cover image Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso

Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso

Christopher Grasso. Oxford Univ, $34.95 (544p) ISBN 978-0-19-754732-8

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. (Sept.)