War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War by Joan E. Cashin (review)

Since 2000, an increasing number of environmental historians have made the Civil War a center of inquiry. At the same time, Civil War historians have begun to pay closer attention to the nonhuman contexts of their work—although one might argue that weather, terrain, disease, and animals have always featured in military historians' work. In War Stuff, Joan Cashin seeks to enter this ongoing conversation by exploring the attitudes of soldiers, administrators, civilians, and army officials toward both human and nonhuman resources during the Civil War.

Cashin argues that the pressures of war toppled antebellum views of the material world, freeing soldiers from prewar mores of rural communalism and the stewardship of natural resources. Policies and regulations meant to govern soldiers' behavior were largely ineffective, and despite widespread outrage at the way Union and Confederate armies acquired the "stuff" needed to fight, ultimately, the struggle for resources caused enormous suffering in the South. The writing is impressively concise and straightforward, and the book draws on a wide range of published and unpublished primary sources regarding army policy, soldier behavior, and civilian reactions to both. However, it is not a particularly "environmental" history, and the argument regarding the war's effect on the South unwittingly elevates the Old South as a kind of paradise lost.

The book consists of seven largely chronological chapters tackling the fates of four resources from the late antebellum period through 1865: people, sustenance, timber, and habitat. Cashin uses her "Old South" chapter to introduce the ethic of communalism she says dictated whites' attitude toward material resources. She argues the Old South was a world of plenty, "an agrarian wonder," in which white people managed their environment in a spirit of "obligation and cooperation," sharing what they had or made with friends, relatives, and neighbors (15, 11). Waste happened, she admits, and there was some poverty, but most whites were decent stewards of human and nonhuman communities alike. Cashin intentionally limits the analysis of War Stuff to white populations, so there are few mentions of African American contributions to the production or management of material resources in the South during this period.

Chapter 2 brings the reader into the war, surveying the full spectrum of the ways the Civil War drew on (white) human capital—Cashin discusses people as laborers, spies, politicians, soldiers, concerned parents, hostages, and refugees. She shows that "military policy had a negligible impact on how the two armies interacted with civilians," and indeed, bureaucratic failure is one of the book's overarching themes (53). This is especially true in Cashin's chapters on sustenance, timber, and habitat. She uses this section to rebut historians such as Mark E. Neely Jr., whose The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (2007) argued for a greater understanding of the evolution of Union army policy from one of relative restraint to one of "hard war." Cashin believes the Union practiced "hard war" tactics from the get-go, due to "failures of supply and discipline" (5). This was most obvious in the role food played in army-civilian interactions, although her interpretations of soldiers' acquisition of timber and attitudes toward Southerners' property make the same point. The final two chapters cover the last years of the war, concluding in chapter 7 that the Civil War had irreparably severed the bonds of communalism that held the Old South together and stripped the region of its bounty.

While the book's title implies that there will be a greater analysis of the environment in this work, War Stuff is a history using traditional sources in which, for the most part, the natural world is a passive player. It relies very little on the interdisciplinary approaches and scientific sources environmental historians typically use, and it only draws on ecological perspectives as presented by other authors. The result is a relatively...