The Devil and John. R. Kelso

Louis-Léopold Boilly, "Tartini's Dream" (1824).

[Adapted from Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Satan was an important character in John R. Kelso’s story.  For Kelso the fervent young Christian, who feared being damned to a fiery hell, the devil was a very real and terrifying figure.  For Kelso the Methodist preacher, who privately studied modern ideas and liberal theologies, “Old Uncle Split-Foot” became the embodiment of the superstition he finally left behind as he angrily left the church.  For Kelso the die-hard Unionist in a divided Missouri, Satan was a character drawn into political argument to help damn his pro-slavery neighbors for the sin of secessionism.  And, after Kelso’s term in Congress, and after he suffered his family tragedies, the devil became the writer’s alter-ego in his long verse satire of conventional religious faith, “The Devil’s Defense.”

SCENE I: Daviess County, Missouri, later 1840s

Kelso was a teenage farm worker, embarrassed by his tattered clothes and dirty bare feet.  His troubles began with God and a girl. He encountered both at a neighbor’s house.  Jeremiah Lenhart, a Methodist preacher who owned the local gristmill, had gathered the township’s first (non-Mormon) church in 1844.  Joining the Lenharts in their home to hear the Word preached, to sing hymns and pray, and to weep over sin and rejoice at God’s glory were a dozen or so neighbors, including Kelso’s parents.  John in the latter part of his fourteenth year underwent the powerful emotional experience that Methodists and other evangelicals called “getting religion,” “regeneration,” “conversion,” and “the second birth.” After an extended period of brooding about sin and praying for salvation, he suddenly felt flooded with an intense, rapturous joy—an experience he was taught to interpret as an upwelling love for God in a heart transformed by grace.

He also fell in love with the Reverend Lenhart’s pretty daughter Sina (Francina), who was “as modest, gentle, generous, and affectionate as she was beautiful.” But Sina, like God, though stirring his deepest and most powerful affections, was forever beyond his reach. She was three years older than Kelso and, at age seventeen, was already entertaining marriage proposals. He knew he did not have a chance. So he tried to avoid her, and when thrown into her company tried to conceal his adoration with a cold politeness. As he strove to master his yearning for Sina, he also struggled to rekindle his loving relationship with God. The rapturous joy had faded, replaced by religious despair. If God’s love had once touched his heart, it now seemed to withdraw, leaving him empty and alone.[1]

Gustave Doré, illustration for John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1866.

He stopped going to church. Sina would be there. He desperately wanted to join other earnest Christians and feel religion again. But to go, to listen to the sermon, and to sing and pray next to his family and friends and yet feel nothing—or, worse than nothing, to feel an empty despair, to feel a million miles away from God—this was unendurable. What had he done to lose God’s love? He started to fear that he had somehow committed the unforgivable sin. Methodists taught that even someone who had been born again could fall from grace and get right back on the road to hell—a very real hell of unending torment in everlasting fire. “My sleep was disturbed by horrible visions of hell,” Kelso later wrote. “Sometimes I waked with a cry so terrible that it made even myself shudder, as it rang in my own ears.” A horrible accident must have made these nightmares very vivid. At the very time that Kelso was enduring all of this, Lenhart’s five-year-old granddaughter Sarah had gotten too close to the fireplace. Her clothes burst into flame and she burned to death. Lenhart, or one of the other Methodist preachers who passed through the neighborhood, did not need to use this tragedy explicitly to add realism to their hellfire sermons (though preachers were known to do this). The incident itself preached a sermon to the sinners in the hands of a sovereign God, and offered young Sarah’s charred body as an image to trouble their dreams.[2]

John Martin, “Le Pandemonium,” 1841, based on Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Kelso prayed many times a day and read religious books, but found no comfort.  In the evenings he began writing poetry.  In the one poem surviving from this period, “The Dream,” the Devil appears and grabs the speaker by the neck, claiming his soul.  Kelso, wrestling with the demons of religious despair, never felt more miserable.  “I seemed to be vainly struggling against an adverse and inexorable fate; and often, when others were sleeping, I went out in the night, threw myself upon the ground, and wept bitterly over my hard and apparently hopeless lot,—my early blighted life.”[3]

His “mental suffering” became more acute.  Finally he went to see his minister to discuss his religious turmoil.  The clergyman listened, asked many questions in order to diagnose Kelso’s spiritual state, and decided that God was testing the young man and trying to press him into the ministry.  Kelso’s spiritual counselor determined that he should become a licensed exhorter in the Methodist Episcopal Church South.  Before Kelso knew what was happening, a date was set. The day before he was to receive his license, his anguish became so deep, so debilitating, that he left work and walked away from his father’s farm with thoughts of killing himself.  But a chance encounter with a neighbor on the road diverted him from his task, and he went back home.[4]

The next day, he received his license as an exhorter, and began standing up before sinners and saints and bringing them closer to Christ.  Kelso soon began teaching school and was as successful in the classroom as he was at Methodist prayer meetings.  The dark skies above John R. Kelso finally began to brighten.

SCENE II: Plattsburg, Missouri, Methodist Clerical Conference, spring 1856

In the mid-1850s, Kelso was a popular Methodist preacher, but in his private studies he was encountering ideas that took him far beyond the boundaries of Methodist orthodoxy.  He eventually abandoned two key evangelical doctrines. He stopped believing in the reality of Satan and a fiery hell—“old uncle Split-foot” and his brimstone dominion, he could now joke. Shedding this belief had enormous consequences.  The doctrine had been the root of his spiritual torment. Once the Devil in hell faded to mere metaphor, it ceased to have a hold on him, and his fear and anxiety vanished.  He began to see that all the hellfire preaching that he had heard over the years—and some, probably, that he had done himself—was little more than a form of psychological terrorism.[5]

His escape from the Methodists’ hell also led him to abandon evangelical understandings of regenerating grace.  He had previously believed that the powerful emotions that swept over believers as they prayed, sang hymns, or listened to sermons were the effects of God’s Spirit—convicting them of their sins, regenerating their hearts, sanctifying their souls. But now he began to embrace a different explanation for his weeping, swooning listeners and for his years of personal spiritual turmoil.  He, like other evangelicals, had felt a religious rapture, a “joy unspeakable and full of glory.”  When that feeling dissipated, however, he had been plunged into despair and depression, interpreting those dark nights of the soul, as countless others had, as God’s displeasure and withdrawal.  As he read more widely, thought more deeply, and followed new paths of inquiry, he started to see that the feeling of joyous rapture, rather than evidence of being bathed in God’s love, “was simply a magnetic or psychological exaltation.”  The religious experiences displayed at revival meetings, where dozens of people, merely from hearing the Word preached, could be thrown to the ground, paralyzed, entranced, or jerked with fits resembling an epileptic seizure—these, too, could be explained: “revivals were gotten up, not by the operation of the spirit of God upon our congregations, but by the operations of our spirits,—of our own magnetism.” Moreover, these experiences were not unique to Christianity and were not therefore special evidence in its favor.  Such things happened, he learned, “in all countries and among all peoples.”  Most people interpreted these powerful emotions and their physical effects as acts of their various gods, but, Kelso came to see, there was nothing supernatural about them at all.[6]

Jan Van Eyck, “The Crucifixion” and “The Last Judgment,” 1440-1.

But Kelso kept these ideas to himself until the news that he and his wife had separated caused his congregation to turn against him.  Former friends and admirers suddenly treated him as a pariah.  Bitterly, Kelso traveled to an annual conference of Southern Methodists meeting in Plattsburg, 15 miles to the east, to cut his connection to the ministry and to the Methodist Church.  He did not intend to go quietly.  He resolved to publicly attack the church orthodoxy that, privately, he had already abandoned.  He planned, he said, “to burst a bomb in the camp of the lord, and to leave that camp in consternation.”[7]

An unsuspecting church elder opened the meeting by praising the work Kelso had been doing for the church.  Kelso rose to acknowledge the remarks.  But instead of expressing gratitude, he now threw his “bomb,” launching into a critique of Methodist doctrine.  He attacked the idea of eternal punishment in hell—of “burning forever the souls of men for being just what God, when making them, foresaw that they inevitably would be;—for being, in fact, just what he had made them to be.”  He attacked other key ideas too, which “constituted our most valuable priestly stock in trade,” including the belief that their religious revivals demonstrated God’s supernatural grace.[8]

The conference exploded in angry debate.  Two preachers who knew of his marital difficulties attacked his moral character as well as his heretical beliefs.  They introduced a forged letter, purporting to be from his wife, which falsely charged him with scandalous behavior and blamed him for the dissolution of his marriage.  Kelso resigned from the ministry, renounced his membership in the Methodist Church, and left the conference enraged.  “Being excited and angry, I armed myself to shoot those two godly forgers.”[9]

 SCENE III: Buffalo, Missouri, spring 1861

The crowd had gathered around the Buffalo courthouse to cheer the news of more states seceding from the Union.But then Kelso had mounted the courthouse steps and made a speech denouncing secessionists as traitors and pledging his life for the Union.That evening at home, he wrote “a scathing satire upon the secessionists” entitled “The Devil’s First Epistle to the Buffalonians.” He made several copies and, for dramatic effect, scorched the papers in the fireplace to suggest that the letter had come straight from hell. He went out that night and posted the sheets around town. The Devil’s epistle caused some excitement and curiosity.Although Kelso had tried to disguise his handwriting, most townspeople guessed its author.[10]

Political devils: John L. Magee, “Satan Tempting Booth to Murder the President,” c. 1865; Eleazar Hutchinson Miller, “The Devil to Pay,” [1865] (the Devil visiting Jefferson Davis in prison), both Library of Congress.

SCENE IV: Modesto, California, early 1870s

 After the deaths of his sons and the dissolution of his second marriage, Kelso turned to writing verse as a kind of “mental refuge.”  “The Devil’s Defense” was a satiric poem of over 2,500 rhyming couplets.  In the spirit of Voltaire or Thomas Paine from the previous century it mocked Bible stories and Christian doctrines.  In a preface to the poem, Kelso recounted his own passage from evangelical enthusiasm to enlightened skepticism—from “the darkness of ignorance and superstition” and his trembling fear of damnation to “the light and gladness of truth,” a transformation made possible because he found the “moral courage” to “read and reason” for himself.

The poem itself purports to be a long speech by the Devil, who has been brought before a human court.  Here Satan is not the being who had terrified the young Kelso, or the rhetorical emblem of treason he had invoked to damn secessionists in his Buffalo broadside before the war, but a playful voice demolishing the “fairy tale” of Christianity with “reason, science, and common sense.”  He recounts Bible stories, lingering over Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and Exodus, exposing absurdities, impossibilities, and ridiculous details in the scriptural accounts.  How did God create night and day three days before creating the sun?  How did Noah muck out the tons of dung that would have accumulated in the ark each day?  In the Cain and Abel story, where did the people in the Land of Nod come from?  Did Moses really glimpse God’s hind parts?  Turning to the New Testament, the Devil also noted discrepancies in the Gospel accounts and described the Book of Revelation as resembling a drunken man’s hallucination.[11]

Like many deistic critics in the Age of Reason, the Devil indicts Jehovah’s moral character—the God who forbids lying, adultery, and killing yet tells untruths, gives his patriarchs concubines, and commands his people to slaughter their neighbors.  But unlike Kelso’s hero Thomas Paine, Kelso’s Devil—and Kelso himself—went beyond replacing the Judeo-Christian God with a moral Creator inferred from Nature.  With Epicurus, he contended that if God was willing to prevent evil but was not able, he was not omnipotent; if he was able, but not willing, he was not benevolent; and if neither omnipotent nor benevolent, why call him God?  He then argued against positing a Creator of any sort from a position of naturalistic atheism:

 No valid reason I can see,

Why matter may not also be

Like them [time and space] from all eternity.

And if these things were never made,

They had of course no Maker’s aid;

And, though the statement may seem odd,

There never was such thing as God.

            These three vast elements sublime,

Of all that is—space, matter, time

With their inherent mighty powers,

Can fashion dew drops, worlds, and flowers;

Form living beings everywhere,

That walk the earth and cleave the air;--

In fact can do, as may be shown,

Just what tis thought God does alone.[12]

The point of it all was to use humor to demystify and demythologize.  Kelso admitted that sometimes his humor was “open to criticism on the ground that it verges on the obscene.”  His Devil did describe the Snake in the Garden of Eden as Eve’s pet, held in her arms, her skin against his, blushing with desire at her naked “charms”; he also asked how God could impregnate Mary without “A fleshly organ, used just so.”  But Kelso protested that his style was bold and his satire severe because the topic demanded it.  God was a powerful and dangerous fiction.  So was the Devil, who admitted as much in his closing lines:

 I am not what your Priests try to make me appear,

Nor should wise men regard me with hatred or fear;

For I was invented to scare only fools

And make them more pliable Priest-serving tools.[13]

[Satan], “Pageant of Peterborough, New Hampshire,” [1910], Library of Congress

---

[1] D mss 1: 17, 65–66, 70, 60.

[2] Ibid., 72. On the death of Sarah Lisle (Jeremiah Lenhart’s granddaughter), see Holcombe, History of Daviess County, 786.

[3] D mss 1: 73; Kelso, “Works,” 46–47.

[4] D mss 1: 74; History of Daviess County, 692, 787.

[5] D mss 2: 141.

[6] D mss 1, 66; 2: 143.

[7] Ibid., 142.

[8] Marvin, Life of Caples, 148, 150; D mss 2: 142–43.

[9] Ibid., 144.

[10] Ibid., 188.

[11] D mss 11:29 (“mental refuge”); “The Devil’s Defense,” in “Works,” 63-125, esp. 86 (“fairy tale”), 65-6 (other quotations).

[12] “The Devil’s Defense,” in “Works,” 82 (eternity of matter).

[13] D mss 11:29 (“open to criticism”); “The Devil’s Defense,” in “Works,” 91, 96, 123.