Guest Editor's Note

Environmental historians have been investigating the role and place of nature in human life for the past forty years; but they have only recently turned their attention to the changing landscapes of the American South—its forests, mountain ranges, plantations, river deltas, commons, and swamps. This turn has also prompted a recent boom in Civil War environmental history, with scholars investigating the ways natural resources shaped marches, camp life, and battles, and how the South's (and a few of the North's) many natural features bore the brunt of warfare. While Civil War historians have previously discussed natural environments in their essays and books on other topics (campaigns and battles, winter quarters, and the home front), this new research places the environment at the center of the study of warfare. "The Nature of War," a special issue of Civil War History, is a forum for this emergent field.

Civil War environmental historians ask a variety of questions, including: To what extent did natural forces determine—or help to determine—military campaign strategy, battle tactics, and army logistics? How did the same environmental exigencies affect Union and Confederate armies differently and why? How did soldiers and civilians make use of nature's bounty—its forests, crops, flora, and fauna—to help them survive the conflict? How much devastation did armies on the move bring to the American landscape? And what did Americans (Union and Confederate, black, white, and Native American, men and women) make of these environments of war?

The articles in this special issue exemplify critical engagement with many of these important questions. Lisa Brady was the first scholar to really take up Jack Temple Kirby's 2001 challenge to unite Civil War and environmental history, with her 2005 article "The Wilderness of War," published in Environmental History. Her historiographical review, "From Battlefield to Fertile Ground: The Development of Civil War Environmental History," provides some basic definitions and considers developments within the field over the past ten years. All of the books and articles that she discusses demonstrate how an environmental approach can uncover aspects of the Civil War that enrich our understanding of its impact on Americans and their nation.

The articles that follow Brady's review represent two theoretical and methodological perspectives within Civil War environmental studies.

Matthew Stith's essay, "'The Deplorable Condition of the Country': Nature, Society, and War on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier," examines the dynamic roles that the natural environment played in Trans-Mississippi border warfare. Perhaps no other locale brought so many interesting communities into contact with one another: Union regulars, Confederate irregulars, unionist and Confederate civilians, and unionist and Confederate Native Americans. Ultimately, Stith asks, to what extent did the war on the border evolve into a conflict over nature?

Brian Black turns our attention to the changing agendas and landscapes of preservation at Gettysburg National Military Park in "The Nature of Preservation: The Rise of Authenticity at Gettysburg." Here he considers how the field on which the battle occurred (the subject of so many military histories) has served as a vital forum through which a society wrestles with wartime memory. What role has "nature"—those "historic" fields, hills, and forests—played in the creation of landscapes of preservation and in the designation of those places as "authentic"?

These essays cross boundaries between military, environmental, political, cultural, and memory studies to engage in provocative explorations of the Civil War's many histories. We hope this special issue of Civil War History will serve as both an introduction to Civil War environmental history and an inspiration to further study.