Jesse Woodson James ( September 5, 1847– April 3, 1882), American outlaw, was born in Kearney, Missouri. His father, Robert James, was a slave-owning hemp farmer and Baptist minister who helped found William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri and later died in California. Robert's widow, Zerelda, married again, first to a wealthy man who soon died, then to a timid doctor named Reuben Samuel, who moved into the James home. In the tumultuous years leading up to the American Civil War, Zerelda and Reuben acquired a total of seven slaves and grew tobacco on their well-appointed farm.
When the Civil War began, Union forces quickly drove organized Confederate units out of Missouri. But the state was badly divided between Unionists and Southern sympathizers (including the James-Samuel family), and local tensions were exacerbated by raids by abolitionist Union troops and simple bandits from Kansas. Jesse's older brother, Frank James, fought with the regular Confederate army until illness forced him to return home. In 1863, Frank joined the Confederate bushwhackers, guerrillas who were battling Union forces in western Missouri, in a savage war marked by atrocities by both sides; the warfare was probably more intense because it was largely waged by Missourians, with Unionist militia pitted against Confederate insurgents, which often pitted neighbors against neighbors. Frank and Jesse's own stepfather, Reuben Samuel, was tortured by local militiamen hunting for Frank's band. Frank eventually linked up with Quantrill's Raiders and took part in the bloody massacre of 200 men and boys in Lawrence, Kansas.