Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement by Phoebe S. K. Young

Abstract

Reviewed by: Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement by Phoebe S. K. Young Aaron Sachs (bio) Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement. By Phoebe S. K. Young. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 414. Cloth, $34.95.) When I think of the overlap between Civil War history and environmental history, I conjure destructive thoughts. I think of industrialism and Native dispossession and barren fields. I think of the excellent chapter "Battle Logs: Ruined Forests" in Megan Kate Nelson's book Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012). Yes: I think of stumps. Happily, Phoebe S. K. Young offers an alternative framework for us to consider. In her new study, Camping Grounds, Young uses a broad-minded version of cultural history to offer a sweeping view of the politics of camping out in the United States over the last 160 years. Her history's origin story constitutes a fresh take on the significance of soldiers' experience in the Civil War. While the men in blue and gray may have ravaged any number of forests, they also imprinted on comradely campfires under the forest canopy. The nature of encampment in American history turns out to be thought-provokingly complex. Readers of this journal will be most drawn to the compelling first chapter of Camping Grounds, which covers both wartime camp experiences [End Page 419] and the ways in which the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) used nostalgic campouts to build membership and stake its claims in the postbellum period. During the war, encampment usually signaled a break from battle that offered welcome comforts, as well as its fair share of challenges (tedium, pests, social hierarchies, weather). Camping was mostly just another military obligation: it was, in Young's useful terminology, functional, just as it had been in the antebellum period, when migrants camped out on the Overland Trail, gold miners camped out in California, and potential converts attended spirit-moving camp meetings. What the GAR accomplished in the 1880s was the transformation of camping into something that could be both recreational and political. The GAR had started lobbying the federal government on behalf of veterans almost immediately after the war. But of course most Americans—and even most veterans—were initially inclined to forget the recent unpleasantness at all costs, and GAR membership was so low in the mid-1870s that the organization almost folded. It was only when GAR leaders invested more seriously in reunion encampments that veterans started joining in significant numbers, such that during the 1880s camping started to define the GAR's identity, and the GAR began to determine the new meanings of camping. Far more than the occasional hunting camp established in, say, the Adirondacks, the GAR's massive campouts in highly visible public spaces shaped national perceptions of the value of sleeping under the stars. In the 1880s, camping was less about individualism and wilderness and more about solidarity and citizenship. Civil War veterans camped out to lobby for pensions and health care. They were successful, because their encampments embodied patriotic brotherhood, manly virtue, and even modern progress, thanks to their commercial sponsorships, tourism packages, and, in some cases, electric lighting. Camping appeared an all-American pursuit. Like the other chapters in this book, the opening one carefully balances close readings of a few key primary sources with broader analysis and thorough contextualization. It homes in on a Union veteran named John Mead Gould, who not only kept a diary of his military experiences of outdoor camaraderie, but also wrote a guidebook called How to Camp Out: Hints for Camping and Walking (1877). Overall, I found that the case studies in Camping Grounds, like most academic case studies, got a little too detailed and repetitive, but Gould is an engagingly cranky New Englander who proves an admirable anchor for Young's opening argument. Gould's writings suggest quite powerfully that when we think about environmental history and Civil War history, we ought to remember, in Young's cogent phrase, "the shared etymological roots of 'camp' and 'campaign'" (20). [End Page 420] Of course, there...