War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War by Joan E. Cashin

Abstract

Reviewed by: War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War by Joan E. Cashin Drew Swanson War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War. By Joan E. Cashin. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 258. Paper, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-108-41318-3; cloth, $84.99, ISBN 978-1-108-42016-7.) The Civil War took much more than human lives, Joan E. Cashin points out in War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War. Union and Confederate armies consumed a variety of resources as they moved across the South, including food, trees, civilian labor, and buildings, with little regard for official intentions, plans, or antebellum codes of conduct. Cashin describes how the conflict broke down the normal structures of civic life that kept communities attentive to one another’s needs. The result was soldiers taking a range of materials from civilians—a defiance of civility and decency that would rarely have happened in peacetime—using up the “stuff” of life for tactical and personal ends. War Stuff’s structure alternates between chronological and thematic. The first chapter establishes an antebellum baseline for southern community interactions and resource use. The region possessed a communal and fairly cooperative attitude, Cashin argues, encompassing its white citizens. The war, however, generated “a series of quick transformations in attitudes toward [End Page 170] people and things. . . . that would exploit almost all of society’s human resources and material resources” (p. 29). It is to these exploitations that Cashin turns in chapters 2–5. Cashin reveals the ways in which civilians were embodied resources, with each side competing for their energies and abilities. Union and Confederate soldiers employed civilians as, among other uses, spies, mail carriers, and hostages. Food was even more sought after than the allegiance of noncombatants. Foraging and impressment kept soldiers fed when regular supply lines left them hungry—a frequent occurrence for both Union and Confederate troops. Timber, too, was a crucial resource, and Cashin argues that the Civil War was particularly hard on American forests. Armies cut standing trees, both for warming fires and to create fields of fire, and they also consumed wood in other forms, raiding sawmills and fencerows for their lumber. Housing, Cashin notes in the fifth chapter, was another wartime resource in high demand, useful for garrisoning officers, shielding snipers, and, when disassembled, raw materials. Approaching armies often caused civilians to flee their homes, which in turn meant that both sides were more likely to use the houses for military purposes. Soldiers also burned homes—both with and without orders—and arsonists were rarely punished. A recurring argument in these topical chapters is that historians have wrongly assumed that wartime rules and regulations (whether the 1806 Articles of War, General John Pope’s 1862 General Orders No. 5, or Francis Lieber’s Code of 1863) on seizing civilian resources governed how soldiers actually behaved. Cashin finds that both Union and Confederate troops were harder on the resources of the country than the rules permitted, even from the initial year of the war. Overall Cashin is quite convincing that “military policy had a negligible impact on how the two armies” pursued “the ‘stuff’ of war” (pp. 53, 4). Chapters 6 and 7 are chronological, following the use and abuse of resources in 1864 as combat intensified, at war’s end, and briefly during the years immediately after the conflict. Cashin suggests that normalcy returned haltingly and unevenly. In the final months of the war, food was even more scarce, frequent large battles burned more forest, shelling left houses and even cities as rubble, and civilians increasingly had to confront the specter of dead bodies, graves, and the wounded as casualties spiraled ever higher. Cashin argues that rather than being exceptional, campaigns like that of General Philip Sheridan in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea were fairly typical of the fighting late in the war. In contrast to recent historiographical trends, Cashin’s portrayal of the antebellum South is one of a region...