John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - Episode 8

More on the text

Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, 112-13.  When rebels seized control of southwest Missouri in the fall of 1861, some people who had waved flags for Frémont now cursed the Union and saluted the Confederacy.  Kelso’s neighbor, Harvey White, said, “You abolitionists will now have to get out of this part of the country and stay out.  Your property will be confiscated.  I have therefore determined to have the first claim upon your farm, Mr. Kelso, by seizing upon it at once.”  As soon as Kelso left, White did indeed take Kelso’s chickens, potatoes, corn, and farm tools.  He let his sheep into Kelso’s orchard and they destroyed the fruit trees.  “To my shame,” Kelso later reflected, “I did not kill him upon the spot.”

For one of his last “business transactions,” Kelso slipped into White’s house and confronted him.  Kelso wanted White to make a move—some “war-like demonstration”—so he could justifiably shoot him.  But White stood stock still and then began to blubber “like a whipped schoolboy.” Kelso lowered his gun in disgust and left.  White would survive until the end of the war, when vigilantes hanged him and his eldest son for theft.  “Thus my vengeance came,” Kelso thought when he heard the news, “but not, as it should have come, by my own hand.”

But what about his other “business transactions” during his three weeks haunting Buffalo?  How many of the twenty-five rebels he vowed to slay with his own hands did he claim in his hometown?  He would admit generally to “bushwhacking” there, but in his memoirs he declined to give specifics: “For reasons of my own, I will not now, and, perhaps, never will describe these business transactions in detail.”  When he left Buffalo, however, it was clear that he was gratified to have begun his quest for revenge.