An Environmental History of the Civil War
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Beginning from the assumption that humans are “connected creatures” in a dynamic natural community, Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver write, “Within that community, the natural world always affects any human activity. In turn, human actions, in war or any other enterprise, alter nature.” After listing some of the different scholarly approaches that have been attempted, they continue that environmental historians still lack a work that considers the four years of war—the musters, training, troop movements, battles, home front, and aftermath—in an environmental context. This book, a collaborative effort between a military and an environmental historian, is an attempt to write such a history. Simply stated, we have tried to reimagine the war, not just as a military action but also as a biotic or biological event, one crucial to the history of the American environment. . . . We treat the war as an ecological event that not only affected people but also altered natural systems and reshaped the already complex interaction between humans, other organisms, and the physical environment. (3–4)To accomplish its task, the authors explain that An Environmental History of the Civil War merges traditional military sources with material from relevant sciences, scholarly territory often unfamiliar to historians. A particular differentiation of their history, they write, is to grant “agency to the natural world” (4).Browning and Silver’s fine book joins efforts by environmental historians in recent years who have staked out a general line of questioning that organically links their inquiry with that of military history. Indeed, this growing body of work has shown that our understanding of any conflict benefits from applying the environmental history line of questioning—even in a much-studied conflict such as the US Civil War.Over the last few decades, Mark Fiege and Ted Steinberg have included Civil War consideration in each of their general texts on environmental history (The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States and Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, respectively) and Jack Temple Kirby has offered methods for organizing the events of the conflict in his work for the National Humanities Center, “The American Civil War: An Environmental View.” Then, however, other scholars offered readers demonstrations of the environmental history approach in specific periods of fighting, particularly Lisa M. Brady in her War Upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War, which looks at the impact of the war on the landscape of the southern United States. And my own Gettysburg Contested: 150 Years of Preserving America’s Cherished Landscape applies many of these perspectives to the 1863 battle and its aftermath. The raw material exists, though, for future scholars to take these insights and to apply them to numerous aspects of the Civil War. To date, the strongest effort might be Megan Kate Nelson’s Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. Nelson’s fascinating work, however, lacks a breadth of questioning and instead primarily emphasizes the grotesque outcomes of fighting in the Civil War and classifies them as environmental degradation.Arriving into this literature, An Environmental History of the Civil War by Browning and Silver seeks to provide the broadest of templates. This book’s primary success is to create a model that will allow readers to pose the questioning of environmental history to any military conflict. Although lacking detail in much of its coverage, Browning and Silver’s book offers any reader a strong guide for how to frame the history of the Civil War through the approach of environmental history.In such a manner, An Environmental History of the Civil War situates itself from the start to be a path-breaking text; the selectivity of its execution, though, may leave readers unsatisfied. Thus, the best application of Browning and Silver’s brief book is very likely for use by other scholars to organize future, book-length explorations of specific battles and aspects of warfare in the Civil War. In the authors’ choice to emphasize a thematic organization over chronology, they make the most likely audience for An Environmental History of the Civil War other historians and students of history. Their template of concerns and themes, however, offers an excellent starting point for other scholars to create a much more exhaustive environmental history of the Civil War. That was not the goal of Browning and Silver and, to their credit, they are up-front about this rationale: “We make no claim to undiscovered sources or unrecorded events.” Instead, they offer a more “holistic way of thinking about the Civil War” (7).The thematic chapters of An Environmental History of the Civil War are laid out chronologically and largely stand as singular essays. Their organizing topics include sickness, weather, food, animals, death and disability, and terrain. Frankly, this is where the authors’ selectivity might become somewhat frustrating for readers. Each of the chapters is strong on its own and could effectively offer undergraduates a strong supplemental reading in either courses in environmental history or the history of the Civil War. In each instance, the chapter briefly introduces the general theme (such as disease, for instance) but frames it around one specific case study from the war. The timing of these case studies functions to offer An Environmental History of the Civil War its overall chronological structure and, thus, readers may find the coherence of the book somewhat uncertain.For instance, weather offers Browning and Silver one of their more innovative chapters. Starting in the western US and with a remarkable discussion of flooding and “climate oscillations,” the chapter emphasizes Confederate leaders’ consideration of weather patterns in their strategic decision making of 1862 (41). The meta-reading of such patterns is rather ingenious and mesmerizing, particularly as it leads to a predominance of rain and mud in the battlefields of the eastern US; however, readers might benefit from more of an applied investigation of how such outcomes altered ground-level fighting capabilities. In just this example, we see the aggressive selectivity that the authors exert on their consideration across the board. Their goal is to create a sampler of environmental approaches to the Civil War to stimulate further inquiry. They create strong individual essays but less of an overall, compelling book.At the conclusion of An Environmental History of the Civil War, the authors briefly utilize each of the chapter themes to summarize a large-scale environmental history interpretation of the Civil War that offers some new interpretations of the actual fighting. Surprisingly, though, the authors then conclude by introducing something entirely different: the formalization of the National Park idea at Yosemite, California, at the end of the Civil War. While this is a fascinating and important topic of environmental history, its use here for me rings hollow—even token. The authors have spent pages expanding our conception of environmental history and it makes little sense to return to common tropes of the field at the book’s closing. In Browning and Silver’s book, readers will find new insight and new opportunities for further analysis and research of the American Civil War.
Source: Pennsylvania history
Author: Brian C. Black
Institution: Pennsylvania State University
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4367610122