Caleb Smith's The Oracle and The Curse

I recently had the pleasure of reading Yale English Professor Caleb Smith's The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War.  It's about the conflict between oracles (judges) and cursers (people on the outside of "the system" -- like antislavery advocates, especially people like Nat Turner and John Brown).  Thus this is an interpretation of American literature as it relates to the clash of visions of law and justice in the years leading into Civil War.  Cribbing now from Harvard University Press' website:

Condemned to hang after his raid on Harper’s Ferry, John Brown prophesied that the crimes of a slave-holding land would be purged away only with blood. A study of omens, maledictions, and inspired invocations, The Oracle and the Curse examines how utterances such as Brown’s shaped American literature between the Revolution and the Civil War.

In nineteenth-century criminal trials, judges played the role of law’s living oracles, but offenders were also given an opportunity to address the public. When the accused began to turn the tables on their judges, they did so not through rational arguments but by calling down a divine retribution. Widely circulated in newspapers and pamphlets, these curses appeared to channel an otherworldly power, condemning an unjust legal system and summoning readers to the side of righteousness.

Exploring the modes of address that communicated the authority of law and the dictates of conscience in antebellum America’s court of public opinion, Caleb Smith offers a new poetics of justice which assesses the nonrational influence that these printed confessions, trial reports, and martyr narratives exerted on their first audiences. Smith shows how writers portrayed struggles for justice as clashes between human law and higher authority, giving voice to a moral protest that transformed American literature.

I have some more thoughts on The Oracle and the Curse in the spring 2013 issue of the Civil War Book Review.  I note that Caleb Smith’s The Oracle and The Law speaks to huge issues, such how pre-Civil War American law gained and maintained legitimacy? How authority shifted from legal and religious elites to popular sovereignty from Revolution through Civil War? And how our country reconciled the higher law arguments of abolitionists with the principles of law and constitutionalism that so widely supported property rights in enslaved humans? It speaks to timeless questions of obedience to law, even as the law is unjust. And our nation continues to struggle with them, as our citizens turn sometimes to the streets and occasionally even to violence, as they challenge everything from environmental development to our wars abroad.  The rest of my review is available here.