John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - Episode 2
More on the text
Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, 70-85. Slavery and secession were quite popular in Missouri. Less than a fifth of white Missourians held slaves, but the dominant political culture was pro-slavery: 85 percent of the men elected to office in the 1850s were slaveholders. Still, six months earlier, 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. In the presidential election of 1860, Missourians split 117,000 votes between the two candidates wishing to preserve the slaveholding republic: Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party. Missouri voters gave the uncompromising proslavery and pro-secessionist Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge 31,300 votes and Republican Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery in the territories but promised not to interfere with it in the states, received slightly more than 17,000. The events that quickly followed the November elections—from the secession of seven Southern states through Ft. Sumter and its aftermath—pushed many if not most proslavery Missourians into the secessionist camp.
By the late spring of 1861, Dallas County’s citizens—at least the loud ones--seemed eager for the state to leave the Union and join the Confederacy. The previous fall, about 70 percent of the voters had chosen either Douglas or Bell for president, though Breckinridge ran stronger and Lincoln weaker than in the state at large. Kelso’s town of Buffalo had more of a pro-Southern tilt than either the county or the state. Slavery, for many of the hardscrabble white farmers and Ozark Mountain folk who favored it even though they owned no slaves themselves, was valued less as a vital economic system than as an institution that maintained the racial order. According to a Missouri saying, it was easy to get “‘Secesh’ . . . from brush country and bad whiskey.”
But in Buffalo by May of 1861, it wasn’t looking like supporters of secession would even need much whiskey. Southern partisans were arguing, nearly unopposed, that the only way that Missouri could continue to ensure a white person’s “right” to slave property was for the state to join the Confederacy.
More on the Illustration
When I read this passage, I could feel the boy's hand touching my finger. Like my own kids holding my hand. That touch can ground you in such a moment of, in this case, the hostility and the adrenaline. It was just this sense of grounding. Even though Kelso wanted to go out and do battle, in that brief moment he let the child guide him away from the angry crowd to the warehouse. I tried to place myself there. I read the text. Readers will come up with their own image of what’s going on. This is what I felt: Kelso on the grass with the small boy.
I talked about my first draft with Chris, and I started elaborating on the ideas. I wanted to get that strong, dramatic shadow of that tree on the right. It allows the hands to really stand out, something I struggled a bit with. As an artist, you're always trying to use the tools that you have, but when you're working with black and white, it's pretty limited. So I tried to make it a really dramatic shadow of that tree coming across to allow the hands to come forward.