Heaven on Earth

Abstract

In 1886, after moving to Colorado and marrying Etta Dunbar, Kelso described himself, even as he struggled to get a disability pension for the worsening effects of his wartime injuries, as “one of the happiest of men.” But with news of the Haymarket Affair in Chicago, where labor radicals were executed as bomb-throwing terrorists, he plunged into another public crisis. Angrily rethinking some of his core beliefs, he decided that Haymarket had exposed the hopeless rot of the American political and economic system. In his last years, after writing his autobiography, he turned to the story of the nation he had fought and bled for, looking for a better way forward. His last book, Government Analyzed, completed by his wife after his death in 1891, reinterpreted the Civil War and offered a defense of anarchism. His last lectures described Jesus as an anarchistic reformer, hoping for a heaven on earth.