Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia by Kathryn Shively Meier (review)

Meier’s Nature’s Civil War seeks to expand “common soldier scholarship” by exploring the ways in which Union and Confederate soldiers assigned to the Peninsula and/or the Shenandoah Valley provided “self care” in an effort to recreate the basic creature comforts of home and to avoid disease. Her work is at its best in supplying thick description of the common soldiers’ lot—exposed to the elements, underfed, buggy, dirty, and tired—and their attempts to improve their condition. She merges environmental history with medical history and military history by emphasizing the common soldiers’ awareness of the intersection between environment and disease. The environmental factors that emerge as most critical were temperature, moisture (rain, glood, and basic hydration), and insect infestation.

Meier’s work includes an account of the official struggles of Union and Confederate medical hierarchies to craft efficient medical departments, and a novel view of “straggling” as a form of “self care” that commanders condemned as absence without leave. One of her most intriguing points is that many of the soldiers who came from farms viewed their surroundings with farmers’ eyes, assessing its drainage, productivity, and water sources—obvious once Meier makes a point of it.

Meier builds her narrative on a rich trove of archival sources that features 205 soldiers, from both the North and the South. She even performs quantitative analysis on her qualitative collection, yielding such interesting facts as a greater prevalence of disease among Civil War troops than official records indicate. Some indication of how the men of this sample were selected would have strengthened her quantitative claims.

The emphasis on the common soldier leads Meier to downplay the importance of contemporary medical knowledge and to privilege the wisdom of the crowd above that of the medical personnel. For example, she argues that “prevention was not considered the domain of nineteenth-century physicians,” which would have surprised the staff of the United States Sanitary Commission who were engaged in that very enterprise. Medical reformers had pushed for improvements in sanitation since the 1790s, albeit using an understanding of infectious disease that targeted foul air as the principal culprit. In general, as Rosenberg emphasized, medical men and lay persons shared an environmentalist understanding of disease causation that was reflected in both the writings of common soldiers and in the analyses of medical men during the Civil War.¹ Both physicians and patients viewed illness as caused by environmental factors—weather that was too hot, too cold, too wet, or too dry; swampy air; contaminated drinking water; etc.

This book could have profited from vetting by a medical historian or a specialist in infectious disease to eliminate some unfortunate errors. Nonetheless, it succeeds in vividly recreating the common soldier’s struggle to adjust to life in a hostile landscape with mainly his comrades and his wits to keep him alive.