John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - Episode 3
More on the text
Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy, 74-6. Secessionists and Unionists began arming and mobilizing across the state, the balance of power shifting from county to county. The words and actions of a few people sometimes tipped that balance. The main secessionist speaker at Buffalo’s rally was Peter Wilkes from Springfield. Wilkes had also spoken at a similar rally at Newtonia, Newton Co., Mo., on April 24, 1861. There, however, the rebels had won the day and a committee passed resolutions in support of the Southern cause. Thirty-five miles south of Buffalo in Springfield, however, opinion was more divided. Kelso’s impassioned speech resembled one given by in Springfield by Robert Pinckney Matthews, a young pro-Union orator. “Meetings were being held night and day to discuss the state of the country,” Matthews later recalled. At a debate in front of a large crowd, “[e]xcitement was at a white heat and a small spark was liable to make a mighty flame at a moments notice.” The secessionist speaker raised his supporters “to the highest pitch of enthusiasm.” Matthews stood to speak for the Union, and “a feeling came over me I cannot define. The whole subject and the consequences of disunion and disruption seemed to open before me and burn like fire on my brain. A sensation of exaltation was over me. What I said I know not, but when I was done, men were crowding around me shouting ‘Union once and forever.’ I realized the field was won and immediately formed a [Union] League of over 50 men who swore with uplifted hand to defend the ‘Stars and Stripes’ with every drop of blood in their veins.”
More on the Illustration
My first draft of this scene, we decided, was too surreal. So I went back to the mental drawing board and I tried to think about Kelso coming up on stage, full of energy, and the reaction of the secessionist speaker. The text doesn’t say anything about the speaker putting his hand up, but that's how I felt it. I think the hand is such a universal language. That's why I try to include prominent hand gestures in a lot of the drawings: the boy grabbing his hand, the hands on his head when he’s in the forest by himself, his hand on the dying horse’s face. Without having the luxury of using people's faces directly, I was trying to use tools that could convey the seriousness of the scene, or the discomfort, or the surprise.
The viewer's eye moves down his arm right into that illuminated hand, and that hand trying to stop Kelso really kind of encapsulates the whole scene. That hand, and then Kelso’s hand clutching the paper in the middle ground, and then his other hand resting on the stage, help convey the sense of space and are tools to emphasize things in the composition. I was going for the element of surprise, and the hands were definitely a big part of that, along with the dramatic lighting and the exaggerated perspective.