industrialization of cloth manufacturing in the urban centers of the U.S. and England with huge human consequences for both people of color and small farmers.  Jesse James was born in a place and time where those consequences were being battered out between the people on the next-lowest rungs of the agricultural ladder:  small farmers caught up in the interstate war between Missouri and Kansas during the 1850’s, before the Civil War began.

Politicians set the stage through a series of compacts and agreements about where slavery could and couldn’t be used to raise crops.  Kansas was “free,” but Missouri was allowed to decide for itself.  As a result, it was mixed, and farms ranged in size from small, family operated units to 2- to 3,000 acres, operated with hundreds of slaves.  The people of Kansas, seeing the competitive disadvantage slavery created for them as producers, began an out-and-out attack on small slave owners in neighboring Missouri, including the James family.  

The James family fought back, first Frank, then Jesse.  Cole Younger and his brothers, who eventually joined gangs with the James brothers, were from a larger Missouri farm family with many slaves.
The violence in the story astounded me, and at first put me off.  But it shouldn’t have:  any time we’re fighting over land - who will control it, use it, make a living on (or a killing off) it - there’s likely to be violence.  Witness South Africa, and what it took to break apartheid and make it possible for the natives of that land to be allowed to live freely on it.

As a Northerner and a small farm advocate, I’m glad Jesse’s side lost.  I regret to say, however, that we have not stemmed the industrialization of our farming system and our food supply.  What it will take for that next, needed revolution - to get people back on our lands growing our food - will be more than violence.  It will take a whole lot of love.