About John R. Kelso
John Russell Kelso (March 23, 1831—Jan. 26, 1891) spent most of his first decade in a small log cabin on a new farm carved out of the woods of central Ohio. In 1840, his family—his father Robert, mother Anna, and five siblings—moved to another rough cabin on another new farm in Daviess County, Missouri. He educated himself by the light of the fireplace, became a schoolteacher and a preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and married seventeen-year-old Mary Adelia Moore on August 28, 1851. The couple had two children: Florella in 1854 and Florellus in 1856.
The marriage was an unhappy one. When the couple separated and began divorce proceedings, it caused a scandal and his Methodist brethren turned against him. Kelso, who had privately been moving past Methodist orthodoxy to explore varieties of religious liberalism, left the church in a dramatic fashion by denouncing its theology at a clerical conference in 1856. He attended Pleasant Ridge College near Weston, Missouri, and established a successful school at Buffalo, the Dallas County seat. He married one of his students, Martha Susan (“Susie”) Barnes, on September 23, 1858. When the United States erupted into civil war in the late spring of 1861, Kelso rallied the Unionists in a heavily secessionist county and was chosen to be a major in the Home Guard militia.
[Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, Figure 10.1: John R. Kelso, c. 1863. John R. Kelso, carte de visite, folder 25, Charles Lanham Collection, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia. Photo courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri.]
After the Federal defeat at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek on August 10, 1861, Home Guard militia units disintegrated as they evacuated southwest Missouri. Kelso then enlisted in the 24th Missouri Infantry as a private and was soon undertaking solo spy missions into Confederate occupied territory. When the fall campaign led by General John C. Frémont to push Confederates out of the state was aborted and the Federals retreated again, secessionists in the region harassed their Unionist neighbors. Dallas County rebels burned down Kelso’s house, ruined his farm, and forced his wife and children to live in a shack. He helped his family and other Buffalo refugees evacuate, but, refused shelter in a bad snowstorm, they suffered terribly. From this point forward, Kelso fought not just for patriotism but for revenge: he vowed to kill twenty-five rebels with his own hands.
After marching south into Arkansas on the campaign led by General Samuel R. Curtis that culminated in the victory at Pea Ridge (March 6-8, 1862), Kelso began his career in the Missouri State Militia Calvary as a lieutenant. Although the Confederates no longer held territory in Missouri, large forces periodically struck from Arkansas, and guerrilla bands of several hundred men as well as smaller groups of local rebel outlaws continually harassed the countryside. Kelso’s new regiment (the 14th—later the 8th—MSM Cavalry) suffered a stinging defeat on May 30 at the Battle of Neosho—a disaster he blamed on the incompetence of his commanding officer. But by the summer, Kelso’s regiment started becoming a potent counter-insurgency force and Kelso himself emerged as a noted guerrilla hunter.
By 1863, he was being celebrated by Unionists in the region for his individual heroism and hated by the rebels who portrayed him as a cold-blooded monster. He fought in the Battle of Springfield (January 8, 1863). Promoted to captain, in 1864 and 1865 he was part of expeditions of as many as 200 men against enemy bases in northern Arkansas and against large bodies of horsemen riding through Missouri’s southwest corner. He commanded detachments of 75 to 125 men on patrols taking rebel prisoners and killing bushwhackers. He helped lead strike forces of 60 to 80 riders against outlaw nests and guerrilla hideouts. With squads of 8 to 10 men, he attacked small enemy camps. Sometimes he wound up charging bushwhacker cabins by himself. Stories about his heroism spread. He challenged the popular sitting congressman for Missouri’s Fourth District in the 1864 election, the Radical Republican Sempronius Boyd, and won. Having more than fulfilled his vow of killing twenty-five rebels in personal combat, Kelso was discharged at the end of the war (April 18, 1865) as a brevet colonel.
In Congress, Kelso supported the Radical Republican agenda for Reconstruction and was among the first to call for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. After his Congressional term, he returned to Missouri and school teaching, going into considerable debt to establish a private academy in Springfield. By this time, he and his wife Susie had five children (Florella and Florellus from his first marriage plus Iantha, Freddie, and John Jr.) Kelso ran for Congress again in 1868 and lost. He supported women’s rights in town and was mocked. Then his academy failed, his second marriage disintegrated, and two of his sons died in September 1870: five-year-old Freddie from tetanus and fourteen-year-old Florellus by suicide.
Devastated, Kelso moved to California. Once again an itinerant schoolteacher, he also became involved in the civic life of Modesto, a railroad boomtown that sprang up in 1870 and grew on the wealth of the surrounding wheat fields. Modesto was controlled by its saloon owners, except on occasions when citizens covered their faces and rode at night as vigilantes to try to clean up the town. In the 1870s, too, he would continue to pursue the studies that led him from Christianity to atheism, delivering the lectures that would constitute the five books he published in the next decade: The Real Blasphemers (New York: Truth Seeker, 1883); The Bible Analyzed in Twenty Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker, 1884); Spiritualism Sustained in Five Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker, 1886); The Universe Analyzed (New York: Truth Seeker, 1887); Deity Analyzed in Six Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker, 1890). He also became an outspoken critic of conventional attitudes about sex and marriage, and a promoter of spiritualism.
[Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, Figure 16.2: John R. Kelso, c. 1884. John R. Kelso, The Bible Analyzed in Twenty Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker Office, 1884), frontispiece. Photo courtesy Homer Babbidge Library, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut.]
In Kelso’s final years, his political radicalism intensified. In 1885 he moved to Longmont, Colorado. He declared himself to be an anarchist at a Colorado rally in 1889 and tried to explain what he meant in his final book, Government Analyzed, a work his third wife, Etta Dunbar, completed after his death and published in 1892 (Longmont, CO: privately printed). In that book he also reflected upon the misguided patriotic “blindness” that had caused him to slaughter his fellow men in the war, realizing that he had merely substituted a sacralized Nation for the God that he had left behind when he abandoned Christianity. Since the 1880s he had become increasingly disabled from the lingering effects of his wartime injuries, and his health had deteriorated. As he lay dying in January 1891, in pain, he thought, from a festering old bullet wound, he was convinced that the Civil War was finally killing him.