Daily globe. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1878-1884, 1882-10-09
FRANK JAMES

His Appeal 20 the Governor of Missouri
for Mercy for His Misdeeds-A Pen
Picture of the OUTLAW.
Following is the letter of Frank James,
the noted outlaw, to Gov. Crittenden, of
Missouri, written a few days before his
surrender to the authorities:
ST. houIs, Sept. 80, 1882.
Hon. T. T. CRITrENDEN, Governor:
Your ExCELLENCY-Time has demon
strated that however correct my course of
conduct, however carefully I may follow
the path of good citizenship, and however
successful may be in gaining the conf
+dence and respect of those who associate
with me daily and know my every
act, the work of heaping infamy
ON the name which my children are to
bear goes steadily on and on as it began
so many years ago. The greater the crime
which startles the people of our Western
states the greater the certainty that it will
be attributed to my act or instigation.
However strange it may seem that man
of the reputation that I bear should as
sumo to possess either pride or sensibility,
have the hardihood to lay claim to some
degree Of both. To-day and for years the
one desire of my life is, and has been, to
regain the citizenship which 1 lost in the
dark days when, in western Missouri,
every mans hand was against his neigh
Dor, and to have an opportunity to prove
by submission to the most rigorous tests
that am not unworthy.o of it. It would avail
me nothing at this day to revert to the
circumstances attending my outlawry
which I and thousands of others
regarded as extenuating. Those who
were where they could observe the events
in that little page of history need no re-
capitulation of them from me; and those
who had no personal knowledge in the
premises have been so steeled against me
by reports of my evil doing that they
would naturally give no consideration to
facts Of that character. The people at
large reason, and reason logically, that
where there is so much smoke there must
be some fire; that although some of the
charges made against me may be unjust,
all are not without foundation, and that
an evasion of the officers of the law is not
the course of an innocent man. 1 bow to
their logic and reply that the man who is
now making this appeal does not do SO
from the standpoint of martyr. He
. comes 10 you, their representative, to say
that, though his sufferings have been
hundred times greater than they
have any knowledge of-immeasurably
greater than the courts which he
evaded would have attacl . l to his acts, he
recognizes that he has no right to complain
of his lot. He comes as man who, con-
scious Of an honest purpose, asks to be
permitted to do what an earnest, law-abid-
ing citizen may to remove from Missouri
the odium for which his name is in part
responsible. He comes as a pan who,
outlaw though he be, has for those inno-
cent ones who call him father and husband
a love as strong and devotion as deep as
are found in men whose lives are blame
less before the world, and as one who is
anxious to remove from his closet the skel-
eton which has so long been its hideous &C.
-cupant.
If it were not for the fear of response
bility for what did not do, rather than
for what did, Gov. Crittenden, you should
never have found it necessary to put a
price on my head. An excited and justly
indignant public is not always discrimin-
alive; and when man is stripped of the
safeguard of presumptive innocence with
which the law theoretically surrounds him,
Gas would be-, he is put to the dangerous
fear is still with me, and as I write, it
prompts me to abandon my present pur-
pose, and having for nearly twenty years
proved my ability to evade all attempts to
capture me: to take my little family and
go to some remote section where I can
live quiet life, free from apprehension.
That I refuse to obey such an impulse;
that I prefer to go back to my boyhood's
home and face my disgrace in order to
live it down; that I am willing to
place myself under a surveillance to which
no man in Missouri has ever been sub
jected, as must naturally be the case should
l return, that I choose this rough course
when smoother ones offer, is, humbly sub
NIT, proof that am not so bad as have
been painted, and that the elements of
manhood have not been entirely omitted
from my nature.
Right terribly, Gov. Crittenden, have the
offences against society which have been
charged against the James family been
avenged. God knows, enough blood has
been spilled, enough hearts broken enough
lives blighted. God knows that if it is the
purpose of the law to prevent crime by
making its punishment awful to contem-
plate, that purpose has been served in
rare degree in these ten years of terror
and tragedy. Is its demand for vengegencs
Unsuitable? Is Justice tempered with
mercy e mere poetical nothing? Must
the great state of Missouri indulge spirit
of vengeance till it has secured its last
ounce of flesh?
Or laying all considerations of mercy
aside, cannot your state, Il would to God
could say my statev') better afford, now
that it has indicated its laws as no state
ever did before, to say to its supplicant:
eyes, come in. We will convert your very
notoriety into powerful intrustment of
good order. We will, purely as an unsenti-
mental Investment, restore you to citizen
ship and give you an opportunity to prove
the sincerity of your contrition and fair
purposes. We will call upon you to util-
ize your experience in inforcing the laws
which YOU have in the past been charged
with violating; and when by years of cor
rect department and honest industry you
have won the confidence of all who now
condemn you, we will point to it all as a
proof of our wisdom"
If l we're certain that I would not be
made scape goat, I would never have
frouhIed Won with this petitiOn but would