My Latest--John Brown's Expert: Boyd B. Stutler & His Unfinished Biography of John Brown

 

Early in my study of John Brown, I spent a delightfully rigorous few days working in the wonderful archive of the Hudson Library and Historical Society in Hudson, Ohio.  Hudson, you may recall, was John Brown's hometown after his family moved there in 1805 from Torrington, Connecticut. Today it hosts a wonderful historical society that has, among its treasures, the papers of the Reverend Clarence S. Gee.  Gee was one of two leading John Brown researchers in the twentieth century.  His friend and corresponded, Boyd B. Stutler, carried on a wonderful correspondence for half a century and shared from their extensive collecting.  Stutler was a journalist and editor of The American Legion Magazine, and Gee was a clergyman with the Congregational and Presbyterian churches.  Gee's interest began as an interest in the Brown family genealogy and Owen Brown, father of our man Brown.  Stutler began as a collector of old books and articles, Brown being part of his native West Virginia history. However, both men grew intensely interested in John Brown over the years, and without their contributions, our research would be considerably less than it has been.

In the early 1950s Stutler took on a biographical project under a publisher's contract.  He never finished the work, and the only material surviving from the biography is six chapters and an outline that he shared with Gee (the original subsequently turned up in West Virginia too, but for many years it was not apparently known by archivists and historians there).

In 2000, when I was researching Gee's papers, I copied that unfinished manuscript and used it as a source for my first book on our subject, Fire from the Midst of You: A Religious Life of John Brown (NYU Press). Over the years, however, I so frequently relied upon Stutler's materials and revisited many of his research ventures, that I became more conscious of his life and contributions and thought it an obligation to bring the manuscript to publication someday.  

Boyd B. Stutler (West Virginia State Archives)

Over the past several years, in fits and starts, not only transcribed the unfinished manuscript but hunted down Stutler's own source material whenever possible to provide annotation (the manuscript has no citations), adding my own research for sources as well.  I also edited the work and added several preliminary chapters about Stutler's life and activities, as well as his work with Brown biographers, from Oswald Villard to Stephen Oates.  There is also a chapter about Stutler's approach to black people, the Civil Rights movement, and the Left.  The book includes photos I obtained from the West Virginia History Collection.  As a hybrid work, then, John Brown's Expert features an extended biographical sketch of Stutler as well as a thoroughly annotated version of his unfinished biography, as well as some flanking material from his typewriter in later life.

John Brown's Expert can be ordered from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or directly from Lulu Publishing.

Endorsements for John Brown’s Expert 

DeCaro has brought us another gem! Veering slightly from his own John Brown biographies, DeCaro critically explores the life and work of Boyd Stutler, a passionate, conservative mid-twentieth-century editor and zealous chronicler of Brown’s immensely important life. Like a detective, DeCaro follows Stutler’s steps through decades of work, piecing together the man’s long journey scouring libraries, archives, museums, and private collections to compose, but ultimately never finish his much-anticipated Brown biography. DeCaro has done it for him. Rich and pleasurable, a must-read!  

 Kate Clifford Larson, author of Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, and Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero

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 Louis A. DeCaro, Jr., one of the all-time top authorities on the antislavery warrior John Brown, has performed a great service by issuing the unfinished biography of John Brown by the late Boyd Stutler (1889-1970), another all-time top authority. To date, scholars have known Boyd Stutler through the West Virginia Memory Project, the finest online resource for primary materials on Brown. In John Brown’s Expert, DeCaro provides us not only with Stutler’s previously unpublished narrative of Brown’s pre-Kansas years but also with a richly detailed account of Stutler’s own life, including his fascinating exchanges with publishers, scholars, and general Brown aficionados. Anyone seriously interested in the history of abolitionism will want to read John Brown’s Expert. 

David S. Reynolds, author of John Brown, Abolitionist, and Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times 

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In John Brown’s Expert, author Louis DeCaro has ably raised from obscurity the pre-eminent researcher into the life of the famed abolitionist. Stutler comes across as an old-fashioned just-the-facts newspaperman loath to take sides in the debate over Brown’s rightful place in history. He never completed his intended Brown biography, but his legacy lives on in the massive amount of research he left behind and in DeCaro's important book.    

Eugene L. Meyer, author of Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army