Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War by Megan Kate Nelson (review)

Megan Kate Nelson, author of Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (2005), has turned her keen analytical eye toward the physical consequences of the Civil War and presents a powerful interpretation of the immediate and long-term cultural responses such devastation elicited. In Ruin Nation, Nelson traces the war’s destructive capacity across splintered forests, through rubble-strewn cities and broken homes, and upon the bodies of soldiers bereft of their limbs and their masculinity. She suggests that in ruining and subsequently reconstructing “their own landscape . . . northerners and southerners alike created a new national narrative” (3). For Nelson, “landscape” is not just a physical space, but a cultural one as well; by merging these planes together Nelson offers an important new view into the legacy of the Civil War.

One reason Nelson’s book is so compelling is her innovative use of “ruin.” She carefully defines the term as “a material whole that has violently broken into parts” that, despite their fragmentation, “remain in situ” so “the observer can recognize what they used to be” (2). “Ruin,” then, can describe buildings, ecosystems, human and animal bodies, and the body politic. Nelson connects all of these through their damaged states to demonstrate the war’s catalytic role in Americans’ reimagining their physical and cultural landscape. She argues that the combined architectural, natural, and bodily wreckage created by the violence of the Civil War forced Americans to reconceive their nation and themselves.

Nelson traces the generation of such narratives through four sites of ruination: cities, homes, forests, and men’s bodies. Although she concentrates on a single subject per chapter, she does an admirable job of analytically linking them through a shared process of devastation and reconstitution. In her own words, “Ruin Nation is many things at once. It is a study of soldiers’ lives and bodies; a work of environmental history; a study of the human-made landscape; and an inquiry into American architecture, both urban and domestic. It is a cultural study of war and all that it both creates and destroys” (9). Most of the ruins Nelson examines were quickly reclaimed after the war. Forests regrew or were replanted with more economically beneficial species; prosthetics replaced amputated arms and legs; and “domestic ruins were recycled and rebuilt,” with their remnant chimneys becoming “the central icons in the Lost Cause narrative.” Nelson suggests that “these figurative ruins long outlasted their material counterparts,” creating new sources for conflict among Americans along regional, racial, and gendered lines (101).

Nelson rests her interpretation on a strong foundation of primary sources, both documentary and graphic, and utilizes a broad array of scholarly research to build her analytical structure. On occasion her arguments come across as assertions. In her chapter on domestic ruins, for example, she suggests that Union soldiers took or scattered private letters or other personal items “to expose what was private to public view” and were “undermining an important part of the assumed right to privacy” (84). It is more likely that they did so for no reason at all, other than that they were bored, or simply because they could. Nelson offers no evidence from the pillagers themselves attesting to any higher-minded, more sophisticated reasons for their vandalism. This rare and minor weakness aside, the majority of Nelson’s examples rest on solid evidentiary ground.

Her most original and intriguing contributions come from her chapters on soldiers’ bodies and on forests. The former complements Drew Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) and Mark Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (2008). Nelson’s book explains the cultural and psychological challenges posed by those who did not die, however, and explores the ways Americans dealt with those who remained painful, embodied reminders of war’s ruinous power. Nelson’s chapter on southern forests (she says very...