Stephen B. Oates, a Civil War historian and biographer of Abraham Lincoln, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and William Faulkner, among others, died on August 20, the New York Times reported. He was 85.
His best-known works consisted of what he called the Civil War quartet, studies of John Brown, Nat Turner, Lincoln and Dr. King, who, he wrote, "humanize the monstrous moral paradox of slavery and racial oppression in a land based on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.... All four were driven, visionary men, all were caught up in the issues of slavery and race, and all devised their own solutions to those inflammable problems. And all perished, too, in the conflicts and hostilities that surrounded the quest for equality in their country."
Ken Burns, who included Oates in his documentary Civil War, said, "Stephen was an extremely valuable adviser to our Civil War series and an informed and passionate participant. He knew the bottom-up story as well as the top-down one, but more importantly, he knew and appreciated the huge stakes for the United States and indeed the world in a Union victory."
Oates also wrote a biography of Clara Barton, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War, and several books in the first person from the perspective of historical figures, The Approaching Fury: Voices of the Storm, 1820-1861 and The Whirlwind of War: Voices of the Storm, 1861-1865.
His son, Greg Oates, said the first-person books were inspired by Hal Holbrook's and Julie Harris's impersonations of Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson, respectively.
He was accused of plagiarism in several books; the American Historical Association ruled in 1993 that there was "no evidence" that Oates had committed plagiarism "as it is conventionally understood" but did find evidence "of too great and too continuous dependence, even with attribution, on the structure, distinctive language and rhetorical strategies of other scholars and sources."
He was defended by many other historians and colleagues.