The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War by Kenneth W. Noe

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War by Kenneth W. Noe Brian Allen Drake The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War. By Kenneth W. Noe. Conflicting Worlds. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 670. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-7320-6.) For too long, Kenneth W. Noe argues, historians have forgotten that among the Civil War's most important elements were the elements—its muck and mud, dust and drought, sudden freezes and thaws, driving rain, and blistering sun. In fact, the 1860s was a decade of particularly extreme weather, he observes, and any study of tactics, strategy, and soldiering needs to reckon with that fact. With The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil [End Page 166] War, Noe thus "takes the Civil War back out in the weather and renarrates its military history" from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, with a keen eye on how the elements shaped bivouac, march, and battle (p. 1). Utilizing everything from Smithsonian Institution records to soldiers' letters, Noe reconstructs daily high/low temperatures and precipitation levels for nearly every major battle and campaign, details the lived experience of that weather, and elaborates on the ways it helped determine victory or defeat. Unsurprisingly, given its massive scope—the book clocks in at 670 pages—its conclusions are complex and varied, rather like the weather itself, but some themes emerge. Global phenomena like El Niño and the North Atlantic Oscillation were profoundly important, for they created both regional events like droughts and pressure systems that then spawned localized heatwaves, rainstorms and floods, and frosts. These, in turn, had significant and sometimes decisive impacts on action in the field, far beyond well-known examples like the Peninsula campaign. Hardly a battle or campaign unfolded—or failed to unfold—without the weather weighing in. The list of attacks, counterattacks, retreats, and pursuits that foundered on storm fronts, blizzards, swollen rivers, and muddy roads is almost endless. Most Civil War histories name-check the weather before moving on quickly to the drums and trumpets, but Noe makes Weather—with a capital W—a vital "third combatant" in every theater (p. 493). The book shines in its depictions of the weather-born miseries of men and animals. After 670 pages of unrelenting heat and rain and mud and ice, The Howling Storm begins to feel like a forced march. But that is the point; Noe's exhaustive account drives home his point that understanding the experience of Civil War combat means understanding the ecological contexts in which it occurred. Even without combat, soldiering was an exhausting, painful, disease-ridden, sometimes fatal, and always constant immersion in the elements, as Noe makes clear through his copious use of soldiers' correspondence and diaries. This was true of many wars, of course, but The Howling Storm's descriptions of mud alone—trapping wagons, halting columns, slicing boots to ribbons in frozen weather, sucking doomed men and animals into its depths in warmer times—give the Civil War the feel of the western front in World War I. They add the human element to the elements, humanizing what could have risked becoming simply a standard military history cum weather report. They also complicate Monday-morning generalship—if you think you could have easily done better than General George B. McClellan in 1862 Virginia, for instance, you might march a few miles in Chickahominy-soaked boots before passing too much judgment. In the end, Noe argues that the weather favored the Union armies to a large degree because of better and more available supplies to deal with it. The weather also may have helped end slavery. If McClellan had been successful in 1862, the war might have ended before military necessity inspired the Emancipation Proclamation. It is an interesting if counterfactual idea and one that environmental historians could ponder. The Howling Storm deliberately sticks mainly to the battlefield, but these sorts of larger arguments are among the most interesting, and it would be nice to see more of them. For instance, there are some fascinating insights into the weather's effects on food supplies, [End Page 167] but they are...