War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War

Abstract

In this short but ambitious book, Lisa M. Brady combines military and environmental history to analyze the role of nature in the Civil War. While she does pay attention to the environmental devastation caused by the conflict, Brady's main interest lies in nature's agency in warfare. Examining Union military strategy through the lens of environmental history, she shows how both the physical environment and human ideas about nature affected military activity in this “first” modern war. Her stated goal is to “use the war as a window through which we can better see … how nineteenth-century Americans perceived their natural environment and their place in it” (p. 5). This is admittedly a formidable task considering the magnitude of the conflict, but Brady successfully unveils many of the complex interactions at work between humans and nature during the Civil War. Brady begins her examination by introducing key concepts, such as Donald Worster's “agroecosystem,” and offers a solid discussion of the relevant environmental and Civil War historiography. Surprisingly little attention, however, is paid to research in the rapidly growing field of environmental history of war. Brady's original research for War upon the Land concentrates on four Union operations. She competently applies environmental history methodology to the rather traditional source materials: letters, journals, diaries, newspapers, and military documents. Brady's first two case studies examine the Union operations on the western theater along the lower Mississippi River and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's stubborn campaigns to take Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1862 and 1863. The next two chapters illuminate the role of nature in Gen. Philip Sheridan's 1864 Shenandoah valley campaign and Gen. William T. Sherman's march across Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864 and 1865, followed by a conclusion that includes a short discussion of the importance of the Civil War to the emerging conservation movement.