The gang robbed its first bank in February 1866 and continued to prey upon banks, stagecoaches, and trains until 1876. At that time, determined citizens ambushed and decimated the gang during a robbery attempt in Northfield, Minnesota. The James brothers escaped and formed a new gang, which included one Robert Ford. On April 3, 1882, eager to claim a bundle of reward money, Ford shot and killed Jesse, who was living in St. Joseph, Missouri, under the alias of Thomas Howard. Ford’s deed was greeted as anything but a public service. Although they were clearly cold-blooded armed robbers, the “James boys” had acquired a popular reputation as latter-day Robin Hoods. People now sang of the “dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard and laid poor Jesse in his grave.” Frank James later surrendered, was twice tried and twice acquitted by friendly juries; he died of natural causes in 1915.
Contemporary legend, dime novels, and later, movies and television transformed another outlaw into a latter-day Robin Hood. Billy the Kid was born Henry McCarty in 1859 (either in Marion County, Indiana, or possibly New York City). Raised in Kansas, the Kid was orphaned early and embarked on a life of petty crime that escalated to murder when, aged 17, he killed a man in a saloon brawl. A year later, in 1878, the Kid became embroiled in the so-called Lincoln County War, a New Mexico range war between one set of cattlemen and another. During the conflict, on April 1, 1878, he ambushed and murdered the Lincoln County sheriff and his deputy. As a fugitive, Billy the Kid supported himself with robbery, all the while pursued by the new sheriff, Pat Garrett, to whom he finally surrendered in December 1880. Four months later, the Kid escaped the noose by killing his two jailors and taking flight. When the Kid stopped at Fort Sumner, New Mexico (some say it was to see his sweetheart), Garrett again caught up with him and, this time, gunned him down.
Cornering the Market
Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and a host of lesser figures were unquestionably criminals. But who were their victims? As many Americans saw it at the time, Jesse, Billy, and the rest did not: victimize innocent citizens but attacked big banks, big railroads, big money—the very forces that were daily robbing the “common man.” If you wanted to talk about victims, well, the real victims were those who weren’t lucky enough to have been born a Gould or a Rockefeller. In the popular logic of the day, capitalists such as these were the robber barons, whereas the western outlaws were the Robin Hoods.
And what about government? In the popular view, lawmakers and police were counted on to go with the money, making and enforcing laws to serve the Goulds, the Rockefellers, and their kind. People who lived during the years following the Civil War took to calling their era the Gilded Age—glittering with showy wealth but corrupt to the core. The railroads boomed, transporting the raw ores of the West to the industrial machines of the East. With hundreds of thousands of discharged veterans flooding the job market, labor was dirt cheap, and the government was—well—pliant. Andrew Johnson, having narrowly escaped removal from office, was succeeded in the White House by Ulysses Simpson Grant in 1869. Grant had proven to be one of the nation’s greatest generals, but in two terms as president, he presided over the most thoroughly corrupt administration in American history. He was personally above reproach, but, naively, he surrounded himself with scoundrels who administrated, legislated, and operated hand in hand with the interests of big business—and (in the infamous phrase of railroad magnate William H. Vanderbilt) “The public be damned!”
Gould and Gold
Jay Gould was born in Roxbury, New York, on May 27, 1836, the son of a poor farmer. By 21, Gould had saved up $5,000, which he invested in the leather business and railroad stocks. Within a decade, Gould was a director of the Erie Railroad and, by means of illegal stock and bribery, clawed his way to a controlling interest in a number of railroads. With fellow tycoon James Fisk (1834-72), Gould hatched a scheme to corner the U.S. gold market. He persuaded President Grant to suspend government gold sales, thereby driving up the price of gold—which Gould and Fisk held in great quantity. Rousing momentarily from naive stupor, Grant realized what was going on and ordered the Treasury to release $4 million of its own gold to checkmate Gould. The result was Black Friday, September 24, 1869, which precipitated a major financial panic followed by severe economic depression as the inflated price of gold tumbled.
Many of the nation’s railroads, already reeling from cutthroat competition, now tottered on the verge of bankruptcy. John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), who had multiplied his family’s already mighty fortune by loaning money to France during the Franco-Prussian War of 1.871, now rushed in to pick up the pieces. By 1900, Morgan had acquired half the rail trackage in the nation. Most of the rest of the railroads were owned by Morgan’s friends, and together, they fixed freight prices at exorbitant levels. There was little shippers could do but pay.
Rockefeller and Oil
The years immediately following the Civil War ran on rails and were fueled by gold. People who controlled either or both interests drove the nation, regardless of who was in the White House, the Congress, or the courts.
There was gold, and then there was black gold. In 1859, oil was struck in western Pennsylvania. This event gave a thin-lipped, ascetic-looking young Ohioan an idea. John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937) decided that oil would become a big business and that his hometown of Cleveland was ideally situated to refine and distribute it to the nation.
Rockefeller built a refinery there in 1862, then put together the Standard Oil Trust, an amalgam of companies by which he came to control all phases of the oil industry, from extraction, through refining, through distribution. Standard Oil was the first of many almighty trusts formed in various industries during the post-Civil War period.
The Gospel of Wealth
The Gilded Age was an epoch of naked greed. Those few capitalists who bothered to defend their motives turned to the science of the day. In 1859, the great British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-82) published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. This book set forth the theory of evolution, arguing that in nature, only the fittest—the strongest, the most cunning, the ablest—creatures ultimately survive to reproduce their kind. Capitalists translated nature into economics, arguing that the state should not interfere in economic life because people at the top of the socioeconomic heap were there because they were the fittest, having survived the battles of the marketplace. This concept was Social Darwinism.