Ruin Nation

Destruction and the American Civil War

Megan Nelson, Amy Taylor, Stephen Berry

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780820343792
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Géographie historique

During the Civil War, cities, houses, forests, and soldiers' bodies were transformed into "dead heaps of ruins," novel sights in the southern landscape. How did this happen, and why? And what did Americans—northern and southern, black and white, male and female—make of this proliferation of ruins? Ruin Nation is the first book to bring together environmental and cultural histories to consider the evocative power of ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change.

Megan Kate Nelson examines the narratives and images that Americans produced as they confronted the war's destructiveness. Architectural ruins—cities and houses—dominated the stories that soldiers and civilians told about the "savage" behavior of men and the invasions of domestic privacy. The ruins of living things—trees and bodies—also provoked discussion and debate. People who witnessed forests and men being blown apart were plagued by anxieties about the impact of wartime technologies on nature and on individual identities.

The obliteration of cities, houses, trees, and men was a shared experience. Nelson shows that this is one of the ironies of the war's ruination—in a time of the most extreme national divisiveness people found common ground as they considered the war's costs. And yet, very few of these ruins still exist, suggesting that the destructive practices that dominated the experiences of Americans during the Civil War have been erased from our national consciousness.

Ruin Nation

Destruction and the American Civil War

MEGAN KATE NELSON

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction. American Ruins

One. Our Own Pompeii: Ruined Cities

Two. Lone Chimneys: Domestic Ruins

Three. Battle Logs: Ruined Forests

Four. Empty Sleeves and Government Legs: The Ruins of Men

Conclusion. The Ruins of History

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Federal Troops at Hampton, Virginia, Harper’s Weekly, April 19, 1862

1.2 Hampton, Va. View of the Town, December 1864

2.1 William Waud, Sherman’s March through South Carolina — Burning of McPhersonville, S.C., February 1, 1865, Harper’s Weekly, March 4, 1865

2.2 V. Blada [Adalbert John Volck], Track of the Armies, 1863

2.3 Edwin Forbes, A Slave Cabin, [1876]

2.4 Edwin Forbes, Gone Off with the Yankees: A Deserted Negro Cabin, [1876]

2.5 A. W. Warren, Before Petersburg — Winter Quarters from the Plantation, Harper’s Weekly, February 25, 1865

3.1 The Appearance of Bragg’s Deserted Encampment, 1862

3.2 Edwin Forbes, A Night March, [1876]

3.3 Timothy O’Sullivan, Fauquier Sulphur Springs, Va., Vicinity: Troops Building Bridges across the North Fork of the Rappahannock, August 1862

3.4 D. B. Woodbury, Engineer Corps Making Corduroy Roads, 1862

3.5 Edwin Forbes, Home Sweet Home, [1876]

3.6 Edwin Forbes, The Commissary’s Winter Quarters in Camp, [1876]

3.7 Timothy O’Sullivan, Petersburg, Virginia. Church Built by the Fiftieth New York Engineers at Poplar Grove, November 1864

3.8 Frank Morse, Sketch of a Chapel for the 37th Regiment, January 2, 1864

3.9 Edwin Forbes, Interior and Exterior of the Opera House Erected by the Second Brigade, First Division, First Army Corps, Commanded by General Rice, reprint 1893

3.10 Edward Sachse, Camp Kelsey, Near Annapolis Junction, Md., Comp. F. 10th Maine Regt Enjoying Thanksgiving Dinner, Sent Them by Their Friends at Lewiston, November 21, 1861

3.11 Timothy O’Sullivan, Camp Architecture: Brandy Station, Virginia, January 1864

3.12 The War in Virginia — Sketch on the Line of the Second Corps at the Battle of the Wilderness, May 6, 1864 — Waiting for the Enemy

3.13 Capture of Fort de Russy, La., on the 14th of March 1864, by the Federal Forces under General Andrew Jackson Smith, [ca. 1894]

3.14 [George N. Barnard], War Views No. 2722: Rebel Fortifications, North Side of the City, Atlanta, Ga., Another View, [1864]

3.15 Edwin Forbes, Traffic between the Lines. . . . The Enemy’s Works (Protected by Abattis and Chevaux-de-Frise) Are Seen in the Background, [1876]

3.16 Alfred E. Mathews, The Battle of Shiloh, Charge and Taking of a New Orleans Battery by the 14th Regt. Wisconsin Volunteers Monday, April 7, 1862

3.17 Henry Lovie, Capture of McClernan’s Headquarters, April 6, 1862

3.18 Wounded Trees within Grant’s Lines, North Side of the Plank Road, Opposite Cemetery No. 3, with Human Remains, [1864–65]

4.1 Bombardment of Fort Henry — Interior View — Bursting of a Rifled 42-Pound Gun, 1862

4.2 Joseph E. Baker, How Free Ballot Is Protected!, 1864

4.3 A Typical Negro: Gordon under Medical Inspection, Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863

4.4 True for Once, July 1864

4.5 Thomas Waterman Wood, A Bit of War History: The Veteran, 1866

4.6 This May Seem Very Bold, June 1863

4.7 Winslow Homer, Our Watering-Places: The Empty Sleeve at Newport, Harper’s Weekly, August 26, 1865

4.8 Adelaide R. Sawyer and J. C. Buttre, The Empty Sleeve: What a Tell-Tale Thing Is an Empty Sleeve, 1871

4.9 Peck Brothers, Photographers, Private George Warner and His Family, [1865–68]

4.10 Return of Wounded Soldiers of the Federal Army Captured at Bull Run — Scene in Hampton Roads on Board the United States Steamer ‘Louisiana.’ To Which They Were Transferred, under a Flag of Truce, October 7, 1861

4.11 Collecting Letters, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1871

4.12 Result of Appointing a Veteran as Postmaster, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 11, 1865

4.13 The Conscription in Prospect — The Would-Be Exempts [A Manufactured Accident], May 1863

5.1 Methodist Parsonage, Malvern Hill, September 2008

5.2 Taylor Farm, Petersburg National Battlefield Park, September 2008

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book – like its subject – has a long history. So it is no surprise that in researching and writing it I have accumulated a long list of debts. At the University of Georgia Press, Derek Krissoff has been a champion of the project from the beginning and an ideal editor. I cannot thank him enough for his words of encouragement, his sense of humor, and his willingness to put on the pressure when I needed it. Steve Berry recruited me for the Weirding the War Conference at the University of Georgia in the fall of 2009 and has subsequently been a wonderful collaborator; his creativity and embrace of the offbeat in Civil War studies have been an inspiration. I also thank John Inscoe for introducing me to Steve and for being an enthusiastic supporter of the project all along. Conversations with Paul Sutter and Mike Vorenberg have shaped my ideas about the intersections of southern, Civil War, and environmental history.

I spent much of the past eight years traveling to archives and to Civil War sites across the South and in New England. I could not have done so without financial support from a variety of institutions. In 2007, Tom Klammer and the Dean’s Office at Cal State Fullerton’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences provided me with start-up funds, which I used to visit Virginia’s archives and battlefields. An Untenured Faculty Development Program Grant from Cal State Fullerton in the spring of 2007 gave me the time to write up some of my ideas. I also received funding in 2008 through the Mellon Research Fellowship at the Virginia Historical Society; the Jay T. Last Fellowship in Graphic Arts at the American Antiquarian Society; the Suzanne and Caleb Loring Fellowship in Civil War Studies at the Boston Athenaeum and the Massachusetts Historical Society; and the Institute for Southern Studies Research Grant at the University of South Carolina. A New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Grant took me to the New Hampshire Historical Society; Maine Historical Society; Connecticut Historical Society; Rhode Island Historical Society; Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; Houghton Library at Harvard University; and Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study.

The curators, librarians, and staff members at all of these archives (and others) were wonderfully helpful and patient as I called one manuscript after another related to what must have seemed a bewildering array of subjects. In particular, I thank Gigi Barnhill, Paul Erickson, Lauren Hewes, Elizabeth Watts Pope, and Laura Wascowicz at the American Antiquarian Society; Nelson Lankford, Frances Pollard, E. Lee Shepard, and Katherine Wilkins at the Virginia Historical Society; Peter Drummey and Conrad Wright at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Stephen Nonack, Sally Pierce, and Catharina Slautterback at the Boston Athenaeum; Candace Kanes, Nicholas Noyes, and Jamie Kingman Rice at the Maine Historical Society; Richard Malley and Susan Schoelwer at the Connecticut Historical Society; Lee Teverow at the Rhode Island Historical Society; Beth Bilderback and Henry Fulmer at the South Caroliniana Library; and P. Toby Graham at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia.

Ruin Nation benefited from the suggestions of archivists and from the comments and questions of my colleagues. I began the research for this book while an assistant professor in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, and Susan Tomlinson and Kurt Caswell read the first words about ruins that I put on the page. My students and colleagues at Cal State Fullerton, especially Natalie Fousekis, Allison Varzally, and Ben Cawthra, joined me on panels and in hallway discussions a...