John Brown's Expert

Boyd B. Stutler (1889-1970) was the foremost researcher and expert on the abolitionist John Brown in the twentieth century, a legacy that still impacts scholars and researchers today. A newspaperman and wartime journalist, Stutler accumulated one of the most important archives of primary and secondary sources on Brown and was considered the expert to consult by a variety of writers and scholars in his time. This work not only presents the first edited and annotated version of his incomplete biography of Brown, but frames his work in a meticulously researched study of Stutler's life. As this study shows, Stutler was a man caught in-between social and political tendencies: he was on the cutting edge in his study of a radical abolitionist, a study that often put him in the company of African-American activists and progressive scholars; yet he was an old-school conservative who despised leftists and disdained the admiration of Brown by those he deemed "pinko." A journalist and researcher at heart, Stutler ultimately unearthed and collected a vast amount of Browniana, yet struggled over writing his own biography, never completing the work.