Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy
The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso
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- £25.99
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- £25.99
Publisher Description
The epic life story of a schoolteacher and preacher in Missouri, guerrilla fighter in the Civil War, Congressman, freethinking lecturer and author, and anarchist.
A former Methodist preacher and Missouri schoolteacher, John R. Kelso served as a Union Army foot soldier, cavalry officer, guerrilla fighter, and spy. Kelso became driven by revenge after pro-Southern neighbors stole his property, burned down his house, and drove his family and friends from their homes. He vowed to kill twenty-five Confederates with his own hands and, often disguised as a rebel, proceeded to track and kill unsuspecting victims with "wild delight." The newspapers of the day reported on his feats of derring-do, as the Union hailed him as a hero and Confederate sympathizers called him a monster.
Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso is an account of an extraordinary nineteenth-century American life. During Reconstruction, Kelso served in the House of Representatives and was one of the first to call for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Personal tragedy then drove him west, where he became a freethinking lecturer and author, an atheist, a spiritualist, and, before his death in 1891, an anarchist. Kelso was also a strong-willed son, a passionate husband, and a loving and grieving father. The Civil War remained central to his life, challenging his notions of manhood and honor, his ideals of liberty and equality, and his beliefs about politics, religion, morality, and human nature. 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 character.
In Christopher Grasso's hands, Kelso's life story offers a unique vantage on dimensions of nineteenth-century American culture that are usually treated separately: religious revivalism and political anarchism; sex, divorce, and Civil War battles; freethinking and the Wild West. A complex figure and passionate, contradictory, and prolific writer, John R. Kelso here receives a full telling of his life for the first time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The "warring impulses" and "complex character" of guerrilla fighter, Union spy, and Missouri congressman John R. Kelso (1831–1891) are explored in this rich yet cumbersome biography. William & Mary history professor Grasso (Skepticism and American Faith) draws on Kelso's copious autobiographical writings to track his early years in Ohio and Missouri, where he became a schoolteacher and a Methodist preacher before divorcing his first wife and renouncing the "central tenets" of his faith. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Kelso publicly denounced his secessionist neighbors as traitors and joined the state's Home Guard. He also spied for the Union Army in Springfield, Mo., and became an officer in the Missouri State Militia, where he developed a reputation as a fearsome guerrilla fighter in skirmishes with Confederate irregulars. Grasso relates Kelso's military exploits and postwar political career, and dives deep into his thinking, which led him to declare that the Bible was made up of "fables inherited from our past," that the U.S. was poisoned by "government corruption and corporate greed," and that marriage "was a kind of slavery." Unfortunately, Kelso's complex nature gets obscured by the mountain of extraneous details. This exhaustive portrait often loses sight of its fascinating subject.