John R. Kelso’s Civil Wars:
A Graphic History - 1861
2. BUFFALO, MISSOURI TOWN SQUARE, SECESSION SPRING, 1861
May 7, 1861. Jubilant speakers addressed a crowd in front of the courthouse in Buffalo, Missouri. Two more states had seceded from the Union. “The Union seemed to have no friends present,” Kelso thought darkly as he heard people cheering the Confederacy.
Up until this moment, he had kept his unpopular Union sympathies to himself. But as he crossed the square, he felt compelled to take a stand. He climbed the courthouse steps and called for attention. Secession was treason, he declared to his stunned neighbors, and he would fight to the death for the United States.
At first, only shocked silence. Then a murmur. Some louder voices began denouncing him: “He’s a traitor to the South.” “He ought to be shot down like a sheep-killing dog.” As the crowd’s fury built, Kelso felt a child’s fingers clutching his hand. An eight year-old boy, one of his students, tugged him away and led him to a darkened warehouse. Four men, secret Unionists, told him to keep quiet and lay low. Kelso refused and instead asked to borrow a pistol.
3. SECESSION RALLY
A week later, secessionists marched into the crowded town square for a rally. They had a Confederate flag, a band ready to play Dixie, and men ready to fire their guns into the air. To loud cheers, a speaker cited scripture to prove that the Confederacy was God’s Holy Cause. But then Kelso leaped onto the stand, waved his hand for attention, and began to address the crowd.
He cited scripture to argue that the seceding states were instead minions of Satan, rebelling against God. He spoke not just to damn the rebels but to embolden timid Unionists and to convert the undecided. “My whole being seemed aglow with a strange inspiration. I seemed to see in great letters of flame the very words that I should speak.” He invoked George Washington, the glorious Union, and the Star-Spangled Banner. “Tears—loyal tears rolled down the rough cheeks of many a brave and honest man who came there believing himself to be a secessionist. . . . A mighty revolution was being wrought in that great assembly. A tidal wave of loyalty was rising that could not now be turned back, or resisted. When I closed, the pent up feelings of hundreds found vent in loud and hearty hurrahs for the Union and our brave old flag.” The secessionists clattered away in their wagons as the Union men cheered.
4. FIRST BATTLEFIELD
Missouri divided. Kelso helped organize a Unionist “Home Guard” militia in Dallas County. In nearby counties, secessionists organized “State Guard” militias. Federal troops from St. Louis led by Gen. Nathaniel Lyon chased State Guard troops led by secessionist Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson to the southwest corner of the state. Kelso’s men just missed joining Lyon for the Battle of Wilson’s Creek on August 10, 1861, where the Federals lost to a pro-Confederate force twice their size and Lyon and 257 other Union soldiers died. Home Guard units dissolved and Unionists fled north. Though having been a major in the militia, Kelso joined the 24th Missouri Infantry as a private to make a point about patriotism.
His first taste of battle was in October. Confederates attacked a small unit guarding the Iron Mountain Railroad Bridge 50 miles south of St. Louis. Kelso’s company rushed there at night in open train cars. When he reached the battlefield, he saw Union soldiers dead in a stone pen where they had made their last stand. “Most of them had been shot in the head as they stood on their knees firing over their low stone wall. They had fallen backward, and I shuddered as I gazed upon their ghostly upturned faces and their glassy eyes gleaming in the moonlight.” Rebel troops had bled and fallen only a dozen yards away. A few days later, the enemy returned, and Kelso and his men fired from rifle pits as the bullets flew thick over their heads.
5. A SPY IN THE RAIN
Kelso began his first solo spy mission in the fall of 1861. The Confederates held southwestern Missouri; the Federals controlled the rest of the state. After taking the train from St. Louis to the end of the line at Rolla, Kelso headed on foot to occupied Springfield, 120 miles away. On that first night, and for many after, he slept in the forest, in the cold rain, back to a tree trunk and gun at the ready. “I dare not kindle a fire. . . . That dreary night seemed like the longest I ever knew.”
Such off-the-books spy missions by soldiers on special assignment were not unusual. The U.S. Army did not have a formal spy agency. Commanders recruited men who had the skills to travel alone through hostile territory, the intelligence to know what to look for, and the inclination to take risks. They knew that for every spy who successfully penetrated the enemy’s camp there might be three or four captured and a dozen turned back at the picket lines. So the officers sent out multiple men, separately but with the same mission. Spies like Kelso traveled hundreds of miles alone, in difficult conditions and dangerous circumstances, but the built-in redundancy made them, ultimately, expendable.
Spies traveled under false pretenses and under assumed identities, in disguise as civilians or in the enemy’s uniform, and if captured they could be summarily executed. “Don’t you know,” one officer said, “that when you go out as a spy, you go, as it were, with a rope around your neck, ready for anybody to draw it tight?”
6. COVER BLOWN
At the beginning of his second spying expedition, calling himself “John Russell,” Kelso stopped at a log hut for breakfast and tried to convey his Southern sympathies. The half-dozen well-armed men at the table seemed suspicious. But he worried even more about “the woman of the house, sharper than any of the men, who seemed to read me at once.” Feeling her eyes upon him, he realized that he had made a stupid mistake. Disguised as a civilian, he had nonetheless crammed his coat pockets with hardtack, the distinctive cracker issued to Union soldiers. She glanced at his bulging pockets, then pulled her husband aside to whisper. After bolting a few mouthfuls of breakfast, Kelso excused himself and continued on his way, quickly leaving the road for the forest, dumping the hardtack, and hiding his revolvers more carefully under his coat.
As he traveled along the Arkansas border, he knew he would need to do a better job performing the “John Russell” people needed to see. He put on his best parlor manners for a Confederate officer who invited him to dinner, and then helped give pro-Confederate speeches at rebel recruiting stations. To bum some breakfast at a dilapidated cabin, he adopted the coarse manners and virulent anti-Black and anti-Yankee attitudes of the dirt-poor hunter inside. Seeking shelter at the farmhouse of a pious Southern woman, “Russell” quickly became pious and Southern too, praising the Lord for the gallant boys in gray. By the time he made it back to Federal picket lines, he was so used to shifting his identity to meet the moment that he could hardly give a straight answer when guards demanded that he identify himself.
7. REFUGEES IN A SNOWSTORM
Gen. John C. Frémont’s five divisions left St. Louis on Sept. 27, and slowly moved diagonally across the state with the promise to clear the rebels from the southwest corner once and for all. But with a series of blunders he had already lost the confidence of commanders in Washington, politicians in Missouri, and his own officers. Fearing disaster, President Lincoln removed him from command shortly after he’d reached Springfield on Nov. 3. Five days later, interim commander David Hunter, worried about being caught between two Confederate armies—one coming from the east and the other from the south—withdrew his troops. Southwestern Missouri Unionists like Kelso, however, felt that the disgraceful retreat had abandoned them to “an infuriated and relentless foe,” surrendering their homes to plunder and flame and sacrificing many civilian lives to the rebels’ vengeance. And, indeed, rebel neighbors soon burned down Kelso’s house and prevented anyone from sheltering his wife and children.
Kelso was ordered to evacuate his family and other loyal Unionists from Buffalo. A blizzard struck the refugee wagon train. Secessionists along the route refused to give them shelter. The refugees stopped at night and tried to make camp in an open field covered with small trees. They hacked down some green wood and kindled miserable fires that produced more smoke and sparks than heat. Some were already frostbitten. His wife and children tried to sleep upon a few old blankets, placed upon the snow.
He wandered the camp. At a distant fire, he tried to help hang blankets to shield from the swirling snow a young woman giving birth. He heard her utter a prayer, heard her baby’s faint cry, and then watched them both die.
He was filled with “unutterable bitterness.” The blood in his veins felt “strangely hot.” He blamed the rebels for all the suffering.
8. VOW OF VENGEANCE
On another spy mission, he returned to his hometown. At midnight, he crept from the dark forest and onto his own property. He stood upon the ashes of his home. There, in the moonlight, was his children’s playhouse; beyond was his orchard, ruined by his rebel neighbor’s sheep. Bitterly, he took off his hat, called the moon to witness, and “vowed to slay with my own hand twenty-five rebels.” Years later he would see this vow as a kind of “madness,” but he also knew that it made the story of what happened next “more wonderful than almost any fiction.”
He hid in the woods outside Buffalo and terrorized the town for nearly three weeks. Ignoring hunger, cold, exhaustion, and the danger of getting caught, he focused on revenge. He had learned the names of several of the men who had burned down his house. Most were men he knew, men he had never harmed or offended. He would meet them, as he put it, to “transact some very important business.” Fear “spread like the wind.” Rumors reverberated through the town. “Like an evil spirit that knew no rest, I appeared and disappeared leaving them all wondering whence I came and whither I went.” He had begun his quest for revenge.
9. CAUGHT BY THE REBELS
The Confederate cavalry caught him, and recognized him as a spy. He admitted it, knew they would hang him for it, and told them he planned to die like a man. But as they built a gallows from fence rails, he tried to ingratiate himself with them by telling “ludicrous anecdotes” that kept them laughing. He overheard some of the men arguing about his fate. One of them said that it was “a damned pity for so brave a man to be strung up like a damned dog.” A sympathetic guard wordlessly signaled to Kelso that he would help him escape. The soldier glanced at the brush thicket behind him.
The minutes ticked by. The gallows were ready. “My heart seemed to cease beating.” Then a soldier called his comrade a liar, and the man responded by throwing a punch. Kelso knew that was the signal—a distraction staged for his sake. He darted toward the brush. The friendly guard then happened to stumble out of his way and into the path of two pursuers. Kelso plunged into the thicket and ran for his life. Four guns fired behind him. Bugles sounded and soldiers mounted their horses, but the escaping prisoner could only be followed through the dense thicket on foot.
Kelso ran, plowing through the briars and brush, and then had to force himself to stop running, for it was better to stay in the thicket than venture out onto the open ground beyond it. He hid in the snow beneath the bushes, hat gone, clothes “torn to tatters,” chest heaving, blood and sweat trickling over dozens of scratches, and feeling “a wild joy hard to describe.”