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{127} conclusion Making a Desert and Calling It Peace in ad 84 the roman military commander and governor of Britain Gnaeus Julius Agricola determined to solidify Rome’s control over the island’s northern frontier. That year he engaged the last holdouts against Roman rule, the Scottish forces united under the chieftain Calgacus, at Mons Graupius. On the eve of battle Calgacus spoke to his warriors, rousing their courage by decrying Roman tyranny: “To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire.” Calling them “robbers of the world,” Calgacus accused the Romans of making “a desolation and [calling] it peace.” Agricola crushed the Caledonian resistance, but though he lost, Calgacus’s words were immortalized. Nearly eighteen centuries later, echoes of Calgacus’s speech could be heard ringing across the American South. The metaphors “desert,” “wasteland,” and “wilderness” punctuate the written records of those who witnessed the war’s destruction, especially in those areas where the Union chevauchées occurred. Observers often associated the war-torn landscapes across the South with the imposition of absolute Federal power. Some saw it as deserved retribution for treasonous acts, others as sheer rapaciousness—unjust, unwarranted, and uncivilized. Critics of the “hard hand of war” connected the abuse of power to the subjugation of people not only by military means but also by denying them the ability to gain sustenance from the land. The immediate material effects of such policies and military strategies were devastating and resulted in malnutrition, vulnerability to disease, and economic hardship. Equally important were the war’s longer-term implications for Americans’ relationships with those transformed environments. Antebellum Americans were well aware that their actions affected the natural environment. Though most believed that human efforts to “improve” nature were both proper and good, some began to question that assumption. Romantics like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Cole criticized Americans’ seeming drive to eradicate nature, fearing that if such “progress” went unchecked, America would lose its spiritual and moral {128} conclusion center. Edmund Ruffin knew that agriculture, improperly practiced, undermined soil fertility and contributed to erosion. An avid agricultural reformer, Ruffin understood that not all “improvements” actually improved the land. George Perkins Marsh, concerned about deforestation, agricultural expansion , and industrial development, concluded in 1864 that “man is everywhere a disturbing agent.” But the developments condemned by Thoreau, Ruffin, Marsh, and others took time, sometimes centuries, to manifest. In contrast, the devastation wrought by the Civil War was immediately visible on the landscape . In four years of war, the Union and the Confederacy clashed militarily over ten thousand times. These engagements ranged from battles involving over 150,000 troops to skirmishes between a few dozen men. The war combined massive military forces and industrial technologies with modern ideologies, resulting in widespread, large-scale damage not just where battles occurred but anywhere armies encamped or gathered resources. In addition, armies carried with them diseases that affected nearby human and animal populations: measles, smallpox, dysentery, and glanders, to name but a few. Civil War armies were essentially mobile cities that affected the landscape everywhere they went and that could not help but consume everything in their path. The arrival of an army, sometimes reaching over one hundred thousand men, put stress on a neighborhood’s available resources, including water, fences, woodlands , livestock, game, and of course, fruit, vegetable, and grain stores. Whether stationary or on the move, the soldiers required food, water, firewood, and shelter, some of which they requisitioned from nearby farms and plantations, taking or destroying the improvements locals had made to their environments. A Confederate soldier camped near Cumberland Gap remarked , “You can not well imagine how destructive the march of an army through a country is [. . .]. Hungry men seize stock. Cold men burn fences.” A resident of Pontotoc, Mississippi, wrote to a friend in the Confederate army, “We have had some stirring and trying times in Mississippi since you left and have fully and truly realized the troubles and horrors of war.” He complained that “our own army has eaten up the larger portion of the subsistence of the county.” Another soldier wrote from Jackson, Tennessee, “You can’t think what a destruction of farms there is here[,] fences burnt and houses torn down.” Charles Wills of the 103rd Illinois Infantry, also camped near Jackson, wrote, “One gentleman living between our camp and town has 10,000 pines, hollies, cedars, etc., in the grounds surrounding his house. [. . .] I mean he had...

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