South Central Review

Mud obscured the once-blue uniforms of over a hundred thousand Federals hunkered down at Harrison’s Landing, Virginia, in July 1862.¹ A sluggish Peninsula campaign ended much as it began: with soldiers languishing in miserable lowlands, exposed alternately to heaving rains and blazing heat.² The Army of the Potomac, commanded by Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, had arrived at Fort Monroe on the tip of the Virginia Peninsula from the Washington vicinity that March and April courtesy of steam technology. A 200-mile journey of 121,500 men, 14,592 animals, 1,150 wagons, 44 batteries, 74 ambulances, and thousands of tons of supplies deposited a massive, mobile city at the doorstep of the Confederate capital, Richmond, defended by the Army of Northern Virginia under Gen. Joseph E. Johnson and later Gen. Robert E. Lee.³ Union soldiers had spent their time confronting two equally challenging enemies: the Rebels and the Virginia environment. A Union cavalry officer described the latter as “filled with tangled thickets and unapproachable morasses. The tributaries of the rivers, mostly deep, crooked and sluggish,” dissipated into “stagnant swamps. A heavy rain in a few hours rendered these streams formidable obstacles” for soldiers and wagon trains. “Above this dismal landscape the fierce rays of the sun were interrupted only at night, or by deluges of rain, so that men and animals were alternately scorched and drenched.”⁴ The boggy conditions and burden of long supply lines in enemy territory triggered logistical and sanitary crises. By July approximately 30% of the Army of the Potomac was too sick for duty.⁵

Meanwhile the Confederates, whose army had swelled to 90,000 under Lee by June 1862, suffered similar problems of sickness, deprivation, and environmental distress. Home advantage amounted to precious little for men confined to a solely outdoor existence. By mid-August 1862, both armies cited health concerns produced by the unremitting Virginia summer as principal reasons for evacuating the area.⁶

Commanders, none of whom had fielded such large armies before the Civil War, had to learn to administer thousands of bodies supported by little infrastructure in punishing environments. Effective leadership meant managing natural resources to supply the soldiers, preventing or [End Page 37] overcoming the health calamities engendered by crowded outdoor camps, and taking environment into account in strategy and execution. The rank and file similarly had to learn techniques for coping with environmental obstacles when infrastructures or officers failed them. By 1865, men from private to general had lived the reality that to win the Civil War meant adequately mastering nature as much as outmaneuvering and outfighting one’s opponent. Armies were, in effect, organic entities, intimately engaged with their local ecosystems and also plugged into more distant networks of natural resource production.

Not only did the natural environment shape Civil War armies, but in turn soldiers altered nature by spreading filth and disrupting ecosystems. Millions of trees were felled in pursuit of army lodgings, firewood, and the construction of roads and railroads, bridges, and defensive fortifications, while thousands more became battle casualties. The smoke of black-powder muskets and cannons filled the air after battle, while the grass lay littered with discarded paper cartridges and Minié balls. Soldiers foraged, consumed and sullied water, and preyed on wildlife for food. Whereas spheres of travel tended to be more localized in the antebellum era, war mobility meant men ate one place and excreted another, altering flora wherever they roamed. Proper tourists, they collected seeds and flowers to send home as relics. Indeed, the Civil War’s intensity and scale and intimacy with nature rendered it a singularly important period of interaction between Americans and their environment.

This essay serves to introduce readers to environmental history of the Civil War and to demonstrate that the war fundamentally altered the relationship between Americans and nature in the nineteenth century. Betraying my own interest as a military historian, I examine Confederate and Union armies as the major sites of this exchange, using the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia as case studies. While the home front...