John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - Episode 1
More on the text
Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, 1-13. I was first introduced to John R. Kelso while doing research for a very different book in the early 2000’s: Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). The Huntington Library in San Marino, California had purchased something called “The Works of John R. Kelso in Manuscript.” It was not even fully catalogued yet, but search terms in a loose-leaf binder suggested that Kelso was someone who struggled with issues of religious faith and doubt—just what I was looking for. So I called up the item, and the archivist delivered an 800-page folio account book filled with handwritten poems, essays, lectures, and, toward the end, a partial autobiography. Kelso, an obscure Methodist preacher who became a freethinker, an atheist, and a spiritualist, did indeed write eloquently about religious skepticism and faith. But there was so much more to his rich life, including an extraordinary, if incomplete, account of his experiences in the Civil War.
Recognizing that his Civil War narrative was not just a gripping story but also had historical value as a detailed account of infantry battles, cavalry scouts, spying, and guerilla warfare, I published an edited edition of the wartime chapters in the Huntington partial autobiography as Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). And I started working on the fuller story of Kelso’s eventful life.
Kelso’s autobiographical narrative in the “Works of John R. Kelso” ends abruptly after his gripping description of the Battle of Springfield, Missouri in January 1863, where, as he describes it, a depleted force of 800 men held off an attack by a much larger Confederate army. His story of his personal life, too, stops with his suspicions about his wife at home being seduced by a former friend. The second half of Kelso’s autobiography, covering the period after January 1863, if it had ever been completed, was presumed lost. I would, I thought, have to piece together the rest of his wartime experience, his political career during Reconstruction, and his subsequent life as a freethought writer and lecturer in California and as an anarchist in Colorado solely from other sources.
But when Bloody Engagements was in press in the fall of 2016, I received a call from a man who identified himself as the great-great-grandson of John R. Kelso. “And,” he said, “I have some manuscripts.” Those manuscripts turned out to be the complete “Autobiography of John R. Kelso,” containing (and expanding upon) the “Works” version and continuing the story up to July, 1885. Kelso had begun writing this version, in fourteen school composition books, in the spring of 1884. The complete narrative is over a quarter of a million words long. Then a cousin came forward with an additional collection of poems, speeches, lectures, and essays that Kelso had prepared (but never published) in 1887. Thanks to these and other generous Kelso descendants I was able to write Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy not just from a vast array of military, political, cultural, and social history sources in public archives but from this voluminous private collection documenting a rich and multifaceted life.
More on the Illustration
Chris asked me to do my version of Kelso’s portrait. I really perceive this picture as being very near the beginning of his whole story. I was focused just on trying to reproduce the portrait as I saw it. I wasn't trying to influence it in any way, other than how I played around with light and dark. I tried to create the illusion of him being as three-dimensional as I could by working with the background. Although it really was pretty much a straightforward reproduction, it gave me some insight into his character--his facial expressions and his seriousness, and how the kind of stare in his eye suggested how he maintained his focus on his task at hand.
In the images that follow, we never again look at Kelso directly in the face. I really wanted to present an interesting vantage point that allowed Kelso to be in there and also for you the viewer to place yourself in the moment. In some of the illustrations, the viewer can be in the position of one of his comrades with him, looking over his shoulder. But that isn’t always the case. There are times when he was by himself, in the woods, and I wanted to imply that sense of loneliness. In these illustrations, I wanted to leave it to the viewers, the readers of the text, to put an image in their own heads with things that I didn't include in the drawing. In my own work, I like to do that and try not to put everything in, leaving it open-ended for people reading or looking at the artwork so that they can have their own interpretation of it.