John R. Kelso and Jesse James: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Politics of Memory
John R. Kelso, c. 1863; Jesse James, 1864 (Library of Congress).
When Jesse James was shot and killed in 1882 by a member of his own gang, he was already a national celebrity. The bank robber and killer had been transformed in the eyes of many into a Robin Hood figure. In the Civil War he had been a teenaged guerrilla or “bushwhacker,” attacking Unionists and exploiting the turmoil in war-torn Missouri to pillage and plunder. As demonstrated in T. J. Stiles’s Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, the mythologization of rebel guerrillas and postwar bandits into culture heroes was the work of writers like John Newman Edwards, a Confederate propagandist and early architect of the Southern myth of the “Lost Cause.” With the collapse of Reconstruction in the 1870s, much of White Missouri, and much of White America, was ready to revise the public memory of the war and the social turbulence left in its wake.
By the time John R. Kelso died in 1891, Missouri historians and journalists no longer knew what to make of him. A former preacher and schoolteacher, Captain Kelso had defended the Union by leading a cavalry counter-insurgency force in the Missouri State Militia, hunting rebel bandits and bushwhackers. After secessionist neighbors burned down his house and forced his wife and children to flee in a snowstorm, Kelso vowed that 25 rebels would die by his own hand. Stories about his bravery and military prowess were spreading by 1863. Unionists hailed him as the “Hero of the South West” and, after he fulfilled his vow, elected him to Congress in 1864 as a champion of Radical Reconstruction. Long before he died, however, the cultural and political transformation that had allowed for the celebration of James had led commentators to dismiss Kelso’s Unionism and radical politics as “fanatical.”
When the war began in 1861, James was a teenager in a slaveholding farm family in Clay County, the western end of the “Little Dixie” strip along the Missouri River where at least a quarter of the population was enslaved. Kelso was a thirty year-old school teacher in Dallas County, about 170 miles south, where slightly less than 4% of households had slaves. But in Dallas as in Clay, most of the White population had come from the upper South, and remained comfortable with Black bondage. Slavery, for many of the hardscrabble White farmers like Kelso’s parents who favored it even though they enslaved no one themselves, was valued less as a vital economic system than as an institution that maintained the racial order. Less than a fifth of White Missourians in the state overall held slaves, but the dominant political culture was clearly pro-slavery: 85% of the men elected to office in the 1850s were slaveholders. Still, at the presidential election in the fall of 1860, most of slavery’s supporters in the state had wanted to remain in the Union. They were conservative Unionists who thought both abolitionists and secessionists were dangerous radicals. The events that quickly followed—from the secession of seven Southern states through Ft. Sumter and its aftermath—had pushed many if not most proslavery Missourians into the secessionist camp.
James inherited proslavery militancy from his mother and shared it with his older brother Frank. Although Kelso had imbibed the racial prejudice of his proslavery family, he was convinced slavery was morally wrong and loathed the slaveholders who looked down their noses at laboring men of any color. His hometown was strongly pro-Southern, but before his shocked neighbors he pledged his loyalty to the United States and then coopted their secession rally to organize a pro-Union Home Guard militia. After Federal troops lost at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek (August 10, 1861), he joined the infantry and marched with the Federal Army of the Southwest to the Battle of Pea Ridge (March 7-8, 1862), which finally freed southwest Missouri from Confederate control.
After Pea Ridge, the Union was able to redeploy forces and shift infantry out of the state to help the broader war effort. The Missouri State Militia Cavalry, posted at small bases, battled the numerous small bands of guerrillas who sabotaged railroads, cut telegraph lines, stole or destroyed property, ambushed soldiers, and murdered loyal civilians. The cavalry would also try to fight the larger bodies of irregulars—often numbering in the hundreds—operating quasi-independently from the Confederate command, or the companies organized by Confederate recruiters that moved through the state. The small, scattered cavalry regiments, however, still left the state exposed to larger forces that could strike quickly up from Arkansas.
John R. Kelso, c. 1865-7; Jesse James, 1882 (Library of Congress).
Union commanders despaired that bushwhackers were infesting the countryside and spreading terror through the loyal populace. How to fight them and beat them proved to be an enormous challenge. Supported by their kin and by secret networks of Southern sympathizers, disguised as ordinary farmers by day and in the blue uniforms they stripped from the bodies of their military victims when they rode and attacked, hiding in wooded hills and creek bottoms, striking quickly from the bush on fast horses, shooting rapidly at close range with the multiple revolvers pulled from holsters strapped to their bodies and saddles, and then dispersing and vanishing back into the countryside, bushwhackers were an elusive and dangerous enemy.
In the spring of 1862, Kelso joined the MSM cavalry as a lieutenant and began his career as a noted guerrilla hunter. The Missouri bushwhackers that cavalrymen like Kelso hunted were a mixed bunch. Some were former Confederate soldiers who wanted to serve the cause closer to home. Frank James (Jesse’s brother) served in the regular Confederate army before becoming a guerrilla. Other bushwhackers grabbed their guns and saddled up less in devotion to the Confederacy than because they imagined themselves protecting their own “Southern rights” in Missouri and their own families from Northern “tyranny.” By Southern rights they meant a right to property that included the ownership of Black people, and the right to erect local, state, and national governments protecting that “property.” They defended their families against any who threatened an economic well-being connected to the slave economy (even if they did not personally own slaves), against the depredations of Federal soldiers, and against the free black marauders who, they imagined, would take their women if abolition ever came to pass. Some had few ideological motivations of any sort. Young men sought the thrill of battle without having to endure the discipline and deprivations of life in the regular military. The criminally-inclined sought to exploit the breakdown of civil order to rob for their own profit and kill people they did not like.
Frank and Jesse James joined two of the most notorious guerrilla leaders of the war. William Quantrill was an opportunist and petty criminal from Ohio who had courted anti-slavery men before switching sides. Quantrill’s most famous raid occurred in 1863 when he led 450 guerrillas, including Frank, into Lawrence, Kansas, where they plundered, burned, and slaughtered over 200 unarmed men and boys. In 1864 both James brothers joined up with “Bloody Bill” Anderson, who stole from northerners and southerners alike, collecting a “tax” like a local warlord with a protection racket. He shot a man in the head for his watch, choked a woman for her valuables, shot another woman in the back when she tried to run away, and raped a twelve-year-old black girl. He and his men brutally tortured locals to find out where loot was stashed. The James brothers seem to have participated in Anderson’s drunken, blood-soaked raid on Centralia, Missouri in the fall of 1864. There they pulled twenty-two unarmed soldiers off a train, forced them to strip off their uniforms, and gunned them down. Anderson’s guerrilla band became known for scalping, skinning, castrating, and decapitating its victims. Jesse’s close friend “Little Archie” Clement was especially fond of slitting throats and mutilating corpses, but he was hardly the only one.
Rebel guerillas became figures of folklore, none more prominently than the bushwhacker turned postwar bandit Jesse James. Dime novels were not written about Federal guerrilla hunters—not, at least, about John R. Kelso. Still, stories about him spread by word of mouth during the war and afterward. Wiley Britton heard many of them. Britton was a Missouri native who fought for the Union on the Kansas border. He heard more after the war as he conducted interviews for the War Department. Stories of Kelso’s “fearless operations against Southern bandits,” Britton wrote in one of his post-war histories, “were familiar to nearly every family in Southwest Missouri.” While those who sympathized with the Confederacy hated Kelso and even called him a monster, Unionists thought of him as a hero who “was without fear and a genius in many respects and like a tiger in his warlike activities.” Kelso was remembered as a polite and scholarly man, always pacing about camp with a book in his hands, but especially as a fighter with remarkable courage. Britton recorded stories about Kelso charging outlaw hideouts and creeping into enemy camps by himself, and besting bandits in hand-to-hand combat.
Britton focused on stories of Kelso as a lone hero. But although Kelso did sometimes attack bushwhacker cabins by himself, he also fought with squads of 8 to 10 men, helped lead strike forces of 60 to 80 riders, commanded detachments of 75 to 125 soldiers on patrols, and was part of expeditions of as many as 200 men against larger enemy forces. In early January, 1863, when Confederate general John S. Marmaduke led three thousand troops up from Arkansas to strike the Federal arsenal at Springfield, Kelso and his men rushed to defend the town. In the Battle of Springfield, Kelso commanded a small squad on the left flank, where the main attack was expected, and then was sent alone at night to spy on the enemy as they withdrew from the lower part of town to their camp. Having failed to take the town, the Confederates left the next morning. Major John Newman Edwards, writing an official Confederate report of the battle, tried to turn failure into victory with his customary flowery prose. He admitted that his brigade “suffered seriously in the attack upon Springfield, but it covered itself all over with glory, and won imperishable laurels.” His men had been “lion-hearted,” bravely hurling them themselves against the “Gibraltar of the Southeast,” and the fallen were “Southern martyrs.” “The mission had been accomplished,” Edwards declared, and the Confederates left Springfield “alone in its glory, because all had been done that could be done.”
John R. Kelso, 1884; Jesse James, dead, 1882 (Library of Congress).
Encouraged by the soldiers who admired him and the loyal civilians who cheered him, Kelso ran for Congress in 1864 and won. Although he was not above pandering to the racism of his white voters, he supported the Radical Republican agenda. In a speech on Reconstruction delivered in Congress on February 7, 1866, he endorsed Black legal and political equality. He voted for the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, the first Reconstruction Act of 1867, and the Fourteenth Amendment. He was among the first to call for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. He also warned against too quickly welcoming the former Confederate states back into the Union and former rebels back as full citizens. Declining to run for reelection, he championed women’s rights back home in Missouri.
Jesse James, meanwhile, after recovering from a bullet to the chest in 1865, went back to work. Bloody Bill was dead but his old guerrillas reassembled around Archie Clement and the robberies and murders resumed in early 1866. When Clement was killed, leadership of the gang fell to Jesse. In late 1869, as retribution for Anderson’s killing, James went to Gallatin (not far from where Kelso had grown up) and shot a banker in the head. John Newman Edwards, now a Kansas City newspaper editor, contacted James and began the publicity campaign to turn the bushwhacker-bandit into a symbol of ongoing “conservative” resistance. After a daring robbery in 1872, Edwards wrote a famous editorial, “The Chivalry of Crime,” comparing the James Gang to Knights of the Round Table. A few weeks later, Edwards published a letter, ostensibly from James himself, mentioning Robin Hood. The myth of Jesse James was launched into public consciousness.
The radical progressive wave that had lifted Kelso to Congress quickly receded and the conservative backlash was gaining strength by the end of the decade. The Republican Party split in 1870 and the “iron-clad” loyalty oath that had prevented former rebels from voting was rescinded. Conservatives and former Confederates swept back into power in a resurrected Democratic Party in 1872, and conservative Democrats would rule Missouri for the next three decades. By 1875, a former Confederate general was representing Missouri in the U.S. Senate and former Confederate President Jefferson Davis was warmly received when he toured the state. Missouri became more “Southern” than it ever had been during the war. By November, 1877, Springfield’s conservative Democratic newspaper was remembering Kelso, a half-dozen years after he had left town for the Far West, not as a congressman but as a fanatical killer. Recalling the year 1865-66, the paper pitied the “[p]oor, broken down, disheartened and impoverished Rebels returning to their homes” only to be “shot down like dogs by such men as Kelso and his murderous band of Loyal Leaguers.”
In 1883, a Missouri historian could only look back at Kelso’s politics—fervent Unionism, Black political equality, and women’s rights—as the product of a disordered mind and warped moral character. A decade later, the St. Louis Republic published an article of over 5,300 words pondering the enigma of John R. Kelso. “The Scout of the Ozarks: John R. Kelso’s Mysterious and Bloody Career in Southwest Missouri” was based on interviews with people who knew him and knew of him, including three men who had fought at his side. Kelso’s name, the reporter wrote, was still “spoken with a shudder by many people along the Missouri and Arkansas border, though nearly 30 years of peace have helped to sustain or palliate the deeds of this fanatical partisan of the Union cause.” Some of the stories about the man might “sound like the nursery tales of mythical desperadoes,” but, the journalist assured his readers, they were “well authenticated by witnesses still living.” The article described Kelso as “brave to the point of recklessness,” and marveled at his preternatural composure under fire. The reporter, however, also described him as a remorseless, ferocious, inhuman “rebel-killer” who “butchered his victims” with an “unforgiving heart.”
The St. Louis Republic writer had heard that Kelso had pushed his political radicalism even further in his final years. Fed up by the corrupt plutocracy the United States had become and outraged by the execution of four labor leaders after the Haymarket “riot” of 1886, Kelso had declared himself to be an anarchist. “The labor question was the favorite hobby among the old guard of free thinkers,” the journalist wrote, “and Kelso left the Republican party and became a fiery champion of the causes of the ‘wage slave.’ He attacked the greed of corporations and capitalists with as much bitterness as he ever denounced ‘rebels’ on the Missouri border in the eventful days of the 60s. He longed for an opportunity to shoulder a gun once more and fight for industrial liberty.”
Jesse James—thief, killer, sometime political terrorist, perhaps a sociopath —could when convenient dress himself up, with the help of Edwards, as a persecuted champion of “Southern rights” (a regional dialect of white supremacy). Yet later memory and myth kept him famous as a Wild West Robin Hood or apolitical gunslinger. John R. Kelso, Union guerrilla hunter and Radical Reconstruction Congressman, went from being hailed as a hero to being derided as a fanatic, and then was mostly forgotten. These different trajectories have less to do with the content of their characters or the excitement of their various violent adventures than with the weird alchemy of popular culture. Kelso beat the bushwhackers on the battlefield, but he lost in the subsequent culture war. Their parallel stories are another example of the process by which, as the historian Heather Cox Richardson has recently put it, “the South won the Civil War.”
Jesse James dime novel, 1901.