John Russell Kelso wasn’t a man to be pigeonholed. Besides teacher, preacher, Civil War soldier and spy, he was a congressman, author, lecturer, spiritualist, anarchist and early advocate for the rights of women and African-Americans, to mention a few of the pursuits to which he turned his probing mind and restless energy. Though Kelso is little remembered today, Christopher Grasso argues that the man embodied the political and philosophical currents running through his times.
Born in 1831, Kelso grew up in backwoods Ohio and Missouri. He was humiliated by his family’s poverty, and from an early age believed he was destined for something greater than hardscrabble farming. Though he had virtually no formal schooling, he nurtured his ambition by devouring the few books he could find. By the time he was a teenager, he was master of the local school and a preacher in the Methodist church. At 18, after quarreling with his father, he left home and supported himself as a quarryman, river boatman and itinerant schoolteacher. Before age 30, he had broken with the church, earned a college degree, married, divorced, remarried, fathered four children and opened a private academy in Buffalo, Mo., in the southwestern corner of the state.
