Review
Title: The history of Warsaw, Illinois, including the Mormon period. Second edition
Author: Brian J. Stutzman
Publisher: Author
Genre: History
Year Published: c2018
Number of pages: 301
Binding: Trade paperback
ISBN13: 978-1-7324587-2-7
Price: $19.95
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
If you know who John Hay, Amos Worthen or Conrad Nagel were, their connection to Warsaw, Illinois may come as a surprise to you. For most readers of this review, and, I fear, of this book, the only recognizable name associated with the town of Warsaw, however, will be Thomas Sharp. Even Isaac Galland may be obscure to most of you. There is an interesting history to be written of Warsaw, Illinois. Sadly, this is not it.
Stutzman is not a historian. His note “About the Author” on the back cover says he is “a businessman, real estate investor, lecturer, and author with an interest in History [sic].” He promises a chronological history “divided into three sections” (1): early settlement, by Indians and then Europeans; the period of Mormon settlement in Nauvoo; and “Warsaw after the Mormons left Hancock County” (1).
I may not be the right reviewer for this book. My academic background is in literary history, and I am a retired librarian, having worked briefly in the LDS Church Historical Department as a librarian and archivist in 1977 and 1978. In January, 1979, I was hired by the Orem Public Library, Orem, Utah, where I worked until May, 2005, when I retired. Today I write, mostly poems, and read a lot, and ride my bike, a recumbent Lightning P-38. My father worked on the Lockheed P-38 Lightning during World War 2.
But as I said, Stutzman is not a historian. In his introduction, he says: “Warsaw, Illinois has a rich history. An attempt to write a comprehensive history spanning more than two hundred years and covering the events of the lives of tens of thousands of residents would take many volumes” (1). While that is true, such a work would not be a history, but rather a chronicle. The discipline of history involves evaluation, not recitation. Stutzman ends his introduction with this note: “To make this work more readable to a general audience, I have elected not to include footnotes, although I have documentation for every claim, date, and location in my many boxes of research on Warsaw” (3).
Reading the book, it was obvious to me that a lot of material had been consulted. And, in keeping with his initial description of the book, the order is roughly chronological. But within the chronological sections, Stutzman skips around a lot, allowing one association between people or places to lead him off from the chronology, like a surveyor finding arrowheads or geodes and stopping his work to collect them. Or like me remembering my father’s work at Lockheed. The problem with that is that Stutzman offers no evaluation of sources, when he gives one. Outside of his boxes of research, he cites only 15 titles in his bibliography, although he refers to at least one other in the text.
As an example of his carelessness, Stutzman repeats the story of a “powerful flash of light from heaven” that disabled men who shot Joseph Smith while he lay on the ground outside Carthage Jail, including one who tried to cut off his head. “These men then stood frozen like marble statues, not having the power to move” (114-115). He cites this only as “[o]ne account said,” so I can’t check it, but it sounds like something from N. B. Lundwall’s The fate of the persecutors of the prophet Joseph Smith, (Salt Lake City : Bookcraft, 1952), a citation from his bibliography, one of the fifteen titles. Discussing the trial of those accused of conspiracy to murder the Smith brothers, he notes one relevant study, in a text box between two paragraphs on page 135: “For an in-depth look at this trial see “Carthage Conspiracy, The Trial of the Accused Assassins of Joseph Smith” by Dallin H. Oaks and Marvin S. Hill.” The book was published by the University of Illinois Press, c1975. Oaks and Hill note, in their “Afterword,” that “A persistent Utah myth holds that some of the murderers of Joseph and Hyrum Smith met fittingly gruesome deaths — that Providence intervened to dispense the justice denied in the Carthage trial” (217 in Oaks and Hill). The endnote to that sentence cites Lundwall’s book. The afterword then examines the fate of those tried for the murder, admittedly not all of the “persecutors,” and concludes that none of them suffered gruesome deaths. I would think that Oaks and Hill deserve the courtesy of an entry in the bibliography, especially since some of the same information in this afterword appears in Stutzman’s text.
Stutzman’s approach is broadly chronological, but as mentioned above, he jumps back and forth in his chronology, especially in discussing the period after the murder of the Smiths, often referring to an earlier mention of a person, and at times going off on a digression that seems ill-timed and irrelevant.
At other times, he includes stories that make the history much more interesting. For example, at the start of Chapter 16: The Civil War and Warsaw, he summarizes a story from the Warsaw Bulletin of October 27, 1955: “There are ghosts in the cellar, cried little John Hay, running to his brother with big, scared eyes. One of them spoke to me: ‘Little Master, for the love of God, bring me a drink of water'” (187). Hay’s younger brother “later wrote” this account: “John was so frightened that he hurried upstairs and went to his room. Next day my father stated at dinner that three runaway slaves had been overtaken by a party of officers from Missouri and the slaves had resisted arrest. One was captured, one was fired on and killed, and the third was wounded but escaped in the woods. My brother John stared at me but said nothing. After the meal he told his father about the voice he had heard in the basement. My father, John, and I investigated. It appeared as if someone had used a pile of wood for a bed; on it was a bloodstain, nearly 18 inches in diameter. This was probably blood shed by the runaway” (187). At this point, Stutzman brings in a different teller, John Hay himself: “Forty years afterward (and) I will never forget that incident. It gave me a greater horror of slavery than anything I ever read” (187-8). I find this story very compelling. I personally would like to know if the entire story was contained in that issue of the Warsaw Bulletin, which is unclear from the way Stutzman reprints it. And I shouldn’t have to go to Wikipedia to confirm that this John Hay is the man who was Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary and later the 37th Secretary of State under McKinley and Roosevelt. Stutzman should mention that in his text, and not assume that his readers will make the connection. This John Hay was born in 1838, and in 1849 he moved to Pittsfield, Pike County, to live with his uncle Milton Hay and attend “a well-regarded local school” (Wikipedia). So “little John Hay” could have been no more than 12 when he encountered the ghost. Stutzman does recite some of the same biographical details for Hay in his “Appendix A- Key People,” which I found only after finishing the main text, although it is mentioned in the table of contents.
The area in which this study is most valuable may be related to Stutzman’s work as a businessman and real-estate investor. He goes into great detail in explaining the various businesses in Warsaw, and the economic pressures applied to businesses in Warsaw by the Mormon settlement in Nauvoo. In fact, he discusses all the various pressures, including the need to move freight around the Des Moines rapids, upstream from Warsaw, downstream from Nauvoo. He discusses the value to Warsaw’s businessmen of “lightening” loads so that steamers could traverse the rapids, and the effect of various efforts on the Iowa side of the river to bypass the rapids with locks. The rise of Keokuk, Iowa, as a town essentially parallels the decline of Warsaw, and Stutzman follows the developments of that rise and decline as a part of his discussion of the later history of Warsaw, including the unintended consequences of building a road out of town to connect to a bridge to Keokuk.
Finally, and I have been counseled not to dwell on such matters, this book appears to be published by the author, who proclaims it, on the verso of the title page, “Second Edition—-Revised, Corrected, and Extended”. He thanks one person who “offered grammatical suggestions.” He doesn’t say whether he accepted the suggestions, but he should have hired an editor to proof the entire book. It needs a careful proofreading, even “[t]o make this work more readable to a general audience.”