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

In her cleverly titled book, Ruin Nation, Megan Kate Nelson explores how Americans made sense of the destruction, or ruination, of the Civil War. Each chapter focuses on one type of ruin—cities, homes, forests, and the bodies of soldiers—describing the thoughts and intentions of those who ruined and tracing the transient nature of the remains. The war's destructive powers divided Americans—southerners had much more firsthand experience of ruination, at least when it came to their homes and cities—but in the end, both sides reacted to ruins in similar ways. Southerners and northerners alike delighted in various acts of destruction and often found wreckage beautiful, transcendent even. Wrecked cities like Columbia, South Carolina, and Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, elicited anger, recriminations, and calls for retribution. Violation of and destruction of homes escalated the cycle of violence, but, and unsurprisingly, wartime deforestation barely caused either side to blink. Neither side predicted, nor was it prepared for, the unprecedented number of amputees who limped back from the war.

In war's aftermath, though, Americans came back together, not because of how much they agreed on the meaning of the ruined things that surrounded them but because they all agreed to stop looking. They did this by rebuilding cities, abandoning wrecked homes to the elements, allowing second-growth forests and underbrush to choke off access to sites, and by filling empty sleeves with metal and wood prosthetics. And ever since they leveled the ruins, postwar Americans—all of us, that is—have enjoyed relics of splinters of battlefield trees, fragments of shattered bones, shreds of bloodstained bed linens displayed in museums and sold as paperweights at the fake sites we created in their stead. Whereas antebellum Americans loved the ruins they associated with ancient civilizations in Europe and the Middle East, postwar Americans preferred pocket-sized traces they could take home with them as they busied themselves with forgetting about their own past. Perhaps it was the enormity of the destruction they had lived through that caused them to lose their stomach for anything bigger.

Creatively and effectively combining elements of environmental and cultural history with gender and memory studies, this is an original, provocative, and ambitious book. Ruin Nation is an auspicious start to the University of Georgia Press's new UnCivil War series, which promises a collection of monographs dedicated to telling the story of the American Civil War in unconventional ways. There is nothing conventional about Nelson's telling. The book raises all sorts of important questions that will make good food for thought in college classrooms and Civil War roundtables. With chapters organized neatly around different themes, readers might be tempted to slice off pieces of the narrative—the chapter on amputees, for instance, is worth the cost of the book alone—but if they do, they will miss the chance to engage in these big questions.

Although she only mentions it once, I suspect postwar Americans' rejection of ruins had something to do with a reaction to modernity. Where they were avid consumers of ancient ruins and, while juiced up on wartime patriotism, could be curious about the destruction their modern weapons wrought, ruins would have obstructed the path modern Americans beat to nostalgia. Meanwhile, curious European tourists visited the war-torn country to do some rubbernecking of their own. A return to the idea of ruins-themed tourism with which Nelson opens the book might have been revealing: what did Europeans think of our American Pompeiis? Finally, there might have been some real payoff to staying with cities and forests, substituting for Nelson's chapter on amputees a discussion of the comparable deforestation that occurred in regions of the North that underwent rapid industrial development—like north-central Pennsylvania, where entire forests disappeared and rivers and streams were redirected to support industrial logging. In wartime photos taken of the hills of Titusville and Oil City, Pennsylvania, oil derricks...