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

BOOK REVIEWS 90 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Sheldon constructs this story with deep and inventive research both in sources that have been well mined and in those that have not. She draws on traditional sources such as correspondence and reminiscences of political leaders , the printed records of Congress, and newspaper accounts, but she also works with invitations , housing directories, Congressional seating charts, and association records. In particular, much of the visual evidence is not simply well analyzed, but strikingly presented as well. We see who is sitting next to whom, and we see the labyrinthine floor plan of the capitol, which gave abundant opportunity for private discussion. The picture of the sociability of political Washington in the antebellum era is a convincing one, but it leaves the reader with some big questions. This is a story about the coming of the Civil War, but it is ultimately unclear what influence the warm friendships of the capital had upon the large political conflicts of the era. Shelden suggests that Washington friendships served as a “buffer for sectional prejudices,” (8) and yet the war came. Certainly we see that those politicians who were unable or unwilling to cultivate Washington society would prove to be especially incapable of promoting sectional peace (here, Zachary Taylor is a prime example), but even the strongest bonds of friendship would prove incapable of taming sectional tensions. Perhaps ultimately we are left with a picture of the limits of “Washington Brotherhood.” Andrew Diemer Towson University Nature’s Civil War Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia Kathryn Shively Meier Way back in 2001, the pioneering environmental historian of the U.S. South, Jack Temple Kirby, noted that environmental historians and Civil War historians had been largely ignoring each other’s work. In an essay written for the National Humanities Center’s exhibit Nature Transformed: The Environment in American History, Kirby called for historians to take an ecological view of the Civil War in order to understand how the war was a turning point in Americans’ relationship to the environment . Some thirteen years later, the exploration of the intersections of military, social and environmental history has become an exciting area of scholarship. Kathryn Shively Meier’s book, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia, is a great example of how using environmental history as a lens can invigorate familiar fields of study, and it makes an important, though limited, contribution to Kirby’s goal of understanding the Civil War as an environmental turning point. Focusing her efforts on the year 1862 and the two Virginia campaigns of that year (in the Shenandoah Valley and the Peninsula), Meier provides a bottom-up view of how common soldiers perceived the relationship between their bodies and the environment. She draws on an impressive array of soldier diaries, letters, and memoirs, as well as official records and medical and surgical histories, to argue that common soldiers were astute observers of that relationship , who fully understood their health to be a product of their environment. Central to Meier’s BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2014 91 argument is a concept she terms “self-care,” the relatively successful efforts by soldiers—individually and collectively—to maintain their own health by confronting the “environment of war” (7). Self-care techniques could range from staying in the shade, eradicating pests, and constructing protective shelters to digging medicinal herbs and “straggling for relief” (2). These techniques, she contends, reflect awareness among soldiers that their greatest enemy outside of opposing armies was the environment, and they took measures to mitigate its effects. According to Meier, soldiers were often at odds with the medical systems imposed by both Confederate and Union militaries, which they found to be “ineffectual, impersonal, and even condemnatory” (66). This tension, which she attributes mainly to class differences, did not suddenly spring up during the war. Rather, as Meier contends, its groundwork was laid in the prewar experience and the fact that most common soldiers rarely had experience with so-called “orthodox” medicine. They practiced their own forms of self-care, occasionally with the help of an alternative medical practitioner or a self-help medical guide. The Civil War, Meier argues, “would usher...