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

The nascent subfield of Civil War environmental history has to this point dealt with nature in America’s seminal conflict in one of two fashions. Some historians have described the material effects of environmental processes on the progress of the war, exploring the import of disease-carrying mosquitoes, the tactical challenges of acoustic shadows, or the viscous suction of mud. Other recent histories have limned the ways the war shifted conceptions of nature, from the Union decision to transform the South’s agrarian spaces into symbolic wildernesses to efforts North and South to come to grips with the ruin war wrought on landscapes and bodies. Kathryn Shively Meier, in Nature’s Civil War, has fused these two approaches. She looks at the intersections of environment, health, and worldview of Union and Confederate soldiers in two 1862 Virginia military actions, the Shenandoah and Peninsula campaigns. Meier astutely demonstrates that nature played a tangible role in the fitness and performance of both armies in both actions, and that ideas about the relationship between health and environments were of at least equal importance.

The book’s organization is topical rather than chronological. Meier prefaces her wartime analysis with a chapter examining ideas about the interrelation of health and environment in antebellum America, detailing the varied understandings and practices of formal medical knowledge and the prevalence of informal self-care. In a second chapter she then relates soldiers’ initial experiences with nature during the early months of the war, extending beyond the traditional period of “seasoning” that accompanied their encounters with the crowd diseases of camp life. The third chapter tackles formal medical networks and practices within the Union and Confederate armies, casting them as relatively ineffective, feared, and avoided by the majority of soldiers, and unable to reshape antebellum ideas about health. Chapter four describes common soldier self-care practices, and the final chapter argues that straggling and desertion were the ultimate expressions of self-care, as soldiers despondent over environmental challenges to their physical and mental health sought the only treatment they believed left to them: walking away from war, either temporarily or for good.

Nature’s Civil War is full of clever, and sometimes surprising, observations. Among them: Meier forcefully argues that most soldiers’ wartime experiences—at least from the standpoint of health and disease—were more akin to those of urban environments than they were encounters with rural nature, as military camps became some of Virginia’s largest cities for a time. The extent to which soldiers avoided formal medical care in favor of their own forms of self-care, and the wide varieties of these informal remedies and palliatives, is also enlightening. And the identification that straggling and desertion often occurred in response to environmental health concerns promises to substantially revise scholars’ interpretations of these actions, at least for the early war.

Meier draws on a substantial selection of soldiers’ diaries, letters, and memoirs for convincing—if anecdotal—evidence. The standard fodder of historians interested in camp life is here, handled critically and well. Perhaps the only critique is a conceptual one. Meier limits her study to two campaigns in one theater of the war and a single year. She notes that these limits reflect a desire to delve into detail while still exploring health in “contrasting environments” (9). These are admirable aims, yet readers may wish for an extension of this story to the broader war; we can only hope that Meier will tackle this topic next.

Historians in different fields will likely take away disparate, though equally important, conclusions from Nature’s Civil War. Civil War historians should finish the book convinced that, in the Eastern Theater in 1862, soldiers’ minds were above all dwelling on nature and health, and that these obsessions had military ramifications. Many environmental historians will leave the book assured that the Civil War was a defining moment for American environmental thought, a...