From Battlefield to Fertile Ground: The Development of Civil War Environmental History

In 2001, Jack Temple Kirby published his essay "The American Civil War: An Environmental View," in which he wrote, "In the nearly four decades since the [Civil War] centennial, demand for old-fashioned (shall I say?) military history and military biography has hardly abated. Environmental history, meanwhile, a sub-discipline born during the 1960s and flourishing modestly since, has yet to impact the Civil War seriously." This failure to unite Civil War and environmental histories troubled Kirby for two reasons. First, he noted that since at least the 1970s "Americans have belonged to a culture steeped in ecological language and politics," one that presumes a connection between humans and the natural world. Second, Kirby suggested that we need an environmental analysis of the Civil War because "no one alive at the dawn of the twenty-first century, from the oldest among us to our most immature students, can conceive of war without environmental danger if not disaster." Kirby argued that failing to understand the war as an ecological event ignores these important cultural and intellectual developments. He then presented "a preliminary environmental impact statement" of the war, highlighting issues such as disease, destruction of rural and urban landscapes, deforestation, and the ecological ramifications of emancipation and of the death of hundreds of thousands of people and millions of animals. He concluded that while not all the consequences of the war equaled permanent environmental degradation, the conflict resulted in a "poorer South after all" and signaled "the beginning of the end of southern rural life as it had been known for at least two centuries." His final exhortation was for Civil War and environmental historians to stop ignoring each other and to begin a fruitful debate.¹

By the start of the war's sesquicentennial, Kirby's was no longer the lone voice in the historiographical wilderness. A dozen or so scholars have started to add their voices to the chorus. Some might not concur with Kirby's reasons for engaging in environmental analysis of the war, or even, perhaps, with his conclusions, but these scholars' impact on the larger field of Civil War history, while still relatively small, is undeniably growing. More panel and round-table sessions at academic meetings focus on environmental histories of the Civil War; indeed, entire conferences are being organized around this new line of inquiry.² Journals are soliciting and publishing articles that analyze the environmental consequences of Civil War battles and strategy, nature's impact on the physical and psychological health of soldiers and civilians, and the ecological debates surrounding battlefield preservation efforts. Books that examine the war through the lens of environmental history are now available, and increasing numbers of graduate students are producing masters' theses and doctoral dissertations along similar lines.³

This special issue of Civil War History demonstrates that environmental and Civil War historians are heeding Kirby's clarion call to action. I feel privileged to provide some historiographical context for the essays in this issue, an honor that rightfully would have been Kirby's, had he not passed away in 2009. I will concentrate my efforts on those publications that are explicitly environmental histories, despite the growing number of articles and books by scholars in other fields who acknowledge—to varying degrees—the importance of such elements as geography, geology, weather, and disease in shaping the course of the Civil War.⁴ I will also limit my scope to those examples that focus primarily on the military conflict, even though environmental historians who examine the South and its broader ecological past are beginning to incorporate meaningful discussions of the war into their work.⁵ Though still fairly limited, the environmental subset of Civil War historiography has developed enough, I believe, to merit this more exclusive attention.⁶

It is still new enough, however, that I feel compelled to offer a brief, perhaps overly simplistic, definition. For those unfamiliar with the field, environmental history is the study of the changing relationships human communities develop with nonhuman nature over time and place. It examines the ways...