War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the Civil War by Lisa M. Brady (review)

Lisa Brady’s War Upon the Land marks the publication of the first full-length environmental history of the Civil War. While Brady’s chosen case studies—Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign, Philip Sheridan’s 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign, and William T. Sherman’s marches through Georgia and the Carolinas—are familiar stories, as is Grant’s evolution toward the strategy of exhaustion, the lens through which these developments are viewed is new. Brady deconstructs the winning U.S. strategy to reveal that its success was bound up in America’s most important nineteenth-century relationship to nature: control. Controlling the “wilderness” was most often achieved through agriculture but also, in a time of war, through military strategic planning. Union generals ultimately undermined Confederate citizens’ capacities to produce food and to manage the uncertainties of nature, from the disease that threatened their bodies to the mercurial weather that endangered their crops. What remained of the South at the end of 1865 was not a literal wasteland but a ruined landscape: “the product of a community’s relationship with the surrounding natural environment” (92). The Confederacy was rendered temporarily ecologically dependent on the United States and so surrendered.

The heart of War upon the Land is composed of four chapters on the three campaigns that, arguably, contributed most to Federal victory. (Two chapters are devoted to the protracted operations at Vicksburg.) Brady contends that while nature was a neutral force, it possessed agency and “provided great assistance if approached correctly,” which, ultimately, Grant, Sheridan, and Sherman achieved (48). This is not to say that the generals did not struggle to wrest control of nature. Grant’s operations at Vicksburg nearly failed thanks to months of battling “water, climate, [and] disease” and an ill-fated attempt at canal construction meant to master the Mississippi River (66). Sheridan initially struggled militarily, but following the third battle of Winchester, “gained unstoppable momentum” and turned to “his primary purpose in the Valley: the systematic destruction of its productive landscape,” a point that will be contested by historians who believe this was Sheridan’s secondary aim (82–83). Sherman’s troops made easy headway foraging through Georgia, only to suffer the treacherous quagmire of South Carolina, where environment appeared to the Federals as malevolent as the fire-eaters they held responsible for the war.

In each case, Union generals “capitalized on the tenuous character of the southern agricultural system,” shifting power just enough to favor their advantage (126). Brady provides compelling evidence that the southern vulnerability was slavery, a system that caused vast land tracts to be sacrificed to cotton, limiting food production and confining husbandry to the periphery. Both sides also recognized black labor as critical to environmental management. After Vicksburg, General-in-Chief Henry Halleck urged Grant to siphon off slaves to handicap enemy agriculture and redirect the labor for Union purposes, in effect, diverting control of nature to the United States. Grant wasted no time in elaborating upon Halleck’s order to encourage mass environmental destruction, conceivably drawing upon what Brady has outlined as Grant’s recent experience at Vicksburg, West Point training, and his cultural convictions regarding the psychological advantage of converting Confederate farmland into wilderness. Yet because the story is fragmented into case studies, it can be difficult to piece together Grant’s personal evolution as strategist.

Brady’s introduction and conclusion serve as useful mediations between environmental and military scholars, inviting understanding and collaboration. The introduction is the best summary of the emerging environmental literature on the Civil War to date, identifying environmental terms that can be applied to Civil War strategy. Chief among these definitions is Donald Worster’s “agroecosystem”—a part-natural, part-domesticated landscape—which “may or may not be as stable” as the ecosystem it is meant to replace...