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

Civil War historians have long included nature in their analyses of the conflict, yet few have used the environment as a central vehicle by which to understand the war more completely. Lisa M. Brady’s much-anticipated book splendidly fills this gap. Brady’s work is not intended as a comprehensive environmental history of the Civil War. Instead, it is a carefully nuanced study of three major Union campaigns that, taken together, provide a compelling case for nature’s agency in shaping the war. Brady examines well-trodden ground through a new and innovative lens, but her story does not simply reinforce the contention that nature affected the course and outcome of the war. More specifically, she argues, the natural environment became an increasingly important factor in Union military strategy against the Confederacy. By destroying the built southern landscape, the Union army effectively eroded civilians’ morale and, eventually, their willingness and ability to continue the war. “By targeting the South’s agricultural sector,” Brady convincingly argues, “this new Union strategy undermined the region’s most basic relationship to the natural world. It destroyed the Confederacy’s agroecological foundations and contributed significantly to ultimate Federal victory” (23).

To tell her story Brady focuses on Union generals Ulysses S. Grant, Philip Sheridan, and William T. Sherman and their increasingly crippling campaigns through the heart of the South. In so doing, she makes a strong case for the Union commanders’ evolving use of the landscape as a weapon in the hard war that developed by 1863. Not every attempt to control nature proved successful, however. The Union effort to build a canal that would nullify Vicksburg’s commanding position on the Mississippi River provides a striking example of futility. But such failed struggles with the environment, Brady contends, helped dispel the contemporary notion that nature “could be made to bend to human will” (48). In return, Union commanders like Grant and Sherman gained a great deal of respect for the natural world’s potential use as a tool of war. Consequently, in his renewed campaign against the Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, Grant waged a war against the southern landscape, destroying crops and farm implements while simultaneously encouraging slave laborers to abandon their masters’ fields. Such tactics laid the groundwork for his successful siege of Vicksburg and proved a precursor for the nascent federal campaigns in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas.

By 1864, Union commanders knew well the powerful economic and emotional connection between Confederates and their constructed landscape, and they did their best to destroy it. Brady uses Sheridan’s brief but devastating operation against Virginia’s remarkably fertile and productive Shenandoah Valley as an example of such evolving Union military strategy. For Brady, the Union assault against what Sheridan called the “granary of the Confederacy” did not turn the region into a “wasteland” or “wilderness,” as local Confederate citizens had claimed, but it did quite effectively destroy the built landscape and undermine civilian morale. Farther south, much like Sheridan’s campaign in the Shenandoah, Sherman’s strike against civilians and their agroecological lifestyle in Georgia and the Carolinas, according to Brady, further “capitalized on the tenuous character of the southern agricultural system, shifting the balance of power just enough to cause the Confederacy to topple upon itself” (126). Improved agricultural landscapes comprised the very bedrock of southern identity and the destruction of such identity played no small role in the collapse of the Confederacy from within.

More than being the best environmental study of the Civil War, War upon the Land provides a glowing example of how useful interdisciplinary research can be in rethinking familiar stories and drawing important new conclusions. By blending environmental and military history, Brady illuminates new and exciting directions for scholars to reexamine the Civil War (and other wars) by exploring...