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  • The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War ed. by Brian Allen Drake
  • Erin Stewart Mauldin
The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War. Ed. Brian Allen Drake. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8203-4715-8, 256pp., paper, $22.95.

Over the last several decades, military history has become an increasingly inclusive academic enterprise, incorporating a range of subdisciplines, including cultural, gender, transnational, and, most recently, environmental history. Scholars interested in the ecological aspects of warfare cover more than how natural elements shaped battles or campaigns—they also address soldiers’ interaction with nature, war’s transformation of natural landscapes, and how wartime experiences alter human views of the environment. Brian Allen Drake’s noteworthy collection, The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War, provides a lively addition to this emerging body of scholarship. The product of a 2011 meeting of the University of Georgia’s UnCivil Wars conference series, this volume surveys the myriad ways scholars might employ the methodologies and perspectives of environmental history to reexamine the U.S. Civil War.

Readers looking for an encyclopedic chronicle of how the environment shaped the war will not find it. As Drake admits in his introduction, the volume “is not and cannot be definitive” (7). However, the book’s chief value lies not in its comprehensiveness, but in its deft use of environmental approaches to discuss oft-studied Civil War topics in new and insightful ways. Ten essays from an impressive roster of historians draw on standard themes of environmental history, but in an engaging manner that will appeal to those unfamiliar with the subdiscipline. Contributors examine climate, disease, military theory, southern agricultural production, and questions of logistics and supply. The authors are explicitly in dialogue with each other, and almost every contribution contains references to other pieces in the volume. This feature transforms the book from a succession of discrete chapters to a genuine discussion among experts. In this way, the collection undeniably succeeds in acting “as an opening statement in a historical conversation rich with possibility” (12).

Several of the essays gathered here recast a specific episode or element of the war. Megan Kate Nelson’s excellent piece of historical detective work, “The Difficulties [End Page 340] and Seductions of the Desert,” reexamines Major Isaac Lynde’s withdrawal from Fort Fillmore, New Mexico, using climatological data, medical knowledge, and analysis of past land use. Kathryn Shively Meier encourages readers to reconsider “straggling” among soldiers on the march as a deliberate method of “self-care” and a phenomenon totally separate from desertion. Lisa Brady’s chapter applies an environmental lens to military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s notion of “friction” in a recalibration of clashes at Fort Donelson, Iuka, and Perryville.

Other pieces are more general in their scope. Kenneth Noe promotes a more dynamic view of weather in warfare and includes a helpful appendix ranking the effect of climatic or weather conditions on specific battles. In his elegantly written chapter, “Stumps in the Wilderness,” Aaron Sachs reflects on the Civil War’s place in the trajectory of nineteenth-century ideas about “the collision of humanity, technology, and nature” (100). For his contribution, Mart Stewart considers wartime foot travel—civilians walking in the landscape, slaves running through it, and soldiers marching across it—and how experiences in nature helped buttress ideas of self-sufficiency, freedom, and national independence.

As is common in environmental history, many of the essays use “place” as the starting point for an analysis of larger issues. John Inscoe examines popular literature produced both during and after the war to show how environmental peculiarities made the southern Appalachian Mountains a refuge for runaway slaves, deserters, and unionists. Drew Swanson’s analysis of the tobacco-producing landscapes of Piedmont Virginia reminds us that in some instances, the conflict was not the watershed moment we assume it was; longer-standing ideas about agriculture and nature persisted despite the challenges of wartime. Timothy Silver uses the history of Yancey County, North Carolina, to demonstrate how an environmental lens can connect studies of home...

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