app1

The duty next in importance to the vigorous prosecution of the war, is the entire, the immediate, the unconditional wiping out of slavery, not only in Missouri, but in the entire nation. I am aware that in touching upon this subject, I am treading upon dangerous ground, and I expect many of you to differ from me in regard to this matter. The time has come, however, when men should express their real sentiments, and as I am not ashamed of mine and am not seeking public favor, I boldly declare them. Time, I believe, will prove them right.⁵

Though raised among slaves and by ultra proslavery parents, I never was a proslavery man. Alone of all my people, I have advocated the cause of freedom—entire freedom. For this, I have been cast off by my kindred, banished from the great family circle, and, today, because of my principles, I have not the sympathy of a relative on earth of the name. Alone I have stood by the Union, and from my veins has flowed, and must flow, all the Kelso blood that is shed for the glorious old “Star-Spangled Banner.”

Many make a great out cry against using negroes as soldiers.9 They consider it very disgraceful to receive the aid of negroes in war, yet these same persons are not ashamed to depend upon the unrequited labor of negroes, for the very food they eat and the clothes they wear. These objections, so far as I have observed, are made only by persons in sympathy with the rebels, or who are, at best, of doubtful loyalty. For my part, if we had negroes enough, I should be willing for them to do all the fighting. They are good enough to fight rebels, and their lives are no more precious, in my estimation, than are the lives of loyal white men. I have, indeed, more than once, seen the time when I would gladly have received the aid not only of a negro, but even of a dog.

At this point, some one would, perhaps, like to ask whether or not I am a believer in “negro equality.” Far from it. I no more believe that the negro is, in all respects, equal to the white man, than I believe that the least boy on the ground, is equal to me in stature. Individuals are unequal in most respects, and so are nations and races. There is but one respect in which all men are born equal, and that is in respect to their rights. In the sublime language of the Declaration of American Independence, “all men have certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.[”] So far, then, as these rights are concerned, I am a believer in “negro equality,” but no farther. In most other respects, the races are unequal and unlike. God seems to have adapted the one race to one climate and to one mode of life, the other race to another climate and to another mode of life. Besides this, there seems to be a natural law of repulsion between the two races, which makes them incline to separate, when both are left free to act. Miscegenation, then, or the mixing of the two races, must always involve a violation of this natural law of repulsion by which they are put asunder; that is, by the stronger race enslaving the weaker. When both races are free to act, they as naturally tend to separation as do oil and water when at rest. The presence of the negroes among us is the result of the violation, not only of this law of repulsion, but also of the eternal laws of justice. To detain them among us, will be to continue the violation of the same great laws, less we grant to them all the rights enjoyed by other freemen. With this view of the subject, I shall labor earnestly, not only for the emancipation of the slaves, but also of the entire removal of the African race from among us. Should the colonization of the negroes, however, be found impracticable, or should the majority of the loyal voters of the nation oppose it, then I shall contend for the removal of all legal distinctions on account of color.

I am aware that the bare idea of negro suffrage is terrifying to all persons in the least tinctured with rebel sympathies, and it is regarded with suspicion, even by many whose loyalty can not be questioned.10 For my own part, however, I would rather the loyal negroes be allowed the right of suffrage, than that the same right be allowed to rebels and their sympathizers. I think it safer to trust ignorant friends than intelligent enemies. Those who most loudly object to negroes voting usually object also to Federal soldiers voting; and, almost unanimously, favor granting the right of suffrage to returned rebels. It is well known that the negroes are intensely loyal, and that their votes would be unanimously cast in favor [of] the government, and against the cause of treason and rebellion. No wonder, then, that the friends of the rebellion are so bitterly opposed to negro suffrage. There are also many persons who greatly fear lest their daughters may marry free negroes, and lest, in a few years, certain devilish little mulattoes may be calling them “grand pap.” I freely admit that the fears of these gentlemen are well founded. They know from experience how dreadful a thing miscegenation is, and knowing their own proneness to mix with the kinky heads, they may well tremble for their posterity. You who have travelled in the south, and have observed how pale many of the negroes are becoming, will not be surprised at the fears of these gentlemen. For the comfort of these unhappy chivalry, however, I will say that their virtue would be greatly protected by freeing the negroes who would then be far less likely to submit to the unholy desires of said chivalry. If, however, after all, they succeed in gratifying their inclination to mix with the kinky heads, the only difference will be, that in the case of freedom, they will be more likely to know their own posterity than they now are. But enough of this. No truly loyal man has any fears that either himself or his children will ever miscegenate with negroes under any circumstances.

Under the clemency of our great and good President, these thieves and murderers are daily returning among us.11 No way humbled by a consciousness of their crimes, they seem to expect, and in many instances, actually receive more respect and protection than are extended to Union men. If they be allowed to vote, they, with their conservative friends will carry the elections in many parts of our own state. But shall they vote? They claim, as a “southern right,” the privilege of murdering union men, and of plundering and driving off union families; and they will again elevate to office and power such men as are known to favor said southern rights. Where, my beloved countrymen, where is our hope, if these men be allowed the means of our destruction?

When these men took up arms against the government of the United States, they declared themselves aliens and enemies to said government and thus, by their own act, voluntarily forfeited all the rights which they once enjoyed as citizens of the same. Can there, then, be any injustice in regarding them, as they regard themselves, as aliens to our government, and in requiring them to wait, before voting, as long at least as we require the loyal Germans to wait, who come to us because they love our government.¹²

Is it not also right to confiscate their property.13 The Constitution of the United States not only gives us the power, but also makes it our duty to do this. The rebels knew this, when they resorted to arms, and they were willing to risk their chances. With their eyes open, they began an unjust suit against us, and now having lost it, let them pay the costs.

Source: Kelso, “Speech Delivered at Mt. Vernon Mo.,” in “John R. Kelso’s Complete Works,” 1–9.

1. The line “a wilderness of woe” is a common phrase in Christian literature. For example, see The Pilgrimage of Man Wandering in a Wilderness of Woe; Wherein Is Shewed the Calamities of the New World, and How All the Principall Estates Thereof Are Crossed with Miserie (London: [W. White], 1606); the poem “The Hindu’s Song, and the Missionary’s Response,” Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle 29, supplement (1851): 771: “The world is a wilderness, / A wilderness of woe, / Where not a lovely flower appears, / But only rank weeds grow”; and the African American hymn “Is There Anybody Here Who Loves My Jesus”: “This world’s a wilderness of woe, / So let us all to glory go” (http://www.hymnary.org).

2. On Dec. 17, 1860, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Sen. Benjamin Wade (1800–1878) of Ohio had charged that southerners “intend either to rule or ruin this Government” (Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd sess., Dec. 17, 1860, 30, part 1, 102).

3. On fears of a slave power conspiracy, see David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); and Michael William Pfau, The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005).

4. By the spring of 1864, hopes in the North were rising somewhat. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s victory at Vicksburg, Miss., in July 1863 extended “federal control throughout the lower Mississippi valley” and his victories at Chattanooga, Tenn., “opened an invasion route to Atlanta.” Grant was put in overall command of federal forces on March 12, 1864. By April 9 he had an ambitious plan to march simultaneously against all of the Confederacy’s major armies. One component of Grant’s offensive, Gen. Nathaniel Bank’s effort to drive up the Red River in Louisiana to take Mobile, failed by May, “leaving a substantial rebel presence threatening Missouri from the South” (Gerteis, Civil War in Missouri, 179 [quotations]; E. B. Long with Barbara Long, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac 1861–1865 [New York: Da Capo, 1971], 451–511).

5. The Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, though politically important, went no further than previous congressional action and applied only to slaves held in areas over which the federal government had no control. On April 8, 1864, the U.S. Senate passed a joint resolution thirty-eight to six abolishing slavery and approving the 13th Amendment; the House did not pass it with the required two-thirds vote until Jan. 31, 1865. After approval by twenty-seven states, the amendment went into effect on Dec. 18, 1865. Citizens of Missouri ratified the new state constitution, which abolished slavery, on June 6, 1865.

6. Former Confederates after 1865 tried to minimize slavery as the cause of the war, recasting it as a conflict of cultures or over constitutional rights—a revisionism known as the myth of the Lost Cause, a view that also distorted the national memory of the conflict. See Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). It is instructive to compare the statements of Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens when they were president and vice president of the CSA, which proclaimed that slavery was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy (in Stephens’s words), with their postbellum apologia (15, 20).

7. The colonization of freed slaves outside the United States had long been discussed and a few times attempted by (mostly white) opponents of slavery. Lincoln proposed it again in 1862. “In 1863 the U.S. Government sponsored the settlement of 453 colonists on an island near Haiti, but this enterprise also foundered when starvation and smallpox decimated the colony. The administration finally sent a naval vessel to return the 368 survivors to the United States in 1864. This ended official efforts to colonize blacks” (McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 509).

8. Mexicans had been fighting their own civil war. The liberal republicans, led by President Benito Juárez, had been temporarily in control in 1861 when the Mexican Congress suspended payments of foreign debts incurred by the previous (conservative) government. Britain, Spain, and France signed a joint agreement to send troops to extract payment by force. France under Napoleon III had more ambitious plans, and French troops joined with the conservatives to battle the republicans. Although they suffered a humiliating defeat at Puebla on May 5, 1862 (Cinco de Mayo), French troops took Mexico City in June and pushed the republicans north. In Oct. 1863, Napoleon III began the process of installing Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, younger brother of Franz Joseph I of Austria, as emperor of Mexico. On April 4, 1864, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution sponsored by Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis opposing the establishment of a monarchy in Mexico (for a report in the Missouri press, see “The Mexican Monarchy. The Vote on the Recent Declarations of the House—The Diplomatic Correspondence,” St. Louis Daily Missouri Republican, April 12, 1864). Radical Republicans vigorously condemned the assault on North American republicanism and both the Republican and Democratic Party platforms in the campaign of 1864 had planks to that effect, but the Lincoln administration struggled to remain neutral to keep France from recognizing and supporting the Confederacy. After the Union victory in 1865, France began withdrawing troops, and when they did so, republican forces moving back down from the North overwhelmed Maximilian’s troops and the conservatives. Some Union Army veterans helped the republican effort. Maximilian was captured and executed in 1867. See Robert Royal Mille, “Arms across the Border: United States Aid to Juárez during the French Intervention in Mexico,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new ser., 63 (Dec. 1973): 1–68; Jasper Ridley, Maximilian and Juárez (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992); and Robert H. Duncan, “Political Legitimation and Maximilian’s Second Empire in Mexico, 1864–1867,” Mexican Studies 12 (Winter 1996): 27–66.

9. The July 17, 1862, Militia Act permitted the use of blacks as soldiers in the Union Army. Regiments began to be formed in August, and the Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, sanctioned the practice (McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 500, 564–65).

10. On black suffrage in Missouri, see Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, and Margaret Leola Dwight, “Black Suffrage in Missouri, 1865–1877” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1978). German Radicals generally supported giving blacks the vote, though many other Radicals had deep reservations, and conservatives (including most Democrats) were strongly opposed. In Oct. 1865, the Missouri Equal Rights League was organized in a St. Louis black church and began petition drives in support of black suffrage. In early 1868, the Republican Party leadership officially endorsed the idea, but in the fall 1868 elections, otherwise a landslide for the Radicals, a public referendum on black suffrage was defeated by nearly 19,000 votes (out of almost 130,000 cast). Congress, however, passed the 15th Amendment in Feb. 1869. Both houses of Missouri’s Radical Republican–dominated legislature quickly endorsed it. The requisite number of states had ratified it by March 30, 1870. But on the limitations of the amendment, see, for example, Foner, Reconstruction, 422–23, 446–49.

11. Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, issued on Dec. 8, 1863, offered a full pardon and the restoration of all rights to those who took a loyalty oath and accepted the abolition of slavery. The proclamation, however, was aimed at and was an initial plan of reconstruction for southern states that had left the Union. In Missouri, a slave state that had remained in the Union, the political rights of former rebels were fiercely debated by conservative and radical Unionists. See Foner, Reconstruction, 35–43.

12. Missouri’s wartime state (Unionist) government in Oct. 1861 required voters to take a loyalty oath, and in June 1862 debated its wording. “Some of the members wanted to prohibit from voting all persons who had ever taken up arms against the state and national government or had supported [the rebellion] in any way. Others … argued that it was unfair to exclude those who had forsaken the cause of the Southern Confederacy and were again loyal citizens. … Instead, the majority decided to allow the vote only to those who had set aside their weapons before December 17, 1861” (Boman, Lincoln and Citizen’s Rights, 139–40). In Oct. 1863, Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield admitted to Lincoln that a large number of “returned Missouri rebels” had claimed that they had repented, taken their oath, and enlisted in the militia; Schofield thought that such allegedly “repentant rebel[s]” were useful in preventing more property damage. The Radicals triumphed in the fall elections of 1864 and controlled the state constitutional convention in the spring of 1865, passing a more stringent “Iron-Clad Oath” in which an applicant had to deny a list of eighty-six specific acts before being registered to vote. See Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 169–70 (quotations), 202.

13. The Confiscation Act of Aug. 1861 authorized the seizure of property that was being directly used to aid the rebellion. The Second Confiscation Act of July 1862 allowed the confiscation of property (including slaves) to punish “traitors,” but the law was confusing and virtually unenforced (McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 353, 500 [quotation]; Foner, Reconstruction, 158). Some Radical Republicans in Congress pushed during the war and afterward for a much broader confiscation of rebel property. Thaddeus Stevens, for example, offered a plan in Sept. 1865 that would seize 400 million acres from the wealthiest 10% of southerners. He would distribute some of it to black freedmen (forty acres and a mule), and the rest would be sold to pay veterans’ pensions, compensate for loyalists’ wartime losses, and reduce the national debt (Foner, Reconstruction, 68, 235). In Missouri, Radical Republicans, especially from the western part of the state that had suffered the most from guerrilla warfare, “called for the confiscation of ‘rebel’ property and expressed regret that every disloyal person could not be hanged” (Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 29).

14. Kelso decided to run anyway as an “Independent Republican.” He defeated Boyd in a very close race (a difference of 113 votes, according to one count, out of a total 8,225)—the Democrat, M. J. Hubble, received only 400 votes. Boyd challenged the result; evidence collected and put before the House amounted to over 170 printed pages. Kelso kept his seat. See www.ourcampaigns.com, drawing data from Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997: The Official Results (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998), but compare John L. Moore et al., eds., Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections, 4th ed., vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2001), 890, which has Kelso and Boyd 293 votes apart. On the election challenge, see “Evidence in the Contested Case of Boyd vs. Kelso,” 39th Cong., 1st sess., Misc. Doc. No. 92, in The Miscellaneous Documents of the House of Representatives, Printed during the Thirty-Ninth Congress, 1865–’66, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. 1866). On Boyd, see chap. 2, note 16, above.