AMHERST — He was, as one admirer put it, an “artful biographer” who wedded careful research with a novelist’s storytelling skill to write movingly about a number of famous American figures: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Clara Barton and William Faulkner.
And at a forum honoring the late Stephen B. Oates, the noted historian and former University of Massachusetts professor, speakers also said Oates had a unique ability to write about history from different perspectives — to remove or suppress the narrator’s voice from his books to give his readers a different way of looking at history.
At “Let the Trumpet Sound,” an all-day symposium Sept. 9 at the university’s Old Chapel, former students and colleagues of Oates joined a number of prominent historians and biographers to remember a prolific author — 17 books — who was also a popular teacher. His classes on U.S. Civil War-era history drew as many as 500 students to some of the university’s largest lecture halls.
Oates, a Texas native, died at his Amherst home in August 2021 at age 85. He taught at UMass from 1968 to 1997, winning a number of awards from the university for his teaching and also earning a silver medal one year in the national Professor of the Year competition.
Last week’s forum, sponsored by the UMass Department of History, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, and the university libraries, had been organized by Greg Oates, Stephen Oates’ son, and Hugh Carter Donahue, a student of Oates in the early 1970s who cited his professor as a key inspiration for his own decision to go to graduate school.
Greg Oates and Donahue pulled together a wide range of speakers and panelists, including former students, to discuss Stephen Oates’ work as a historian and biographer, a teacher and colleague, and as a public intellectual: Among other accomplishments, Oates was a featured voice in filmmaker Ken Burns’ 1990 PBS series on the Civil War.
One former student attending the symposium, part of which was filmed by C-SPAN, was Stephen M. Brewer, a retired state senator and representative from the Worcester area who graduated from UMass in 1971; he took a class with Oates on the Civil War and Reconstruction in 1968, the professor’s first year on campus.
“It was a great class, and he was a wonderful teacher, just full of energy,” said Brewer, who noted that he also came back to campus in 1997 to sit in on Oates’ very last lecture.
“I wanted to come here today to pay my respects,” he said.
Noted Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, whose credentials include a six-year stint heading The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, said during a keynote address that Oates was “a true giant” as a Civil War-era historian as well as a superb writer — one who knew what to leave out of a book to help move a narrative forward and recreate the sensibilities of different eras, in turn bringing historical figures to life.
“Stephen was a great self-editor,” Holzer said. “He knew how to use the power of suggestion to let readers find their own conclusions.”
When it was published in 1977, “With Malice Toward None,” Oates’ biography of Lincoln, won praise as the new “standard” for one-volume biographies of America’s 16th president. Holzer said he reread the book some weeks back as preparation for his speech at UMass and found that “it holds up beautifully.”
And Holzer noted that Oates’ biography of the abolitionist John Brown, “To Purge This Land With Blood,” was praised by the New York Review of Books as the “most objective” study of Brown when it was published.
Though everyone knows what happened to Brown at the end of his life, Holzer added, “The book is so engrossing that you keep reading as though you don’t know that ending.”
Oates faced some controversy in the early 1990s when a few other scholars claimed there were cases of plagiarism in his Lincoln biography and two other books. Oates vehemently denied the charges, and numerous scholars, including Holzer, came to his defense.
The American Historical Association issued a mixed verdict on the matter in 1992, saying Oates had not committed plagiarism but had placed too much reliance on “the structure, distinctive language and rhetorical strategies of other scholars and sources” in some of his books.
At UMass, Holzer alluded to the issue, saying some “envious researchers” had come down on Oates’ work with a kind of microscopic intensity “that not many of us could survive,” placing more emphasis “on punctuation than ideas.”
And Holzer told the New York Times last year in an obituary for Oates, “Many of us in the field regarded it as a criticism that grew into an assault and became a tragedy.”
The UMass forum, though, was a celebration of the positive, with Holzer and other speakers noting that Oates rebounded in the later 1990s by writing two innovative works, “The Approaching Fury: Voices of the Storm, 1820-1861” and “The Whirlwind of War: Voices of the Storm, 1861-1865,” which used first-person narratives of numerous figures from that era to take a fresh look at the Civil War.
And Aaron Rubenstein, director of the Special Collections and University Archives and Research Center (SCUA) at UMass, said he was thrilled to announce that Oates’ family will be providing his papers to the university.
“This is an incredible opportunity for us,” said Rubenstein, adding that a new generation of scholars will now be able to access the work of one of the school’s seminal historians.
UMass “is the only place for these papers,” added Greg Oates, a screenwriter who lives in Amherst.
Holzer said Oates’ books would provide a lasting legacy for the university, historians, and readers alike: “He left us wanting more, the way all great writers do.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.