The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War ed. by Brian Allen Drake (review)

“Consider, for example, the settlement of the Mississippi valley,” Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949; “[P]onder the fact that the cane-lands, when subjected to . . . the pioneer, became bluegrass. What if the plant succession inherent in this dark and bloody ground had . . . given us some worthless sedge, shrub, or weed? . . . Would there have been any overflow into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri? . . . Any transcontinental union of new states? Any Civil War? . . . Is history taught in this spirit?” (A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There [New York, 1949], pp. 205–7).

In this vibrant collection of essays, twelve scholars bring Leopold’s spirit of national environmental history to bear on the darkest of bloody grounds. For Civil War enthusiasts, scholars, and students in any field, these essays demonstrate what historians discover when they bring their keen eyes, experience, and curiosity to places, themes, and topics outside their usual stomping grounds. The varied questions and methods of these scholars offer southern historians well-crafted vignettes about various wartime landscapes and communities, including mountains, battlefields, cotton fields, Piedmont tobacco barns, muddy roads, dense second-growth forests, cemeteries, and even deserts.

Editor Brian Allen Drake provides an excellent introduction, his metaphors neatly capturing the collection’s goals and limits: no “sweeping and conclusive answer” but instead “a methodological smorgasbord” laid out to provide inspiration and models regarding “what sort of distinctive contributions environmental history might make” to Civil War history (p. 7, emphasis in original). The first essays address elemental topics: weather, human bodies, food, and disease. Kenneth W. Noe narrates how rain, drought, and fog shaped the war, listing key engagements on a spectrum delineating the effects of bad weather from “No Effect” to “Maximum Effect” (pp. 27, 29). Megan Kate Nelson contributes a beautifully argued reassessment of the Union retreat from Fort Fillmore, New Mexico, in July 1861, in which scorching heat and dehydration led to approximately one hundred deaths and a humiliating surrender. Nelson writes, “we see the power of the landscape to shape human action. . . . Such conditions demanded adaptive responses from soldiers” (p. 47). Timothy Silver’s close reading of wartime Yancey County, North Carolina, follows Alfred Crosby’s conception of “portmanteau biota”— the animals, crops, and microorganisms humans carry along when they move—to reveal the ways bodies in motion between battlefield, army camp, and home carried labor and diseases to and fro, linking southern ecologies at multiple levels, from intestinal parasites to crop failures and mosquitoes to hog cholera (p. 52). Disease, Silver concludes, “is not just an ancillary story. It is the story” (p. 62, emphasis in original). Continuing this focus, Kathryn Shively Meier frames the act of straggling in 1862 Virginia—short-term desertion in the face of exhaustion, hunger, mud, weather, and disease—as soldiers’ pursuit of mental and physical relief and, most important, as bodily self-care in the face of enormous daily environmental challenges.

The middle essays move to intellectual and theoretical ground. Aaron Sachs’s eloquent essay “Stumps in the Wilderness” draws broad connections between parallel landscapes and stories of destruction and loss: wounded veterans’ bodily stumps and the nation’s ravaged forests, stripped of trees by warfare and economic expansion. New ideas about wilderness, Sachs argues, emerged from the stump-filled ground of felled forests and from Virginia’s 1864 battle of the Wilderness and the ravaged bodies it left behind. John C. Inscoe turns to nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary depictions of the southern mountains as a refuge from warfare—a higher ground, morally, spiritually, and physically, in the southern literary imagination. Back on the battlefield, Lisa M. Brady reimagines the “friction” at the heart of Carl von Clausewitz’s 1832 On War—that war rarely goes as planned...