John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - Epilogue As Prologue

More on the text

Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, 1-13, 409-18.  Rich as they are, Kelso’s writings narrate his life from his own particular perspective in the 1880s.  He left some things unsaid and others were unseen.  Immersed in the flow of events, he was not—and could not have been—fully aware of the broader social, cultural, and political forces shaping his experience.  Once, in California, walking alone, he tried to cross a mountain range at night in stormy weather.  By the summit he was exhausted, and as the rain turned to snow, he knew he didn’t have the strength to make the descent or the luxury of stopping without freezing to death.  So he slipped into the cold dark waters of a rushing mountain stream, knowing that it would flow down into larger streams and eventually empty into the valley below.  He let the torrent take him down, rushing blindly into the night.  He listened for the roar of waterfalls ahead, and when he heard it he groped his way out of the water over slippery rocks and around dripping bushes, made his way to the bottom of the falls, and then reentered the rushing stream. When he finally pulled himself from the water at the base of the mountain and knocked on a farmer’s door, the family who let him come in from the storm looked frightened as he explained what he had just done and were astonished that he had survived.  Kelso’s life was like that trip down the mountain.  With brave—or reckless—determination, he plunged into the rushing stream of events, avoiding the worst dangers only by skill, fortitude, and luck.  At the end, he had quite a story to tell, but only from the perspective of a desperate yet determined man, up to his neck in the churning waters, plunging down through the darkness.

The manuscripts in Kelso’s own hand help us follow him into the stream; hindsight and historical scholarship offer a broader view.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Representative Men,” in the famous collection of essays by that name published in 1850, achieved greatness by embodying Ideals: Plato the Philosopher, Shakespeare the Poet, Napoleon the Man of the World.  Kelso, too, wrote about Great Men who represented areas of thought or behavior because their genius forever changed the course of human progress.  They were giants towering above others in their age—Plato, Shakespeare, and Napoleon are in his list, too—who came to be regarded as the “representatives” of “the principles they have taught, the modes of character they have illustrated, the arts and sciences in which they have excelled, [and] the systems they have founded.”  Whatever Kelso had aspired to be when, as a young boy, he read biographies by firelight, he was not a Great Man in this sense—he never achieved greatness by his exemplary accomplishments or his historical influence. But Kelso was a representative man of nineteenth century America in a different way—embodying, with his own peculiar vitality, “modes of character” enmeshed in larger systems and principles not of his own making. 

Or perhaps he was (at least) four such characters: the Evangelical Christian, the Enlightened Critic, the Sentimental Hero, and the Radical Reformer. . . . 

If in nothing else, Kelso can be seen as a representative man of nineteenth-century America in a complex intermingling of sentimentality and rationalism, sympathy and self-assertion, aspiration and despair, violence and tears.  But more importantly, in the end, he was himself.  Biography is not an efficient conveyance of some neat historical thesis.  It should, first and foremost, portray the irreducible singularity of a particular life.