An Environmental History of the Civil War by Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver (review)

Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver’s An Environmental History of the Civil War is the latest work to challenge the traditional narrative of Civil War history. Scholars have typically downplayed the environment’s influence on the war, opting instead to focus on the stories of people. After all, it was people who fought in battle, who suffered on the home front, and who struggled for their freedom. And yet people are only part of the story. Humans are vulnerable to their environment. This was certainly the case during the Civil War, when environmental factors regularly dictated troop movements, supplied food for marching armies, and altered soldiers’ health. Recognizing this, Browning and Silver broaden the traditional narrative by treating the war as “an ecological event that not only affected people but also altered natural systems and reshaped the already complex interaction between humans, other organisms, and the physical environment” (4).

Browning and Silver are not the first historians to merge the fields of Civil War and environmental history. Over the past ten years, a number of works have highlighted the relationship between the war and the natural world. Lisa M. Brady’s War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (2012) examines the connection between military strategy and popular conceptions of the land, while Kathryn Shively Meier’s Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (2013) investigates the environment’s impact on soldiers’ health. Erin Stewart Mauldin’s Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (2018) exposes the war as an ecological disaster that had lasting implications for southern agriculture, and Joan E. Cashin’s War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (2018) emphasizes how soldiers and civilians competed over the same environmental resources. Yet, with a growing historiography of environmental studies of the Civil War, Browning and Silver observe that “we still lack a work that considers the four years of war—the musters, training, troop movements, battles, home front, and aftermath— in an environmental context” (4). Their book is therefore unique because in it they seek to unite all these discussions. In doing so, Browning and Silver have produced a study that “reimagine[s] the war, not just as a military action but also as a biotic or biological event, one crucial to the history of the American environment” (4).

An Environmental History of the Civil War is divided into six chapters that move through the war both chronologically and thematically. Browning and Silver begin their study in the spring of 1861 with the rapid recruitment, training, and deployment of soldiers into the field. These actions led not only to a transient population, but also to overcrowded camps where vulnerable bodies came into contact with new microbes, viruses, and bacteria. Next, the authors explore the weather. By contextualizing the war within broader weather patterns, Browning and Silver reveal that the Civil War occurred during a protracted time of La Niña, which created warm, dry conditions over most of the North American continent. The notable exception was during the winter of 1861 through the spring of 1862, when abnormal rainfall left soldiers in Virginia, Tennessee, and California navigating floodwaters and floundering in the mud. Browning and Silver aptly demonstrate that weather not only affected troop movements, but also undermined soldiers’ health through exposure, nutritional deficiencies, and unclean water.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on the environmental struggles that resulted from gathering and moving large numbers of men and animals. The land bore responsibility for providing enough food and water to sustain both armies. But while food production skyrocketed in the North, it dwindled in the South owing to loss of labor, lack of agricultural diversity, and the Union army’s evolving hard-war policy. Additionally, men and animals produced...