Hell Town

Abstract

In 1852, Kelso was a young schoolteacher in a place nicknamed “Hell Town” in Platte County, Missouri. He faced down a gang of knife-wielding teenaged boys who tried to control the school. Like many nineteenth-century schoolmasters, he used violence and humiliation to assert his authority: he beat the schoolhouse rebels with a dogwood switch (threatening worse), and ritually mocked the gang’s leader. But in the 1850s, the entire Missouri-Kansas borderland, and then the entire country, became a Hell Town, where authority broke down and men reached for weapons, threatening and inflicting violence. The issue was slavery. But which party stood like the schoolmaster, teaching a lesson about law and order, and which was the gang of rebels, needing to be mastered or humiliated and driven out? Proslavery vigilantes harassed anyone expected of abolitionism, and Free Soilers fought back. For the time being, though, Kelso and his young wife stayed quiet.