War upon the land: Nature and warfare in the American Civil War

“War upon the Land: Nature and Warfare in the American Civil War” examines several Union approaches to war and nature, focusing on three separate but related campaigns: the operations near and around Vicksburg in 1862–1863, the 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign, and the marches through Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864–1865. Although not an analysis of the material consequences of the Civil War, “War upon the Land” examines an equally important result of the war: the development of a new military strategy that has nature and its destruction as it central focus.; For most of the Vicksburg campaigns, Union strategy centered on solving the problems of nature through engineering. When it became apparent that nature was sometimes unwilling to conform to military specifications, the Union leadership under General Ulysses S. Grant instituted an alternative approach to nature and strategy, one that hearkened back to Americans' deep seated fears about wilderness. Whereas the initial Union strategy focused on controlling wilderness through engineering, the subsequent plan aimed at creating wilderness through the revival of the ancient practice of the chevauchée, or massive foraging raid.; Three main assumptions form the core of the study. The first is that nineteenth century ideas about nature greatly influenced strategic planning, with control over nature being the most important factor. The second core argument is that nature is a historical agent, and that it played an active role in the war, shaping the conflict just as the effects of war transformed it. Very closely related is the third assumption: that the armies of the Civil War had to contend with nature, just as they battled each other.; Ultimately, “War upon the Land” argues that we cannot make sense of the Civil War, without an understanding of the ways in which nature influenced the conduct of the war. By examining several watershed campaigns through the lens of environmental history and analyzing the ways in which nineteenth-century American ideas about nature directly influenced the direction of the war as well as its material consequences, “War upon the Land” begins to fill a lacuna in the historiography of the Civil War.