American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era by David W. Blight (review)

There is nothing quite as interesting as those who were both historical actors and writers, observes David Blight in his new book, American Oracle. Blight’s story, which continues his examination of the intersection between Civil War memory and race, picks up twenty-five years after the close of his award-winning Race and Reunion. But rather than a comprehensive survey of the period, Blight offers a meditation on the meaning of the Civil War during the centennial by exploring four writers he argues left a profound impact on popular understandings of the war: Robert Penn Warren, the Kentucky-born poet and novelist; Bruce Catton, the most popular and widely read historian of the war between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s; Edmund Wilson, the preeminent literary critic of the twentieth century who embraced southern sympathies; and James Baldwin, an essayist and race critic from Harlem.

Each of these prominent and prolific writers, he argues, probed the Civil War’s legacy at a pivotal and deeply divided moment in the nation’s history and offered a way of understanding the conflict as something both uniquely American and common to all humanity. Each came to the war by a different path—Wilson as ferociously antiwar, believing that no war was worth its sacrifices, Catton trying to comprehend real people caught up in the maelstrom of a tragic bloodbath, Warren driven by questions of whether humans controlled their own fate, and Baldwin wracked with his own personal wars railing against America’s failure to acknowledge its history of racism. In four deeply researched and lyrically written chapters, Blight examines the writers and their lives, breathing new life into their words. At times he seems to channel the author about whom he writes. “No amount of foolishness and pathos can quite kill the scent of lilacs in May, or the jingling of medals dangling from the breast of an old soldier—especially when the war he represents never quite seems to end and even bigger wars crowd in for comparison,” he writes of Catton (84). Anyone who has ever heard Blight speak will be hard-pressed not to hear his deep voice reading the words aloud.

Though it would be unfair to criticize Blight for the authors he might have selected (as, he points out, reviewers castigated Wilson), readers will no doubt wonder about the inclusion of James Baldwin. He notes that Baldwin was chosen to examine how the centennial was experienced by black Americans. But he also candidly admits that Baldwin “only occasionally wrote directly about the Civil War” (187). Though riveting in its explanation of how Baldwin’s childhood in Harlem and tense relationship with his father shaped his later writings, most of the chapter has little to do with either the Civil War or African Americans’ experiences during the centennial.

Overwhelmingly, the book emulates the greatest works of two of his subjects, Wilson’s Patriotic Gore and Warren’s The Legacy of the Civil War, to offer a consideration on the war’s meaning. Part reflection, part literary critique, like those of the authors about whom he writes, Blight’s work is above all concerned with finding meaning in the tragedy and myth of the war. “The Civil War was actually about something beyond all the blood of the war years,” he observes, “about more than gore” (168). In musings about the Tea Party and Obama, and in direct references that compare 1861 and 2011, he probes the extent to which the myth and tragedy of the war still linger. He asks the reader to consider, just as Wilson and Warren did fifty years ago, what all the bloodshed should mean to our own generation.

Not unlike the critiques of Patriotic Gore, Blight’s prologue at times reads like a separate piece, only marginally connected to the biographical essays and literary critiques that follow. It is rich nonetheless...