Blight’s Oracles

A book on Civil War memory by David W. Blight commands attention. His justly celebrated Race and Reunion has shaped historians’ understanding of how, by 1913, the public memory of the war had developed. In it, Blight shows how white Americans celebrated the heroism and honor of both sides, focused the meaning of the war on the preservation of the Union, and de-emphasized, if not ignored, its role in ending slavery. As a result, what he termed the emancipationist legacy of the war was ignored, and reunion came at the cost of rights and advancement for African Americans.¹ Blight returns to these themes in his new book, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.

Blight takes his title from Robert Penn Warren: “And so the Civil War draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous, of personal, as well as national, fate” (p. vii). It may not be Warren’s clearest sentence; if the war serves as an oracle, it is certainly one that speaks through others. Blight examines “the works, and to some extent the lives, of four of America’s most important writers on the subject of the significance and legacies of the Civil War during the 1950s and 1960s”—Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin (p. 7). Blight chooses these four because of their differing backgrounds and perspectives but also because they all have “an intense interest in the power of epic events, in the role of myth in shaping how people gain a sense of history, and in the consequences of human strivings, with their residues of violence, failure, and possible renewal” (p. 10).

All wrote during the civil rights era, which explains the subtitle. Blight begins with a brief discussion of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” in which King evoked the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. (Blight does not mention another reference to the war famously not made during the March on Washington: John Lewis’ call to march through the South as William Tecumseh Sherman had—a reference Lewis was convinced to leave out of his address.)² After his discussion of King’s address, Blight then rightly argues that the “Civil War and civil rights have been forever intertwined in American history and mythology” (p. 2). Civil War symbolism and memory did play a role in the civil rights era, particularly among white Southerners, and historians need a study of that influence and also of how the battles of the 1960s reshaped the memory of the 1860s. That is not the story Blight chooses to tell.

Blight does consider his book “a look at the Civil War Centennial era, not primarily at the level of institutions or of popular culture, but through serious literature and historical narrative” (p. 28). In his introduction, Blight recounts how civil rights issues impinged on the Centennial, drawing primarily on Robert J. Cook’s excellent study, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961–1965 (2007).³ Blight’s book complements Cook’s, which remains the best source on the Centennial. The two, though, differ in interesting ways. Of Blight’s four authors, Cook mentions only Warren and Catton. Cook does not discuss Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, but perhaps he should have. Blight observes that Wilson’s book generated review essays on the war “like nothing else published during the Centennial” and received a great deal of critical attention (p. 171). The major difference in the interpretations of the two books, though, may be in their assessment of the public memory of the war during the Centennial. Cook sees some growth in the acceptance of a black counter-memory and questions whether the Lost Cause still held great power. He even doubts that it proved influential enough for radical segregationists to rally white Southerners around an imagined Confederate past. Blight’s account implies that the Lost Cause still held sway, certainly in the South and...