John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - Beginnings
Preface
“John R. Kelso’s Civil War: A Graphic History” has been adapted from the biography of Kelso by Christopher Grasso, Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
The text of the Graphic History is by Grasso. The illustrations are by Robert W. Davidson (osakanart.com).
In the “Read More” link at the end of each segment, the author discusses the broader context of each episode in the biography. The illustrator comments on the artistic choices he made to turn the narrative into an arresting image.
JOHN R. KELSO
Teacher, preacher, soldier, spy; congressman, scholar, lecturer, author; Methodist, atheist, spiritualist, anarchist. John R. Kelso (1831-91) was also a strong-willed son, a passionate husband, and a loving and grieving father. At the center of his life were the thrill and the trauma of the Civil War, which challenged his notions of manhood and honor, his ideals of liberty and equality, and his beliefs about politics, religion, morality, and human nature.
He fought for the Union in Missouri, serving as an infantry private marching to large battles, a spy gathering intelligence in enemy territory, a cavalry officer fighting Confederate guerrillas, and a lone gunman taking revenge on the rebels who wronged him.
Growing up in a rough backwoods cabin, he had educated himself by firelight. A Methodist preacher, he left the church when his first marriage crumbled and his congregation turned against him. A schoolteacher, he left his schoolhouse when, in the spring of 1861, Missouri and the United States split in half.
EPILOGUE AS PROLOGUE
Teacher, preacher, soldier, spy; congressman, scholar, lecturer, author; Methodist, atheist, spiritualist, anarchist. John R. Kelso was many things. The Civil War was at the center of his life. Throughout his life, too, he fought private wars—not only against former friends and alienated family members, rebellious students and disaffected church congregations, political opponents and religious critics, but also against the warring impulses in his own complex character. The fuller story of his “checkered career,” moreover, offers a unique vantage upon dimensions of nineteenth-century American culture that in the twenty-first are usually treated separately: religious revivalism and political anarchism; sex, divorce, and Civil War battles; freethinking and the Wild West.
His supporters and admirers elected him to Congress for more than just his reputation as a courageous fighter. He was also known as a learned man—always pacing about camp with a book in his hands—and as a persuasive public speaker. In the House, he was a Republican pushing the Radical agenda for Reconstruction, and he was one of the first to call for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.
After his Congressional term, Kelso returned to Missouri and school teaching, but his life’s path turned sharply again, this time because of the deaths of two of his sons and the failure of his second marriage. Devastated, Kelso moved to California. He became involved in the civic life of Modesto, a railroad boomtown built on wheat, controlled by saloon owners, and occasionally policed by masked vigilantes. In the 1870s, too, he would continue to pursue the studies that led him from Christianity to atheism, delivering the lectures that would constitute the five books he published in the next decade. He also became an outspoken critic of conventional attitudes about sex and marriage, and a promoter of spiritualism.
In Kelso’s final years, his political radicalism intensified. In 1885 he moved to Longmont, Colorado. He declared himself to be an anarchist at a Colorado rally in 1889 and tried to explain what he meant in his final book, Government Analyzed (1892). In that book he also reinterpreted the Civil War, reflecting upon the misguided patriotic “blindness” that had caused him to slaughter his fellow men. Nearly done writing his chapter on “War,” at the end of a discussion of the American Civil War and slavery, and in the middle of a sentence, John R. Kelso, in early January 1891, suffering, he thought, from the lingering effects of an old war wound, put down his pen. He died on January 26.
In the twentieth century, Kelso was quickly forgotten. But the obscure publications and voluminous manuscript writings he left behind tell a remarkable story. In it, Kelso’s marriage and family life cannot be seen as peripheral to his experience as a guerrilla fighter. He had two ambitions linking his public and private lives. He had long wanted a loving companion, a soul-mate by the fireside, and he dreamed of making some grand mark upon history. His wife at home with the children could be the emotional bedrock supporting his military endeavors. When that failed, he turned instead to look first to the approval of his commanding officers and then to the admiration of the men who served under him. Through it all, a nineteenth-century ideal of manhood linked the many dimensions of Kelso’s life—as husband and father as well as teacher and preacher or soldier and politician.
From the log cabins of backwoods Ohio, to the bloody battlefields of Civil War Missouri, to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., during Reconstruction, to the new frontiers in California and Colorado; from conventional notions of marriage to an apparent endorsement of free love and of Mormon polygamy; from evangelicalism to atheism and spiritualism; from patriotic military and government service to an anarchistic critique of American corruption: the fuller story of Kelso’s life not only further illuminates his complicated character but also the broader nineteenth-century American landscape through which he moved and found his way.