Reimagining the Civil War

For most Americans, the Civil War sesquicentennial has come and gone with little fanfare. Ceremonies have been small, controversies have been sparse, and no memorable speeches have been delivered. Yet in Civil War historiography, the last few years have been a time of monumental change. A field that used to be known mostly for military studies is now a hotbed of new methods, approaches, and frames. Social and cultural histories have moved from the margins into the center, accompanied by smaller subfields such as environmental history, budding trends like a spatial turn, a shifting focus to the trans-Mississippi West, and a growing attentiveness to the multivalent functions of the human body in wartime.

What many of these new directions share is a deep interest in the material dimensions of war. Whereas questions of ideology and causality remain important, historians are increasingly preoccupied with the war as a physical experience, a process shaped not so much by the politics underlying it but by the interactions between the conditions it created and the men and women who had to contend with them. Three of the more intriguing books to have come out during the sesquicentennial showcase this perspective in powerful ways. The Blue, the Gray, and the Green is an excellent collection reflecting the growth of the field and its influence. The best essays in the book offer truly innovative interpretations of how the environment shaped the history of the war. Kenneth Noe paints with large brushstrokes the overall picture of climate patterns during the war period, most crucially the alteration of heavy rains and droughts in the South. These unusual weather events, he argues, played a crucial and unacknowledged role in facilitating Confederate defeat. Yet he also urges historians to “move beyond the effects of the elements to the question of how people and institutions shaped their responses to them” (p. 25). The Confederate cause, Noe makes clear, was a casualty not just of bad weather, but of the government’s inability to deal with the consequences of agricultural disasters that ensued.

Megan Kate Nelson explores one episode of military conflict in the oftforgotten Southwestern theatre, the embarrassing Union surrender at San Augustine Springs, New Mexico. By carefully reconstructing both environmental conditions and human behavior, she delivers a new history of the engagement and argues that Union defeat was not the result of incompetence but of heatstroke and dehydration that caused the officer in charge to make grave mistakes in judgment and that forced his soldiers to withdraw from the march.

In another noteworthy essay, John Inscoe offers a captivating interpretation of the Appalachian wilderness as both myth and reality. The unique topography, terrain, and environment of Appalachia shaped both the nature of the wartime struggle and the way it was perceived. “The war drove perceptions of the mountain South as moral high ground, and made of it both a literal, psychological, and emotional refuge from a world gone terribly wrong” (p. 131). And yet the paradox Inscoe points out is that the region’s allure as a hiding place made it highly attractive for a diverse and unruly crowd of runaways: refugees from combat zones, escaping slaves, Confederate deserters, Union POWs, and guerilla fighters of all sorts. These groups wreaked havoc on the region and generated a type of irregular warfare that was often more brutal than the one employed in regular battlefields.

In a different vein, Lisa Brady attempts to bridge the gap between environmental and military historians by introducing the term “friction,” coined by the nineteenth...