Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South by Erin Stewart Mauldin (review)

drastically over the past decade. Erin Stewart Mauldin's Unredeemed Land contributes significantly to that literature by making land its central actor. Following in the historiographical footsteps of Lisa Brady's War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (2012) and Joan Cashin's War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (2018), Mauldin traces Southern land-use techniques from the antebellum period, through the war years, and deep into the postwar period. The Civil War and emancipation are central to how practices changed. After the devastation of military operations and the liberation of the enslaved, self-sufficiency practices waned and cotton dependency grew. More than market forces or greed of landowners and merchants, environmental and ecological conditions promoted the South's fall into an impoverished monoculture. The connection between the land and the South's plight is a key theme of Unredeemed Land, and Mauldin illustrates it persuasively.

Antebellum Southern agricultural systems revolved around two poles: available excess land and slave labor. The region's climate and soil composition made excess land valuable. Hot, humid summers with short but intense rainstorms on top of "old soils" made continuous cotton production difficult (16). Mauldin contends that extensive land-use techniques, such as free-range animal husbandry, ditching, and shifting cultivation, enabled Southern farmers to keep land productive and profits high. Even with these practices, however, "the land simply could not keep up with the world's voracious hunger for cotton" (12). With older lands unable to produce lasting profitable cotton returns, Southern landowners sought continued expansion. Thus, farmers saw the debates over "free" or "slave" in the newly acquired western territories as a threat. Challenging our understanding of the secession crisis, Mauldin argues the debate over slavery's expansion was more than political and that "constraining slave territories threatened the profitability and long-term sustainability of the southern agricultural economy" (13).

The Civil War and emancipation were powerful forces that changed the South's agricultural system for generations. Even though Southerners' land use during the war—foodstuffs rather than cotton, fallow fields, and land abonnement—gave the land a break from antebellum practices, Mauldin illustrates the irony that the human conflict continued to inflict hardship on the land. Mauldin's engagement in the debate over the war's destruction is a significant historiographical contribution. Rather than emphasizing buildings destroyed or crops and livestock impressed, Mauldin contends the war was destructive because of the execution of military operations on a landscape trained to extensive land-use systems. "Soldiers removal of livestock, provisions, fences, and woodland, as well as the exacerbation of soil erosion by fortification building," she explains, "were all more damaging because of the region's reliance on extensive land-use techniques" (69).

In the immediate postwar years, cotton yields were high because of the break the soil received during the war, and good prices rewarded fine harvests. With this, the Southern landscape turned into the reformers' intensive ideal: continuous cultivation, fenced livestock, and improvement techniques like fertilizer. Still, the environmental impact of the war and emancipation, Mauldin argues, "undermined any effort to reorganize Southern agriculture, worsening environmental conditions and restricting economic opportunities for white and black farmers alike" (70). Intensive land-use techniques failed to produce the profitable cotton crops farmers sought. Furthermore, labor contracts, the absence of livestock, and the continual reduction of woodlands and common spaces made self-sufficiency difficult. Mauldin expertly ties the land and its postwar limitations to the development of the New South. Farmers migrated to other agricultural areas in the region, to the growing cities and their developing industry, or to the railroad, mining, or timbering businesses.

Erin Stewart Mauldin's Unredeemed Land is an eloquently written and tightly argued monograph. Weighing in at only five chapters and...