John Russell Kelso (1831–91), who fought for the Union Army in Missouri, experienced the Civil War in several different ways: as an infantry private marching with his regiment to fight in large battles, as a spy traveling in disguise through enemy territory and gathering intelligence, as a cavalry officer leading his company against Confederate guerrillas and outlaws, and as a lone gunman emerging like a ghost from the dark woods to take revenge on the secessionists who had wronged him. He was also a soldier away from his family, worried that his wife would come to love him less in his absence and suffering at the news of his child’s death.
Kelso saw both aspects of the conflict that tore apart Missouri: the conventional battles of uniformed armies facing each other on battlefields and the brutal guerrilla warfare in which neighbors burned down each other’s homes and gunned one another down on their doorsteps. The importance of conventional warfare in Civil War Missouri has long been slighted by historians captivated by the larger scale of battles east of the Mississippi (Union and Confederate commanders fought with hundreds or thousands of men in the West and with tens of thousands in the East). But soldiers had the same chance of dying or being maimed in western battles. Moreover, their victories and defeats in Missouri had important strategic significance, with control of the lower Mississippi Valley and the Missouri River’s western corridor hanging in the balance. As a foot soldier, cavalry officer, and spy, Kelso worked to keep Missouri in Union hands and in doing so disrupt the Confederacy’s larger defensive strategy.1
Even when Union armies pushed the Confederacy’s conventional forces out of the state, however, smaller squads of southern partisans, sometimes collaborating with local guerrillas, continued to strike at targets throughout the Missouri countryside, especially in the counties bordering Kansas and Arkansas. Some of this vicious fighting was an outgrowth of the Border War of the late 1850s between Kansas Free Soilers and proslavery Missourians. Some was the result of a descent into lawlessness as the norms of civilized behavior broke down. As Kelso hunted guerrillas and bandits throughout the Ozarks, the rules of war were bent, twisted, and sometimes broken completely.2
The extant wartime chapters of Kelso’s handwritten “Auto-Biography” and two of his political speeches from 1864 and 1865, all published here for the first time, present a fascinating account of this extraordinary ordinary man’s battlefield experiences as well as his evolving interpretation of what the Civil War meant. Kelso’s experience of the Civil War is revealing but hardly typical, and his narrative is much more than a conventional soldier’s memoir of battles and skirmishes. Kelso began writing his autobiography in the early 1880s. A bookseller—perhaps one of the few people to have seen the manuscript—later wrote that Kelso was “a remarkable man … the history of whose life reads more like romance than reality.” The historian Wiley Britton, however, could have verified that Kelso’s war stories were not colorful fictions. Like Kelso, Britton had fought for the Union Army in Missouri during the Civil War. Britton published his own Memoirs of the Rebellion on the Border, 1863 and a two-volume history, The Civil War on the Border, among other books. The latter work was based in part on several thousand postwar interviews Britton conducted in Missouri as he investigated pension and property compensation claims for the War Department. Stories of Kelso’s “fearless operations against Southern bandits were familiar to nearly every family in Southwest Missouri,” Britton wrote, and he heard from “the many witnesses examined who had reminiscences to relate of [Kelso’s] daring acts in the war.” But Britton also had a brother and brother-in-law who had served with Kelso, and the historian had corresponded with the man himself. While those who sympathized with the Confederacy hated Kelso and even called him a monster, Britton thought of him as a hero who “was without fear and a genius in many respects and like a tiger in his warlike activities.”3
Britton had heard that Kelso had written “an account of his life and adventures in the war” but “was never able to locate the manuscript.”4 Indeed, the manuscript of Kelso’s “Auto-Biography” seems to have disappeared sometime after his death in 1891. A partial version carrying his life story up to early 1863, which Kelso in the early 1880s had copied into a folio ledger book containing some of his other written works, also vanished from public view for a century. Although a forgotten figure by the early 1900s, Kelso—the preacher and schoolteacher turned Civil War guerrilla fighter who subsequently became a congressman calling for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, then later a public agnostic, a spiritualist lecturer, and eventually an anarchist—lived a remarkable and controversial life.
Before the War
John R. Kelso was born on March 23, 1831. With his father, mother, and five siblings, Kelso spent most of his first decade in a small log cabin on a new farm they tried to carve out of the “wilderness” of central Ohio. In the fall of 1840, the family moved to Daviess County, Missouri. The autobiography’s early chapters portray a boy growing up in a rough backwoods cabin and becoming ashamed of his patched trousers and dirty bare feet. Kelso describes his traumatic religious conversion in his fourteenth year, an experience mingled with his overwhelming desire for a local minister’s pretty daughter. He educated himself by the light of the fireplace, became a schoolteacher and Methodist preacher, and married seventeen-year-old Mary Adelia Moore in the fall of 1851.5
Kelso felt successful in everything but wedded life. The couple had two children—Florella in 1854 and Florellus in 1856—but Kelso’s young, unhappy wife seemed forever on the verge of a mental breakdown. She finally confessed to being in love with another man. When Kelso announced the end of his marriage from his pulpit, his congregation turned against him. Kelso then left the church in a spectacular fashion, intending, as he put it, “to burst a bomb in the camp of the Lord and to leave all in consternation.” His private studies had led him to doubt some of the central tenets of Methodism, and of Christianity itself. But being rejected by his congregation had pushed him over the edge. So at the annual conference of Methodist ministers he stood up and renounced the faith. Opponents—including his father-in-law—tried to silence his heresies by blaming him for destroying his marriage. Kelso nearly responded with a pistol. By the end of 1856, he wrote, he found himself “a wifeless, homeless, churchless, and almost friendless and moneyless wanderer upon the earth. I was free, however, and the world was before me.” He considered the possibility of becoming a mercenary in Central America: “I thought of my two little children, however, who would need me, and my desire to rise above my enemies, finally induced me to take what I suppose was a wiser course.”6
By the spring of 1861, Kelso had rebuilt his life. He had earned a degree at Pleasant Ridge College and established a successful school in Buffalo, Missouri, the Dallas County seat. He had married one of his students, Susie Barnes, and they lived with the two children from his first marriage and a child (Iantha) the couple had together on a “beautiful little farm” about a mile and a half from town. But circumstances would again prompt him to stand up alone and declare heretical principles before a hostile community, throwing another bomb into another congregation as he asserted his independence. The attack on Fort Sumter and the rallying of secessionist sympathizers in Missouri prompted the schoolteacher to take a stand—and caused his life to take a dramatic turn.7
Missouri had a population of more than 1,180,000, including nearly 115,000 slaves. Most of the state’s enslaved people worked in households or in small groups on farms, not large plantations: a quarter of the state’s 24,000 slaveholders had only one slave and nearly three-quarters held less than five. Yet the dominant political culture was clearly pro-southern and proslavery: 85 percent of the men elected to office in the 1850s were slaveholders. In the presidential election of 1860, Missourians split 117,000 votes between the two candidates who continued to try to compromise on the slavery question: Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party. Missouri voters gave the 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, slightly more than 17,000 votes. Democrat Claiborne Fox Jackson, who endorsed Douglas but was actually a man of strong pro-southern sentiments, won the governor’s race.8
In Dallas County, too, about 70 percent of the voters chose either Douglas or Bell, though Breckinridge ran stronger and Lincoln weaker. Kelso’s town of Buffalo had more of a pro-southern tilt than either the county or the state. Benton Township, which included Buffalo, was on average wealthier than the other five townships in the county. Over 18 percent of Benton households listed occupations other than farming, as opposed to fewer than 4 percent for the rest of the county. The county had 5,892 residents (1,024 families) in 1860; 40 were slaveholders, who held 114 slaves. Thirteen of those slaveholders, holding 37 slaves, lived in Benton. So in Dallas County as a whole, slightly less than 4 percent of households had slaves; in Benton, 8 percent did. The number of household heads born in slaveholding states, however, was somewhat higher in the county at large than in Benton: 84 as compared to 76 percent. A majority in the county came from the upper South, especially Tennessee. Slavery for many of the hardscrabble white farmers and Ozark Mountain folk who favored it was valued less as a vital economic system than as a guarantor of white supremacy.9
Kelso himself, though he came from an ardently proslavery family, hated the institution and resented haughty slaveholders, but before the spring of 1861 he had kept his opinions to himself. Events made that no longer possible. Seven southern states, beginning with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, seceded from the Union. In his January inaugural address, Governor Jackson insisted that Missouri would stand with its sister slaveholding states. In St. Louis, site of a large federal arsenal, paramilitary organizations on both sides started organizing and drilling. Temporarily dashing the private hopes of Jackson and a powerful group of pro-southern legislators, the state constitutional convention, which met in March, rejected secession. Then, on April 12, 1861, the South Carolina militia attacked the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor.10
Kelso’s Civil War
Jackson quickly rejected Lincoln’s call on April 15 for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion: “Your requisition, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with. Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on any such unholy crusade.” On April 22, the governor called for a special session of the legislature to reorganize the militia, and on May 3 he called for the militia to assemble. Claiming in public to be assuming a defensive posture of “armed neutrality” in the conflict between North and South, behind the scenes the governor was trying to maneuver Missouri out of the Union, and he wrote to Confederate president Jefferson Davis requesting artillery. By May 6, nearly nine hundred militiamen had established “Camp Jackson” on the eastern edge of St. Louis, threatening, the Unionists thought, the federal arsenal there.11
The fearful excitement that Kelso so vividly describes electrified citizens in all the states, North and South, but was especially intense in border states like Missouri where sentiment was divided. Secessionists and Unionists began arming and mobilizing across the state, the balance of power between them shifting from county to county. Sometimes the words and actions of a few people could help tip that balance one way or another. In Buffalo, Kelso mounted the courthouse steps and in front of a strongly pro-southern citizenry denounced Claiborne Jackson and his secessionist supporters as traitors. In Hickory County, the pro-southern forces took the initiative, organizing around the rhetoric of a few local orators and the military leadership of a former sheriff. In Newton County, secessionist speakers held a rally and passed resolutions in favor of Jackson and the Confederacy. When they tried to do the same thing in Dallas County, Kelso and his allies disrupted the meeting and rallied support for the Union. Kelso’s description of that volatile scene and his account of his impassioned argument in favor of the Union (see chapter 1) resemble the experience of Robert Pinckney Matthews, a young pro-Union orator at a heated debate in Springfield. There, however, political sentiment was more evenly divided and voicing opposition to secession was, for the moment, less dangerous. As in other counties, in Kelso’s Dallas, the Unionists organized Home Guard militia regiments to counter the mobilization of Jackson’s State Guard.12
On May 10, Capt. Nathaniel Lyon, commander of the St. Louis Arsenal, surrounded Camp Jackson with about eight thousand troops and forced the militiamen to surrender even before they had a chance to unpack the four Confederate artillery guns they had smuggled into camp. As Lyon’s men marched the militia under guard through the streets of St. Louis to the arsenal, enraged civilians began pelting the Federals with rocks and debris. The raw troops, many of whom had enlisted only a few weeks before, fired into the crowd and soon twenty-eight people were dead—a bloodletting that struck southern sympathizers and even some moderates as a sure sign of federal tyranny.13
Lyon, promoted to brigadier general while being called a murderer in the pro-southern press, met with Governor Jackson on June 11. Lyon was a stubborn Republican abolitionist from Connecticut, and he refused to compromise with what he considered to be treason. “This means war,” he said, abruptly ending the meeting and walking out of the room. The next day Jackson called for 50,000 state volunteers to enlist in the State Guard and resist federal despotism. The day after that, Lyon led a force of about 2,500 from St. Louis to the state capital in Jefferson City, but by the time he got there, Jackson and his State Guard force had already evacuated to the southwest.14
In July, Lyon’s army, growing with new recruits, was moving toward Springfield in the southwest and toward an engagement with the State Guard, which was also growing and would be joined by Confederate forces coming up from Arkansas. Not far from Springfield, Kelso’s Dallas County Home Guard regiment was hunting rebels and planning to support Lyon. Kelso met Lyon at Springfield in early August, just days before the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. At that battle on August 10, the second major one of the Civil War (the Union had lost at Bull Run in Virginia on July 21), State Guard and Confederate forces of about 12,000 men defeated Lyon’s army of 5,400. General Lyon was killed and became the first general to be mourned and celebrated as a martyr in the northern press. As Union troops retreated to the northeast, Kelso’s Home Guard regiment broke up. Although he had been a major in the Home Guard, he enlisted in the 24th Infantry Regiment as a private to make a point about putting patriotism before self-interest. But even as a private his special talents were quickly recognized: by late August he was heading back alone to enemy-occupied Springfield on a spy mission.15
The commander of Union forces in Missouri was now Gen. John C. Frémont, famous from the antebellum period as the so-called Pathfinder of the West and a presidential candidate in 1856. But Frémont insulated himself behind a bloated staff and seemed more interested in elaborate uniforms and expensive fortifications than in taking decisive action in the field. He quickly alienated his main political supporters in Missouri. His martial law decree of August 30 angered Abraham Lincoln by announcing that anyone found with arms within Union lines would be shot and by declaring that all rebels’ slaves would be freed. The first provision would have prompted the enemy to retaliate in kind. The emancipation provision moved much more quickly on the slavery issue than Lincoln, desperate to keep the border states in the Union, was willing to go. The president rescinded both provisions. And on November 2 Frémont, who by that time had moved a large army very slowly back down to Springfield, was removed from command.16
As winter came to southwest Missouri in late 1861, the Union Army again retreated, leaving loyal Missourians at the mercy of local southerners. Jackson and his pro-southern legislature had reconvened in Neosho, in the southwest corner of the state, and had passed an ordinance of secession on October 28. The Unionist state convention in St. Louis had appointed a new provisional state government back in July. Lincoln and the United States recognized the provisional government; Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy recognized Jackson and his portion of the old state legislature, and welcomed Missouri into the Confederacy. To citizens in southwest Missouri, what mattered most was which military power was in charge. And when the Union retreated a second time, secessionists turned on their Unionist neighbors. A petition from the southwest to the new Union commander pleaded for help and claimed that Confederate troops and local vigilantes had robbed three to five thousand people of their money, food, clothing, and shoes, and then forced them from their homes into the cold to starve. Kelso, evacuating loyal citizens from Buffalo, saw this happen to his own and other families, and he swore that he would get revenge.17
The next Union effort to push the Confederates out of southwest Missouri was led by Gen. Samuel R. Curtis. After going on some spy missions for Curtis, including one where he was captured and sentenced to death but escaped, Kelso rejoined his regiment and marched south with Curtis in February 1862, chasing an army led by Gen. Sterling Price. The Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, on March 6–8 was a decisive victory for the Union. Confederates would never again occupy a significant amount of Missouri territory.18
In early April, Kelso began his career in the Missouri State Militia Cavalry as a lieutenant. Although large Confederate armies no longer held territory in Missouri, smaller groups constantly raided from Arkansas, and local guerrilla bands as well as outlaw gangs with southern sympathies continually harassed the countryside. Kelso’s regiment’s first major encounter with the enemy was a stinging defeat on May 30 at Neosho—a disaster he blamed on the incompetence (at best) of his commanding officer, Col. John M. Richardson. Not every expedition after that was honorable and heroic. On one scout in particular, under the command of Maj. John C. Wilbur, Kelso saw how plundering Union officers could be nearly as bad as the rebel bandits they were supposed to be thwarting. But by the summer of 1862 Kelso and his friend Capt. Milton Burch began to establish their reputations as guerrilla fighters. In August they defeated Col. Robert Lawther’s Confederate raiders twice. In September Kelso led a daring attack on the Medlock brothers’ outlaw hideout. In another raid, Kelso again disguised himself as a Confederate to capture rebels and attack a saltpeter mine (for making gunpowder).
Kelso’s manuscript autobiography ends with his account of the Battle of Springfield and its aftermath in January 1863. Confederate general John S. Marmaduke had moved his brigade quickly up from Arkansas and intended to take arms and provisions at the undermanned post at Springfield. After a day of intense fighting, the defenders, including soldiers pulled from their hospital beds, held the town. Kelso fought on the battlefield all day and then crept into the rebel camp to spy at night. “You and your troops are heroes,” General Curtis telegrammed the post commander from St. Louis. When the battle was over, southern sympathizers, assuming Marmaduke had won, drove wagons into town for their share of the booty and to make deals with the conquerors. One man, trying to sell some horses, mistook Kelso for a Confederate officer. Kelso, as he had done many times before, used the case of mistaken identity to his advantage and pounced. He took the man’s horses and forced him into Union service at the point of a bayonet: “Now you shall help us or die. You do not deserve the treatment of a prisoner of war, and you will not receive it. We are Federals; I am Kelso; now you know what to expect.”19
People in war-torn Missouri increasingly came to know what to expect from Kelso. Large Confederate forces made other strikes from the south: Marmaduke again in April 1863; Col. Jo Shelby in October 1863; Gen. Sterling Price in September 1864. Week to week in southwestern Missouri, however, the threat was from raids by smaller groups of Confederates, local guerrilla bands, and gangs of bandits. Kelso and the 8th Missouri State Militia Calvary spent most of the war battling these groups. It was against them that Kelso made a name for himself.
Kelso’s ascent was only briefly interrupted by a court martial on March 11, 1863. He had been accused of “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” His commanding officer, Capt. Samuel A. Flagg, charged that back in January, in camp at Ozark, Kelso had refused an order to march to Forsyth, considering it a “wild goose chase.” Kelso admitted that he had asked to see Flagg’s written orders before marching but explained that there had been problems with officers (including, he strongly implied, Flagg) issuing orders while drunk. Kelso was acquitted and immediately returned to duty. A month later, during Marmaduke’s second raid into Missouri (April 18–May 1, 1863), Kelso dressed in civilian clothes to trick rebel cattle thieves into thinking that he was Marmaduke’s dispatch bearer. The ruse led to four dead cattle rustlers and the recovery of forty head of cattle.20
Kelso became known for riding his claybank horse, Hawkeye, and for carrying a large shotgun rather than a rifle. “Hawkeye seemed to possess, like Kelso, a charmed life,” according to later recollections. “The horse was never touched in battle, though often the most conspicuous target for Confederate bullets.” As for Kelso’s favorite weapon, a reporter later wrote that “Kelso killed his first Confederate with a shotgun and he would never exchange the weapon for any of the improved army rifles.” Yet when his luck finally evaporated in the late summer and early fall of 1863, it was a shotgun blast and an accident with Hawkeye that gave him injuries that would trouble him for the rest of his life.21
While battling guerrillas in Carthage on August 7, 1863, he received the contents of a double-barrel shotgun in the chest and left hand. A doctor was able to pick out the thirteen buckshot that did not penetrate deeper than the skin on his chest but had to leave one, which remained lodged painfully beneath his sternum. Some buckshot remained embedded in his left hand too, permanently limiting the use of two fingers. A month later, on September 7, he was riding with Burch and his men after bushwhackers who had captured some sutler’s wagons in Laurence County. Hawkeye, getting tangled in a hitch rope in the pursuit, turned a somersault and landed on Kelso. Both of the lieutenant’s hips were injured (the right one was dislocated). For the rest of his life, Kelso complained of a hernia and kidney problems that he attributed to this accident. Whether from getting crushed by Hawkeye or from some other incident, Kelso also injured his left shoulder, leaving it permanently higher than the right one. In later years, he would be reminded of his injuries whenever he tried to get in or out of a chair, put on an overcoat, or touch the buckshot still lodged in his hand and chest.22
His injuries, however, did not keep him from the field for long. The records show him attacking rebels in Jasper County in November 1863. In the spring of 1864, after being promoted to captain, he rode against the 2nd Cherokee Indian Regiment in Spavinaw, Arkansas; insurgents at Mill Creek and Honey Creek, Missouri; and a guerilla band near Neosho. Burch reported that on an expedition to Cowskin Creek on August 13, 1864, Kelso engaged and killed “Lieutenant Baxter, a noted bushwhacker.” In early October, Kelso was providing intelligence on the advance of Confederate General Price’s army before the Battle of Westport. A month later, Kelso’s Unionist admirers elected him to Congress.23
Hero or Monster
Kelso’s exploits made Union Army veteran and historian Wiley Britton think of Ulysses and Diomed in the Tenth Book of the Iliad, Greek warriors who entered a Trojan camp at night, slaughtered enemy soldiers, and triumphantly returned with trophies. “But this grandest of scenes in the description of individual heroism in war scarcely surpasses some of the daring acts of Kelso, the student, teacher, and soldier.”24
Kelso was remembered as a polite and scholarly man, always pacing about camp with a book in his hands, but especially as a fighter with remarkable courage. Britton commented repeatedly about Kelso’s reputation for fearlessness. Describing one skirmish, Britton wrote that Kelso “displayed his usual tact, daring, and coolness. In fact, it was asserted by those who had served with him from the beginning of the war that he never became disconcerted under the most trying situations.” Kelso “frequently exposed himself in the most perilous situations without any outward signs of fear or excitement. He was always equal to an emergency. When in a fight or dangerous situation, no interposing obstacle disconcerted him at the critical moment.” Britton recorded several stories to illustrate the point that “as far as outward signs were concerned, [Kelso] seems to have been absolutely without fear.” On one occasion, Kelso was scouting in southern Taney County with a small detachment of his men when he learned that several southern families were sheltering pro-Confederate bandits:
Early the next morning he surrounded one of the houses in which some of the bandits were known to have spent the night, taking himself the most dangerous position. Coming up in front of the house, he saw three bandits within, and keeping his eyes on them and his hands on his shotgun in the position of “ready,” crossed the fence and started for the door. In a moment after crossing the fence, a big dog came snarling and growling at him and seized him by the calf of the leg. Not in the least disconcerted by this unexpected attack of the dog, he stopped, and keeping his eyes on the bandits took with his right hand his revolver from the scabbard, and feeling for the dog’s neck shot the beast dead. He proceeded as if nothing had happened, and entering the door, found that the bandits had escaped through the opposite door. His daring amazed them so that they fled without firing a single shot at him.25
Kelso’s “name was connected with so many acts of daring adventure in Southern and Southwest Missouri during the war,” and he “was so much talked about by the Unionists and secessionists” in that region, Britton wrote, “on account of the numerous victims upon whom his avenging hands had fallen.” Of course, “he was popular with and liked by the Unionists and sincerely hated by the Southern people.” R. I. Holcombe, a less sympathetic local historian writing in the early 1880s, called Kelso “a desperate man” who was “fanatical in his Unionism” and who believed that all Confederates were traitors deserving death: “It is said of him that he killed many a man without a cause. Stories are told of him that make him appear … fit only to be denominated a monster, and entitled only to execration. Doubtless some of these stories are exaggerations, but the fact remains that Kelso was a ‘bad man,’ and held human life in very cheap estimation.”26
In 1893, the St. Louis Republic published an article of over 5,300 words that conveyed something of both sides. “The Scout of the Ozarks: John R. Kelso’s Mysterious and Bloody Career in Southwest Missouri” was based on interviews with people who knew him and knew of him, including three men who had fought at his side. Kelso’s name, the reporter wrote, was still “spoken with a shudder by many people along the Missouri and Arkansas border, though nearly 30 years of peace have helped to sustain or palliate the deeds of this fanatical partisan of the Union cause.” Some of the stories about the man might “sound like the nursery tales of mythical desperadoes,” but, the journalist assured his readers, they were “well authenticated by witnesses still living.” The article described Kelso as “brave to the point of recklessness” and marveled at his preternatural composure under fire: “Kelso was a man of phenomenal self-control. He never lost his cool, methodical judgment in the most perilous situations. He could not be scared by any unexpected assault. He loved to fight, but the intoxication of hand-to-hand encounter only steadied the man’s nerves and sharpened his perceptions.” But the reporter also described him as a remorseless, ferocious, inhuman “rebel-killer” who “butchered his victims” with an “unforgiving heart.”27
Even in Britton’s appreciative account Kelso’s darker side can be seen. In the episode with the dog, for example, after Kelso entered through the front door, “he shot the man of the house and severely wounded his son, holding that those who gave aid and comfort to the bandits were as deserving of punishment as the bandits themselves.” The author of “The Scout of the Ozarks,” who heard the same story from an eyewitness, added details that painted an even more brutal picture:
An old man was found in the cabin, whose wife and son, a young man hardly grown, completed the family. Kelso shot down the aged husband and father as soon as the fleeing soldiers dodged his aim. The boy ran out of the house and was climbing over the fence around a little “truck patch” when the Captain fired the other barrel of his shot-gun at him. The lad fell down among some pea vines and Kelso thought he was killed. The wounded youth crawled under the matted vines and escaped to tell in after years his sad story. Kelso went back into the house and searched for more soldiers and left the helpless old woman alone with her dead husband and, as she thought, murdered boy.28
Friend and foe alike marveled at “the fearless and energetic manner in which Kelso had hunted down the bandits, frequently penetrating their most secret hiding places and engaging them in hand-to-hand conflicts.” Both his admirers and detractors remembered a story about a trophy quilt. The reporter for the St. Louis Republic heard it from a Mart Hancock, who had served in Kelso’s cavalry regiment. Britton told the tale this way:
While stationed at Ozark, in Christian County, he made a scout with his company into the White River Mountains of Taney County, near the Arkansas line, and encamped for the night in the vicinity where a small party of bandits had their retreat. After supper he started out afoot to reconnoiter for information as to whether there really were any Southern bandits in the neighborhood. He returned to his camp about dark, and told his men that he had found where the marauders were camped, and that he intended to visit them that night. He offered to let any of his men accompany him who desired to do so, but the night was dark, and they knew that some desperate plot was in his mind, and no one volunteered. He started out alone, prepared for bloody work, and returned the next morning with six horses, saddled and bridled. His account of his night’s adventure, as he related it to his men on his return, was thrilling in the extreme. It is not necessary to follow him over each devious step after he left camp, for the adventure itself shows him moving along cautiously over the dim path through the darkness to the immediate vicinity of the camp of the bandits, carefully scanning every object in front, with revolver in hand and ears alert to the slightest sound in any direction. After he gets up near to the marauders’ camp, who can follow him through his careful reconnoitering of it on up to the commencement of his terrible slaughter, without his heart beating audibly? He finds three bandits sleeping under their crude shelter, and as he has already found six horses saddled near at hand. Where are the comrades of the sleeping bandits? He ascertains that the sleeping bandits are covered with a beautiful quilt, which he desires to take unstained with blood as a trophy, and carefully draws it off them, and in another moment like a tiger springs on his victims and shoots them to death before they are conscious of danger. In the short and desperate struggle the comrades of the victims do not come to their rescue, and Kelso mounts one of the horses standing saddled and rides it into camp, leading the other five as trophies of his bloody adventure.
Greek heroes Ulysses and Diomed, too, had slain sleeping Trojan soldiers before making off with their horses and chariot. Britton was quick to explain that despite Kelso’s interest in trophies, “he was never charged with committing acts of plunder, or of turning captured property into channels of private gain,” but Britton admitted that Kelso’s “acts were of course characterized as cruel by those who sympathized with the South.”29
Britton admired Kelso’s intellect as well as his courage: “He was a great student of languages, philosophy, and mathematics,” Britton wrote. “He had an insatiable thirst for knowledge—knowledge, too, of the profoundest depths.” Holcombe, the Missouri historian writing in the early 1880s, called Kelso a “transcendentalist” who was “well versed in all the dogmas of the schools of modern thought. It is said that he always carried a book of some sort in his saddle pockets, and frequently engaged in the study of mental philosophy and the subtleties of metaphysics while lying in the brush by the roadside waiting to ‘get the drop’ on a rebel!” The Republic’s reporter wondered how “this strange man could return from a bloody scout and take up his studies with as much earnestness as though he had been at college preparing for commencement.” Britton commended Kelso’s “characteristic earnestness.” Holcombe concluded that “much learning made him mad.” Britton noted Kelso’s self-discipline: “He was strictly temperate in his habits of life, and he prided himself in asserting that he had never taken a chew of tobacco, nor used the weed in any form; nor touched a drop of intoxicants of any kind. No language ever escaped his lips that was not fit for the most refined and cultured ears.” Holcombe recorded that Kelso “believed in diet and plenty of exercise as brain-producing elements” and dismissed him as a “crank.”30
Britton did not dismiss Kelso, but he struggled to explain what drove the man to pursue his foes with such relentless determination. Britton speculated that as a spy who had entered the enemy’s camps, Kelso had seen firsthand how Confederates mistreated Union prisoners and heard how rebels, conspicuous before the war “for their domineering conduct towards political opponents,” now boasted of killing Union men for trifling causes. According to Britton, Kelso refused to be promoted any higher than a captain of a company because he did not want to miss “the opportunity of participating in the personal conflicts with the enemy, which appears to have been almost a burning desire with him.”31
The War Continued as Politics
Kelso reported that friends and admirers started mentioning his name for Congress even before the fall election in 1862. He was able to set aside his reservations about splitting the Republican vote for the 1864 contest and ran as an Independent Republican against the sitting congressman and Republican Party nominee Col. Sempronius H. Boyd, previously Kelso’s commanding officer in the 24th Regiment, Infantry Volunteers. Granted a short leave from his regiment, Kelso rode throughout his district campaigning and carrying, it was said, his oversized shotgun. The vote was very close, with about 100 to 300 votes separating the candidates out of more than 8,200 cast. Kelso was declared the winner, but Boyd challenged the election, charging that several hundred votes for Kelso were illegal—cast by nonresidents, minors, and voters who had not first taken the prescribed oath. After a subcommittee investigation, which produced over 170 printed pages of evidence, Kelso retained his seat.32
Through the election, Kelso became known in widely circulated press accounts as the guerrilla fighter who had vowed “that he would not cut his hair and beard until he had killed twenty-five bushwhackers with his own hand. He recently passed through St. Louis for Washington, close-cropped, and boasts that his vow is fulfilled.” A description of Congressman Kelso first published in the New-York Daily Tribune multiplied the body count:
In another part of the House stands a little, small person, barely beyond boyhood, with eyes and hair of midnight black, yet looking and moving like a tiger. This is John R. Kelso of extreme Southern Missouri, who is said to have killed more than 60 Rebels with his own hand. He is scarred and shot from sole to crown, and in the border episodes of the war holds a strange wild prominence, where in the bitterness of the fight he retorted upon individual Rebels the violence they inaugurated, and hunted them, alone and persistently, like one in a vendetta. Here he is quiet, amiable, grave; but this studded roof, with its soft emblematic medallions, are in odd consonance with the dark and bloody vistas he has haunted.
The account was wrong on at least two points: Kelso was neither small nor young. He was six feet tall, two hundred pounds, and in 1866 he was thirty-five years old. But even the Missouri press, which liked to laugh when eastern tenderfoots romanticized and exaggerated the daring deeds of Missouri heroes, helped build the legend of John R. Kelso. The Springfield Patriot snorted derisively at an article on “Wild Bill” Hickok in Harper’s Monthly, which claimed that Bill had personally dispatched not a few dozen but several hundred rebels with his own hands. “We dare say that Captain Kelso, our present member of Congress, did double the execution ‘with his own hands’ on the Johnnies, during the war, that Bill did.” (Kelso’s military record claimed that he had personally killed twenty-six enemy combatants.)33
The term of the 39th U.S. Congress ran from March 4, 1865, to March 3, 1867. Gen. Robert E. Lee did not surrender at Appomattox Court House until April 9, 1865, and even after he did, there were still over ninety thousand Confederate soldiers in the field. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, the attempted assassination of Secretary of State William H. Seward, and the planned assassination of Vice President Andrew Johnson on April 14 convinced many in the Union that the war was continuing in a new form. In May, some Confederates west of the Mississippi still persisted in thinking that they could keep fighting. Despite President Johnson’s proclamation on May 10 that the armed insurrection had virtually ended, Union soldiers continued to fight guerrillas in Missouri through the end of May and skirmishes went on in Texas.34
Even as violence threatened a final achievement of peace and security, political resistance threatened to overturn what had been won on the battlefield. The war had simply assumed “the form of political contest,” Kelso said in a speech given at Walnut Grove, Missouri, on September 19, 1865: “Armies are no longer hurled upon armies … yet the real struggle, the irrepressible conflict of antagonistic principles, is still going on. Slavery, though dead in name, still exists in reality. The rebellion, though overthrown in arms, is by no means subdued in spirit; nor has treason yet been made odious. Unpunished traitors, emboldened by the lenity of our government, are still plotting its destruction.” Kelso, the sole Independent Republican in the House, aligned himself with the Radical wing of the large Republican majority. Radicals insisted that the rights of citizens, including black ones, must be protected. Like the leading Radical in the House, Thaddeus Stevens, Kelso believed that the seceding states had given up their rights as states and could now be treated as conquered territories; like leading Senate Radical Charles Sumner, Kelso held that the Declaration of Independence was as foundational as anything in the Constitution and that it demanded equality before the law.35
Andrew Johnson did everything he could to block the Radical Republican Reconstruction agenda. Johnson, previously a slaveholding Democrat, began courting southern leaders in June 1865, and through the rest of the year welcomed provisional governments in the South that empowered former secessionists and restricted black civil rights. In 1866, Johnson vetoed the bill to enlarge the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau and then the Civil Rights Act, though the latter veto was overridden and passed. In 1867, he vetoed the law giving the vote to African Americans in the District of Columbia and then the First Reconstruction Act (both vetoes were overridden and passed). On January 7, 1867, on behalf of the Radical caucus, Kelso followed his Missouri colleague Benjamin F. Loan and offered resolutions to impeach the president. Loan’s and Kelso’s attempts were defeated by procedural maneuvers, but a third attempt, by James M. Ashley of Ohio, was put to a vote and passed, 107–39. By the time Johnson was tried in the Senate (March 30–May 16, 1868) and acquitted, after the vote was one short of the two-thirds necessary to convict, Kelso had returned to private life as a schoolteacher in Missouri.36
He tried to regain his seat in the fall of 1868. Republican Sempronius Boyd was again his opponent, and Capt. Charles B. McAfee also ran for the Democrats. Boyd won easily with over 8,900 votes; McAfee received nearly 5,000, and Kelso, running on a “negro equality” and “anti-bondholder” platform, tallied only 1,304. In his home county (Greene), Kelso polled merely 74 of 1,969 votes cast. Writing a quarter century later, the author of “The Scout of the Ozarks” in the St. Louis Republic thought that Kelso’s rejection at the ballot box was a sign of a sobered electorate that had been rapidly distancing itself from the “fanaticism” that had provoked the war and produced such horrific bloodshed. Another commentator remembering Kelso in the 1890s wrote that “things have changed very much” since the days when Missouri voters would send a man like Kelso to Washington, and “it would be hard to find a man who actually voted for him to acknowledge it in public.” Kelso, however, may have become politically unpalatable less for his reputation for violence than for his progressive politics. After all, other violent Missourians, like the gambling gunslinger Wild Bill Hickok and the sociopathic criminal Jesse James, would be turned into folk heroes in the postwar period. But as white southerners embraced the myth of the Confederacy’s noble Lost Cause and white northerners retreated from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction, a champion for “negro equality” and against the entrenched power of wealth cut against the grain of a hardening white conservatism. The Republic article noted that in later years, Kelso “became a fiery champion of the causes of the ‘wage slave.’ He attacked the greed of corporations and capitalists with as much bitterness as he ever denounced ‘rebels’ on the Missouri border in the eventful days of the ’60s.” For the author, however, this was merely a new channel for Kelso’s fanaticism, a new fad for a restless mind.37
After his career in Congress ended, Kelso opened a school in Springfield, but his life’s path turned sharply again, this time because of the death of one son, the tragic suicide of another, and the failure of his second marriage. Devastated, Kelso began divorce proceedings and in 1872 moved to California, living for a time with his daughter and son-in-law. He became involved in the civic life of Modesto, a railroad boom town that sprang up in 1870 and grew on the wealth of the surrounding wheat fields. Modesto was controlled by the men who ran its many saloons, brothels, and gambling houses—except on the dramatic occasions when 250 other citizens, perhaps including Kelso, armed themselves, covered their faces, and rode at night as vigilantes to try to clean up the town. In the 1870s, too, Kelso 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, including The Real Blasphemers (1883) and Deity Analyzed (1890). He also became an outspoken critic of conventional attitudes about sex and marriage and a promoter of spiritualism.38
In 1873, he began to fill the eight hundred pages of a large ledger book with copies of his congressional speeches, poetry, and public lectures. The title page described the volume as “The Works of John R. Kelso,” dedicated to his surviving son and posterity. On June 6, 1882, in his fifty-second year, on page 668 of this ledger book, he began his “Auto-Biography,” dedicated to his three children. “Knowing that the sun of my life is now nearing its setting, and believing that a brief account of my eventful career will be of interest, and probably of some benefit to yourselves and your posterity, I have concluded to give you such an account,” he wrote. “While I wish you to be indulgent critics, I do not wish you to be blind to my many errors. I wish you to see, to forgive and to avoid those errors. If you do all these things, even my errors will not have been utterly in vain. The world will be at least a little better off for my having lived in it, and the great desire of my heart will be realized.”39
Kelso then filled the remaining pages of the ledger with a vivid account of what he called his “checkered career.” The story breaks off, on the bottom of the ledger’s final page, in late January 1863, with the main character buying a house in Springfield for his family and being ordered to Neosho to battle bushwhackers, while the writer looks back bitterly from his perspective two decades later, knowing what would happen next.40
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, a work his third wife, Etta Dunbar Kelso, completed after his death and published in 1892. In that book he also reflected on what at the end of his life he considered to be the misguided patriotic blindness that had caused him to kill his fellow men in the war, realizing that he had merely substituted a sacralized Nation for the God that he had left behind when he abandoned Christianity: “Believing that I was thereby fulfilling a sacred duty, and proving myself a good, brave and patriotic man, I cheerfully bore, for more than three years, every conceivable hardship and privation; took part in nearly a hundred bloody engagements; with my own hands, slew a goodly number of brave men, and after the fearful tragedy had been successfully enacted … I looked back with exultation upon the part I had enacted. … How blind I was, and yet how honest. How blindly, how piously, how patriotically inhuman even the best of us are capable of being made by superstition.” 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 from typhoid fever, put down his pen. He died on January 26. His wife blamed not the fever but a gastric inflammation caused by that last rebel bullet, which had been festering painfully beneath his sternum for nearly three decades.41
The Meanings of the Civil War
Kelso’s writings offer different interpretations of the larger meaning of the Civil War. When he first stood before his pro-southern neighbors in Buffalo in the spring of 1861, he voiced a commitment to the Union that was nothing less than a sacred cause. The struggle, as he explained it, was between traitors who would ruin the peaceful and prosperous country they could no longer rule and those who would preserve the republican government that had been created by the revolutionary forefathers and had stood as a beacon of freedom to the world. But after the Confederate victories and Union retreat from southwest Missouri in the fall of 1861, Kelso had other reasons to fight. When pro-southern neighbors stole his property, burned down his house, and drove his family and the families of other loyal friends into the bitter cold to suffer (and some of them to die), Kelso became motivated by personal revenge. He acknowledged, too, that he had an ambition to lead men into battle and make a name for himself.
By 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation had added the abolition of slavery to preserving the Union as a war aim, and Kelso too came to see slavery as the center of the contest—slavery as the utter denial of the ideal of political equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence and as a manifestation of the tyrannical behavior of a small group of aristocrats over the common American people, white and black. Kelso rode the Radical Republican wave to Congress, joining those who believed that the South and America at large had to be thoroughly reconstructed both politically and socially to live up to the nation’s highest ideals.
Thirty years after he had stood on the Buffalo courthouse steps and pledged his life to save the Union, and twenty-five years after he had stood in Congress demanding that African Americans be given the right to vote if their freedom from slavery was to have meaning, John R. Kelso had come to see the patriotism that had prompted him to fight as a delusion and the outcome of the Civil War as a cruel joke. Seeing an America by the last decade of the nineteenth century riddled with corruption and ruled by an oligarchy of large corporations, Kelso bitterly regretted his wartime exploits. What he had once thought of as patriotic heroism he now considered a misguided righteousness of the most dangerous kind, a blindness that led to state-sanctioned destruction and slaughter.
The reporter in the St. Louis Republic, puzzling over Kelso’s character two years after his death, could only conclude that “John R. Kelso was one of the enigmas of the war.” He was a “mysterious” combination “of courage, cunning, hate, earnestness, [and] fanaticism,” and yet he undoubtedly possessed “the tastes and aspirations of an idealist.” The Kelso that emerges in the pages of his “Auto-Biography” is a coldly efficient killer in the midst of a soldier’s bloody engagements but also a man with tender sentiments and powerful passions that he found almost too much to bear. He fought bravely for his country but also thought deeply about the causes of the war and the moral character of the struggle. John R. Kelso’s Civil War, like the man himself, was no simple thing.42
1. The argument for the overlooked significance of conventional warfare in Missouri is made in Louis S. Gerteis, The Civil War in Missouri: A Military History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2012), 1–7. See also Marvin R. Cain and John F. Bradbury, Jr., “Union Troops and the Civil War in Southwestern Missouri and Northwestern Arkansas,” Missouri Historical Review (hereafter MHR) 88 (Oct. 1993): 29–47.
2. On guerrilla warfare in Missouri during the Civil War, see esp. Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri during the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Mark W. Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–1865 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010); and Bruce Nichols’s encyclopedic Guerilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri, 4 vols. (Jefferson, N.C.: MacFarland, 2004–14). See also Daniel E. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
3. John R. Kelso, “Auto-Biography,” in “John R. Kelso’s Complete Works in Manuscript,” Huntington Library, San Marino, Cal., 668–800; “Radical Literature,” Lucifer the Light-Bearer, June 15, 1901, 176 (“a remarkable man”); Wiley Britton, The Union Indian Brigade in the Civil War (Kansas City: Franklin Hudson, 1922), 225 (“fearless operations,” “was without fear”); Britton, The Aftermath of the Civil War: Based on Investigations of War Claims (Kansas City: Smith-Grieves, 1924), 232 (“the many witnesses”); Britton, Memoirs of the Rebellion on the Border, 1863 (Chicago: Cushing, Thomas, 1882); Britton, The Civil War on the Border, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899, 1904).
4. Britton, Aftermath of the Civil War, 222–23.
5. Kelso, “Auto-Biography,” 668–92, 674 (“wilderness”); 1840 U.S. Census, Bennington Township, Delaware County, Ohio; 1850 U.S. Census, District 27, Daviess County, family no. 181, www.ancestry.com; Missouri Marriage Records, 1805–2002 (online database; Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com, 2007): John R. Kelso and Mary (Adelia) Moore, married Aug. 28, 1851.
6. Kelso, “Auto-Biography,” 702 (“to burst a bomb”), 703 (“a wifeless,” “I thought”). The names Florella and Florellus are variants for the Latin word for flower (flora); Florellus is a character in the verse dialogue “Pastoral III. Night,” in Robert Fergusson, The Poetical Works of Robert Fergusson (Parsley, Scotland: R. Smith, 1799), 12–16.
7. Kelso, “Auto-Biography,” 707 (“beautiful little farm”); 1860 U.S. Census, Benton Township, Dallas County, Missouri, roll M653_617, p. 191, J B [R] Kelso; Missouri Marriage Records: John R. Kelso and Martha S. (Susie) Barnes, married Sept. 23, 1858. The name Iantha is a variant of the Greek word for a violet (ianthe); Percy Bysshe Shelley ponders Ianthe sleeping at the beginning of Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem (London: P. B. Shelley, 1813).
8. William E. Parrish, A History of Missouri, vol. 3, 1860–1875 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 6–8; Geiger, Financial Fraud, 12. Slaves were especially concentrated in seven “Little Dixie” counties in the center of the state; see R. Douglas Hurt, “Planters and Slavery in Little Dixie,” MHR 88 (July 1994): 397–415, and Robert W. Frizzell, “Southern Identity in Nineteenth-Century Missouri: Little Dixie’s Slave-Majority Areas and the Transition to Midwestern Farming,” MHR 99 (April 2005): 238–60.
9. On politics in Dallas County and Buffalo, see chap. 1, note 7, below; on slaveholding and wealth in Dallas and Benton, see chap. 1, note 13, below. Kelso discusses proslavery attitudes among non-slaveholding whites in chap. 3. On the state’s smaller slaveholders, see esp. Diane Mutti Burke, Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815–1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010). For the culture of poorer whites in the region, see also T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2002), and Jeremy Neely, The Border between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007).
10. Kelso, “Auto-Biography,” 697; William E. Parrish, Turbulent Partnership: Missouri and the Union, 1861–1865 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1963), 1–17; Louis S. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 67–96.
11. Gov. C. F. Jackson to Secretary of War Simon Cameron, April 17, 1861, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (hereafter OR), ser. 3, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899), 82–83. See also Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 247–48.
12. On Hickory County, see chap. 1, note 22; on Newton County, see chap. 1, note 11; and on Matthews and Springfield, see chap. 1, note 17, all below.
13. Christopher Phillips, Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 185–99; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 100–115.
14. Phillips, Damned Yankee, 211–22, 214 (quotation); Gerteis, Civil War in Missouri, 32–40. Lyon’s remarks, however, come only from Thomas Snead, Price’s aide-de-camp, writing a quarter century later in The Fight for Missouri: From the Election of Lincoln to the Death of Lyon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886), 200. Lyon’s army skirmished with the State Guard at Boonville on June 17 before the latter retreated to the southwest; see Paul Rorvig, “The Significant Skirmish: The Battle of Boonville, June 17, 1861,” MHR 86 (Jan. 1992): 127–48.
15. On the battle, see William Garrett Piston and Richard H. Hatcher III, Wilson’s Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
16. On John C. Frémont (1813–90) in Missouri, see Allan Nevins, Frémont: Pathmarker of the West (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939), 473–549. See also Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 48–76; Andrew Rolle, John Charles Frémont: Character as Destiny (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 190–213; Donald B. Connelly, John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 23–40; and Dennis K. Boman, Lincoln and Citizen’s Rights in Civil War Missouri: Balancing Freedom and Security (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 36–62.
17. Parrish, Turbulent Partnership, 77–100. On the petition, see chap. 4, note 9, below.
18. On Curtis, see esp. Terry Lee Beckenbaugh, “The War of Politics: Samuel Ryan Curtis, Race, and the Political/Military Establishment” (Ph.D. diss., University of Arkansas, 2001). On the battle, see William L. Shea and Earl J. Hess, Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
19. Gen. Samuel R. Curtis to Gen. Egbert Benson Brown, Jan. 8, 1863, 9:00 p.m., OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, part 1, 179; Kelso, “Auto-Biography,” 798 (quotation). On the Battle of Springfield, see [Return Ira Holcombe], History of Greene County, Missouri (St. Louis: Western Historical Company, 1883), 424–56; Paul M. Robinett, “Marmaduke’s Expedition into Missouri: The Battles of Springfield and Hartville, January, 1863,” MHR 58 (Jan. 1964), 151–73; Elmo Ingenthron, Borderland Rebellion: A History of the Civil War on the Missouri-Arkansas Border (Branson, Mo.: Ozarks Mountaineer, 1980), chap. 25; Frederick W. Goman, Up from Arkansas: Marmaduke’s First Missouri Raid, Including the Battles of Springfield and Hartville (Springfield, Mo.: N.p., 1999); and Larry Wood, Civil War Springfield (Charleston: History Press, 2011), chaps. 10–11.
20. John R. Kelso Court Martial Case File, Springfield, Mo., Jan. 21, 1863, NN-2499, Record Group 153, Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General (Army), National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, part 1, 314.
21. “The Scout of the Ozarks: John R. Kelso’s Mysterious and Bloody Career in Southwest Missouri,” St. Louis Republic, June 18, 1893.
22. Kelso’s injuries are detailed in over a dozen affidavits in John R. Kelso, Pension File, National Archives. “Bushwhacker” was a term applied to irregular combatants (not officially connected to any recognized military unit); sutlers were people following the army and selling provisions to the soldiers.
23. For Kelso’s military activities after Jan. 1863, see OR, ser. 1, vol. 32, part 1, 314, 761–63; vol. 22, part 2, 330; vol. 34, part 2, 384–85; vol. 34, part 1, 921–22, 957–58, 966–67; vol. 34, part 4, 344; vol. 41, part 1, 194–98, 737–38; vol. 41, part 4, 411–12; vol. 48, part 1, 1127.
24. Britton, Civil War on the Border, 2:204.
25. Britton, Civil War on the Border, 2:201 (“displayed his usual”), 202–3 (“frequently exposed”), 206 (“as far as”), 203 (“Early the next morning”).
26. Britton, Civil War on the Border, 2:204; Holcombe, History of Greene County, 477.
27. “The Scout of the Ozarks.”
28. Britton, Civil War on the Border, 2:203; “The Scout of the Ozarks.”
29. “The Scout of the Ozarks” references “Mart Hancock.” Martin Hancock was a private in Co. F, 8th and 14th Regt., Missouri State Militia (MSM) Cavalry (National Park Service, “Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System,” http://www.nps.gov/civilwar/soldiers-and-sailors-database.htm [hereafter NPS Soldiers’ Database]); Britton, Civil War on the Border, 2:230 (“the fearless and energetic”), 202 (“While stationed at Ozark”), 71 (“he was never charged,” “acts were of course”).
30. Britton, Aftermath of the Civil War, 222 (“He was a great student”); Britton, Civil War on the Border, 2:205 (“He had an insatiable thirst”), 207 (“characteristic earnestness”), 204–5 (“He was strictly temperate”); Holcombe, History of Greene County, 477; “The Scout of the Ozarks.”
31. Britton, Civil War on the Border, 2:207 (“for their domineering”), 208 (“the opportunity of participating”).
32. On Kelso campaigning with his shotgun, see “Hon. J. R. Kelso,” St. Joseph, Mo., Herald and Tribune, Dec. 13, 1864, and Britton, Aftermath of the Civil War, 222. On the election see appendix 1, note 14, below.
33. Harrisburg, Pa., Weekly Patriot and Union, Nov. 30, 1865; New-York Daily Tribune, June 20, 1866; “Springfield, Mo., versus Harpers’ Monthly. ‘Wild Bill, Harpers’ Monthly and ‘Colonel’ G. W. Nichols,” Springfield Missouri Weekly Patriot, Jan. 29, 1867, reprinted in Atchison, Kans., Weekly Champion and Press, Feb. 14, 1867; John R. Kelso, Individual Muster-Out Roll, Compiled Military Service Record, National Archives.
34. The first session of the 39th Congress ran from Dec. 4, 1865, to July 28, 1866; the second session was Dec. 3, 1866, to March 3, 1867. On how the continuation of violence past Appomattox affected the 39th Congress, see Richard L. Aynes, “The 39th Congress (1865–1867) and the 14th Amendment: Some Preliminary Perspectives,” Akron Law Review 42 (2009): 1019–49, esp. 1028–35. On the 39th Congress generally, see William H. Barnes, History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress on the United States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1868). On Reconstruction, see esp. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); see also Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014).
35. John R. Kelso, “Speech Delivered at Walnut Grove Mo. Sept. 19th 1865,” in “John R. Kelso’s Complete Works,” 10–27, 12 (quotations). Party divisions of the winning candidates on Election Day: 136 Republicans, 38 Democrats, 13 Unconditional Unionists, 5 Unionists, and Kelso, the Independent Republican; see U.S. House of Representatives, “Congress Profiles,” 39th Congress, http://history.house.gov/Congressional-Overview/Profiles/39th/. On Congressional Radical Republicans, see esp. Foner, Reconstruction, 228–39.
36. Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 2nd sess., Jan. 7, 1867, 37, part 1, 319–21. See Milton Lomask, Andrew Johnson: President on Trial (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1960), 222–23, and Hans L. Trefousse, Impeachment of a President: Andrew Johnson, the Blacks, and Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 54–62; see also David O. Stewart, Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009).
37. Liberty, Mo., Weekly Tribune, Oct. 2, 1868; “Election Returns,” Liberty, Mo., Weekly Tribune, Jan. 8, 1869; Holcombe, History of Greene County, 513; “The Scout of the Ozarks”; Beverly A. Barrett to unknown, Feb. 22, 1897, typescript, John F. Bradbury, Jr., Private Collection (hereafter Bradbury Collection). On racial politics after the war, see David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). On postbellum politics in Missouri, see William E. Parrish, Missouri under Radical Rule, 1865–1870 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1965). On Hickok, see Joseph G. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok, rev. ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974). On James, see Stiles, Jesse James.
38. Their final divorce decree was rendered on Jan. 30, 1874 (“Abstract of Divorce Records, 1837–1899,” Greene County, Missouri Circuit Court, http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/records/d1873.htm). Kelso’s main published works are The Real Blasphemers (New York: Truth Seeker, 1883); The Bible Analyzed in Twenty Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker, 1884); Spiritualism Sustained in Five Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker, 1886); The Universe Analyzed (New York: Truth Seeker, 1887); Deity Analyzed in Six Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker, 1890); and Government Analyzed (Longmont, Col.: Privately printed, 1892).
39. Kelso, “Auto-Biography,” 1, 668 (quotation).
40. Kelso, “Auto-Biography,” 675.
41. Kelso, Government Analyzed, 48–49; Etta D. Kelso, “Widow’s Declaration for Pension” (July 3, 1891), John R. Kelso, Pension File, National Archives.
42. “The Scout of the Ozarks.” For a full account of Kelso’s life, see Christopher Grasso, Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, forthcoming).