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  • War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War by Lisa M. Brady
  • Mark E. Neely Jr.
War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War. By Lisa M. Brady (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2012) 187 pp. $69.95 cloth $24.95 paper.

In one of the most revealing quotations from the Civil War, U.S. Army engineer Gouverneur Warren observed after the disastrous Battle of Chancellorsville, "All our known topography in the entire region from the Potomac to the James River, and from the Blue Ridge to the Chesapeake . . . is a dense forest of oak or pine, with occasional clearings, [End Page 139] rarely extensive enough to prevent the riflemen concealed in one border from shooting across to the other side; a forest which, with but few exceptions, required the axmen to precede the artillery from the slashings in front of the fortifications of Washington to those of Richmond."1 Warren attributed the indecisiveness of battles in the Civil War, among other things, to that overwhelming quality of the terrain in America. This quotation would be appropriate in the first chapter of any history of the war. Perhaps the application of the fresh insights and welcome sensitivities of the new discipline of environmental history will bring it to greater attention.

War upon the Land focuses on the Mississippi campaigns of 1862/63, particularly Ulysses S. Grant's siege of Vicksburg; Philip H. Sheridan's famous 1864 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley; and William T. Sherman's March to the Sea and through the Carolinas in 1864/65. Brady describes the "agroecological systems" of the various theaters of war, bringing to bear concepts of strategy from the generals' perspectives and comments from soldiers and officers in the field about the campaigns. Such evidence reveals the rank and file of soldiers to have been closer to nature than most of us are. Their generals—despite their education in engineering at West Point, their assumptions about the rightful mastery of the environment, and their eagerness to subdue an enemy operating from an unknown Southern landscape—were likely closer to nature as well. Taken together, the judiciously chosen quotations from writings about the environment by military personnel in the Civil War should spark our appreciation for the importance of terrain in nineteenth-century warfare.

Terrain is essentially a military term for the scientific and reformist term environment. Whether any revolutionary transformation of environmental vision resulted from the Union army's sojourn in the Confederacy remains unclear even at the end of the book. Nonetheless, an irony surrounding this well-written and accessible study concerns the impressive work performed by the engineering corps, whose enemy was nature as well as the Confederate army and whose descendants in modern times might be said to be the Army Corps of Engineers. Sherman discovered that the bridges and road repairs of his brilliant engineers could make his army move faster instead of slowing it down with siege operations. Grant, far from being a butcher heedless of casualties at the beginning of his career, reached for elaborate engineering projects in 1863 Mississippi to counter the Confederates' advantages on the Mississippi River and to avoid slaughter. Only Sheridan had little need for ambitious engineering to torch the mills and commercial crops of the Valley of Virginia.

Brady's book will demonstrate the extent to which issues relating to terrain have been underestimated in the Civil War. The study of war in [End Page 140] general has much to gain from the new perspectives of environmental history.

Mark E. Neely Jr.
Pennsylvania State University

Footnotes

1. Box 10, Folder 9, Orderly Book, Gouverneur Kemble Warren Papers, Manuscripts and Special Collections, State Library of New York, Albany.

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