The Blue, the Gray, and the Green

Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War

Stephen Berry, Amy Taylor, Brian Drake

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780820347158
  9780820347141
• eBook ISBN:
  9780820347752
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The Blue, the Gray, and the Green is one of only a handful of books to apply an environmental history approach to the Civil War. This book explores how nature—disease, climate, flora and fauna, and other factors—affected the war and also how the war shaped Americans' perceptions, understanding, and use of nature. The contributors use a wide range of approaches that serve as a valuable template for future environmental histories of the conflict.

In his introduction, Brian Allen Drake describes the sparse body of environmental history literature related to the Civil War and lays out a blueprint for the theoretical basis of each essay. Kenneth W. Noe emphasizes climate and its effects on agricultural output and the battlefield; Timothy Silver explores the role of disease among troops and animals; Megan Kate Nelson examines aridity and Union defeat in 1861 New Mexico; Kathryn Shively Meier investigates soldiers' responses to disease in the Peninsula Campaign; Aaron Sachs, John C. Inscoe, and Lisa M. Brady examine philosophical and ideological perspectives on nature before, during, and after the war; Drew Swanson discusses the war's role in production and landscape change in piedmont tobacco country; Mart A. Stewart muses on the importance of environmental knowledge and experience for soldiers, civilians, and slaves; Timothy Johnson elucidates the ecological underpinnings of debt peonage during Reconstruction; finally, Paul S. Sutter speculates on the future of Civil War environmental studies.

The Blue, the Gray, and the Green provides a provocative environmental commentary that enriches our understanding of the Civil War.

INDEX

acoustic shadows phenomenon: overview, 10, 147, 149–51

Fort Donelson battle, 151–53

Iuka battle, 153–56

Perryville battle, 156–59

Adventuring in the Andes (Frazier), 130

African Americans. See Cudjo’s Cave (Trowbridge); fertilizer regime, postwar; slaves

agency, concept of, 227–28. See also specific concepts

agriculture: Civil War connections summarized, 231–34

emancipation’s impact, 191, 197–98

northerner critiques, 163–64

as scholarly opportunity, 164–65

Sherman’s destruction, 5, 191, 197

shifting cultivation strategy, 53, 191–92, 232–33

slavery’s role, 176–77, 194–95, 232

soil fertility attitudes, 195–97

taxation/confiscations, 175–76, 188n55

twentieth-century soil survey, 187n47. See also fertilizer regime, postwar; tobacco, bright leaf

Agriculture and the Civil War (Gates), 4

air temperature factors. See acoustic shadows phenomenon

Alcott, Louisa May, 81

American Forests (Starr), 103, 110n16

American Space (Jackson), 112n25

amputees, 96, 98, 108n2, 220

Appalachia, as refuge

—freedom associations, 114–15

—for fugitive soldiers, 121–24, 127

—guerrilla activity correlation, 120–21

—literary portrayals: overview, 9

Cold Mountain (Frazier), 130–37

“Crowder’s Cove: A Story of the War” (Woolson), 125, 128–29

Cudjo’s Cave (Trowbridge), 115–20, 139n17

“A Strange Land and Peculiar People” (Harney), 124–25, 141n27

“The Yares of Black Mountain” (Davis), 125, 126–28, 141n39

—wilderness image development, 113–14

Appalachia on Our Mind (Shapiro), 141n37

Appleton’s Journal, 128

Arizona, in Southern Manifest Destiny, 36–37

“Armies of the Wilderness, The” (Melville), 96

Arndt, Hartmut, 149

artillery damage, 100, 109n7

Ashby, Turner, 70

Ashley, David, 86, 87

Bachman, Aaron E., 79

Bagley, William Chandler, 232

Bailey, Phoebe, 178

Balicki, Joseph, 26

Ball, Charles, 215–17, 222n11

Ballard, Michael, 154

Banks, Nathani...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. New Fields of Battle: Nature, Environmental History, and the Civil War
• One. Fateful Lightning: The Significance of Weather and Climate to Civil War History
• Two. “The Difficulties and Seductions of the Desert”: Landscapes of War in 1861 New Mexico
• Three. Yancey County Goes to War: A Case Study of People and Nature on Home Front and Battlefield, 1861–1865
• Four. “The Man Who Has Nothing to Lose”: Environmental Impacts on Civil War Straggling in 1862 Virginia
• Five. Stumps in the Wilderness
• Six. “The Strength of the Hills”: Representations of Appalachian Wilderness as Civil War Refuge
• Seven. Nature as Friction: Integrating Clausewitz into Environmental Histories of the Civil War
• Eight. War Is Hell, So Have a Chew: The Persistence of Agroenvironmental Ideas in the Civil War Piedmont
• Nine. Reconstructing the Soil: Emancipation and the Roots of Chemical-Dependent Agriculture in America
• Ten. Walking, Running, and Marching into an Environmental History of the Civil War
• Epilogue. “Waving the Muddy Shirt”
• Contributors
• Index