An Environmental History of the Civil War

By Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver

This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world. To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But here Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver weave a far richer story, combining military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the war's significance and impact. As they reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment by fostering the spread of microbes among vulnerable soldiers, civilians, and animals; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape across several states; sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world; and demanded a reckoning with disability and death on an ecological scale. And as the guns fell silent, the change continued; Browning and Silver show how the war influenced the future of weather forecasting, veterinary medicine, the birth of the conservation movement, and the establishment of the first national parks.

In considering human efforts to find military and political advantage by reshaping the natural world, Browning and Silver show not only that the environment influenced the Civil War's outcome but also that the war was a watershed event in the history of the environment itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781469655390

Judkin Browning

Judkin Browning is professor of military history at Appalachian State University and author of Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina.

Book preview

An ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY of the CIVIL WAR

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

An Environmental History of the Civil War

JUDKIN BROWNING & TIMOTHY SILVER

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

© 2020 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Jamison Cockerham

Set in Arno, Scala Sans, Rudyard, Ashwood, Brothers, and Dear Sarah by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Cover illustrations: Map of the siege of Vicksburg, 1864, by Adam Badeau, 1885; and Stuck in the Mud: A Flank March across Country during a Thunder Shower, by Edwin Forbes, ca. 1876; both courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Browning, Judkin, author. | Silver, Timothy, 1955– author.

Title: An Environmental History of the Civil War / Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver.

Other titles: Civil War America (Series)

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2020] |

Series: Civil War America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019041157 | ISBN 9781469655383 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469655390 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Nature—Effect of human beings on—United States—

History—19th century. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. | United States—Environmental conditions—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC E468.9 .B883 2020 | DDC 973.7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041157

CONTENTS

Introduction: More than the Mud March

one     SICKNESS

Spring–Winter 1861

two     WEATHER

Winter 1861–Fall 1862

three     FOOD

Fall 1862–Summer 1863

four     ANIMALS

Summer 1863–Spring 1864

five     DEATH AND DISABILITY

Spring 1864–Fall 1864

six     TERRAIN

Fall 1864–Spring 1865

Epilogue: An Environmental Legacy

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Mud March

Camp life

Hospital ward

Quinine in whiskey

Butler and Lincoln cartoon

California flood

Map of Sibley campaign

Attack on Fort Henry

Map of Virginia Peninsula

March from Williamsburg

Bridge over the Chickahominy River

Foraging in Virginia

Cornfield at Antietam

Confederate conscription

Food in Ohio

Map of Vicksburg and vicinity

Dead horses at Gettysburg

Giesboro Depot

Burning dead horses at Fair Oaks

Reinforcements for Our Volunteers

Beef for the Army—on the March

Battle of Spotsylvania

Wounded at the Wilderness

Confederate dead at Spotsylvania

Air-Tight Deodorizing Burial-Case

Embalming

Field hospital

Andersonville prison

Saltworks in Saltville, Virginia

Wilderness battlefield

Forts at Atlanta

Winter camp in Virginia

Mirror Lake in Yosemite Park

An ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY of the CIVIL WAR

INTRODUCTION

MORE THAN THE MUD MARCH

The day after Christmas 1862, Union general Ambrose Burnside started planning a bold maneuver to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond. The commander called for his Army of the Potomac to cross Virginia’s Rappahannock River on pontoon bridges west of Fredericksburg—a city halfway between Washington, D.C., and Richmond—and move south around the Confederate troops on the other side. From that position, Burnside hoped to squeeze the enemy between his army and the banks of the Rappahannock. With southern forces defeated or on the defensive, Burnside believed he might have an easy path to Richmond. Once there, he would deal the South a blow from which it could not recover. Such an aggressive move might also boost northern morale, which had been at low ebb since a humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg two weeks earlier. Few subordinate officers expressed much faith in Burnside or his plan. At least two generals met with President Abraham Lincoln to say as much, and for a moment, the commander in chief wavered. But when Burnside threatened to resign, Lincoln reluctantly approved the action.¹

During the first weeks of 1863, Burnside watched the weather. Sunny skies and cool temperatures allowed local roads to dry out and become firm enough for travel. Even a quick cold snap on January 17 seemed to have little effect on his men or his projected path to the Rappahannock. Encouraged by the good weather, the general put his army in motion at noon on January 20. As he approached the river, however, Burnside got word of Rebel troops stationed south of the river in a position he had not anticipated. He decided to delay the crossing for a day while he considered the latest intelligence. After that, he intended to move his two corps—Burnside preferred to call them Grand Divisions—consisting of 75,000 men into position for an attack on Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces.²

Around 9:00 on the night of January 20, just as the first of his men reached the river’s edge, a cold, heavy, incessant rain set in along the Rappahannock. At times the rain mixed with snow, and the precipitation did not stop for thirty hours. Driving wind blew down hastily pitched tents. The relentless downpour doused campfires, leaving shivering soldiers no protection against the elements. Gen. Régis de Trobriand recalled that nightfall brought a funereal aspect, in which the enthusiasm is extinguished. In short order, the once-firm Virginia roads became a muddy morass of ruts and ditches as impassable as any swamp. Trobriand asserted, the mud is not simply on the surface, but penetrates the ground to a great depth. According to one of Burnside’s artillery officers, The mud was so deep that sixteen horses could not pull one gun. Wagons stuck up to their hubs, draft animals died from exhaustion, and mules drowned in the middle of the road. At least four of the pontoon bridges needed to cross the river remained mired firmly in the muck. Theodore A. Dodge, a soldier in the 110th New York who followed Burnside to the river, explained it this way: Mud is really king. He sets down his foot and says, ‘Ye shall not pass,’ and lo and behold we cannot.³

Something about the Virginia quagmire proved especially insidious. Dodge could not put his finger on it, but for some reason, he believed, mud wields a more despotic sway these last two days than I ever saw him wield before. Unable to go any farther, Burnside’s bedraggled men forlornly returned to their winter camps near Fredericksburg without so much as firing a shot. Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, Lee’s men looked on with glee, posting large signs that read This Way to Richmond (complete with arrows pointing in the opposite direction from the capital city) and Burnside Stuck in the Mud.⁴

In the aftermath of the fiasco, Burnside blamed insubordinate Union officers for his woes and threatened to resign unless Lincoln dismissed the alleged offenders. The officers and their supporters, some of whom coveted Burnside’s command, pointed the finger at the general. Eventually Lincoln, never enamored with Burnside’s effort in the first place, convinced the general to accept another assignment and entrusted the Army of the Potomac to Joseph Hooker, one of Burnside’s critics. Perhaps better than any other incident, Burnside’s ill-advised Mud March demonstrates the indecision, lack of leadership, and internal rancor that plagued the Union high command in late 1862 and early 1863.⁵

For those who write the military history of the Civil War, the Mud March is one place (and sometimes the only place) where the natural world—in the form of rain and bottomless Virginia mud—becomes important to the narrative. Tellingly, it is the only campaign named for a weather-induced feature, rather than a geographic one. The horrendous weather that overtook Burnside has prompted a few scholars to look into the atmospheric conditions that brought on the storm and the soils that so quickly became a quagmire. But most military historians come back to Burnside, citing his overly ambitious plan, his failure to understand the folly of moving troops in winter, and the one-day delay that kept him from crossing the river. Unlike Theodore Dodge and other soldiers who lived through those difficult days in 1863, military historians have been much quicker to note the foibles of General Burnside than to acknowledge the tyranny of King Mud.⁶

Sketch of the Union Army of the Potomac during the Mud March, January 21, 1863. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Over the last two decades, environmental historians, a group of scholars generally more attuned to the role of nature in human endeavors, have called for a different approach. As Jack Temple Kirby explains it, people are connected creatures, obligated partners in a dynamic natural community. Within that community, the natural world always affects any human activity. In turn, human actions, in war or any other enterprise, alter nature. When it comes to the Civil War, some environmental historians have viewed the conflict as a struggle for resources; others have called attention to the health of soldiers, civilians, slaves, and freedpeople. A few have focused on the wanton destruction of the natural and built environments and the ways Americans reacted to the unprecedented devastation. The impact of the war on agriculture, especially in the South as it reorganized after emancipation, has also drawn scrutiny. Lisa M. Brady, one of the first environmental historians to examine the Civil War, has investigated the ways military strategy reflected prevailing ideas about nature and how those ideas influenced individual campaigns.⁷

Even so, 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. This book, a collaborative effort between a military and an environmental historian, is an attempt to write such a history. Simply stated, we have tried to reimagine 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. Decades ago, Alfred W. Crosby, a pioneer in environmental history, reminded us that human beings are never really alone in the natural world. They live side by side with what Crosby, in a marvelous turn of phrase, called the portmanteau biota: the conglomeration of microbes, crops, weeds, and domestic animals that reside in their bodies and on their farms and fields. When Europeans settled on other continents, Crosby argued, they and their associated organisms were not only colonizers but also agents of biological upheaval that transformed both people and nature. This mass relocation of people, plants, and animals took place in a natural world that was not static but one in which climate, weather, winds, and a host of other factors helped determine the pace and extent of change.⁸

Similarly, we treat 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. Such a history requires merging traditional military sources with material from relevant sciences, scholarly territory often unfamiliar to historians. This approach also grants agency to the natural world, not as the sole determinant of events but as a prominent and often neglected actor in a complicated story. As environmental historian Ellen Stroud writes, paying attention to the material stuff of nature—rain, dirt, bacteria and viruses, animals, and human bodies—does not mean that one ignores human action and decision-making. Instead, giving equal time to nature provides a new context, a means of telling better histories, a way to bring to light connections, transformations, and expressions of power that otherwise remain obscured.⁹

Viewed in this context, the Mud March becomes much more than a confrontation between Burnside, his officers, rain, and soil. Before he could move on Richmond, the general had to make sure he had adequate provisions to feed his men and that they were healthy enough to embark on a campaign. Likewise, every horse and mule that pulled a wagon or moved artillery toward the Rappahannock had to receive fodder and care. All those plans went awry with the bad weather. The prolonged exposure to the elements and the physical exertion it required weakened the soldiers. Carcasses from the animals that suffocated in the mud had to be disposed of or left to rot, adding to the misery of the rain-soaked camps. Additionally, every man who marched with Burnside already carried within his body various microorganisms that could cause sickness in the right conditions. Those conditions flourished during this cold, wet slog. As a result, disease ran rampant through the dispirited Union ranks, exacerbated by overcrowding, poor nutrition, and poor sanitation. When General Hooker finally took over, he commanded a demoralized and diseased army wrecked by poor human decisions in difficult environmental circumstances. I do not believe I have ever seen greater misery from sickness than now exists in the Army of the Potomac, wrote the army’s medical inspector general. One medical officer suggested that the Mud March cost as many lives as the Battle of Fredericksburg by the time the illnesses had run their courses. For the rest of their lives, numerous soldiers believed that their chronic joint pain and bowel complaints stemmed directly from those three frigid, wet, and muddy days along the Rappahannock. Disheartened by their experience, more men deserted the Federal ranks that bleak winter than at any other time of the war.¹⁰

What is true of the Mud March is true of the war as a whole. Soldiers from rural areas crowded together in training camps, creating a new and inviting environment for the microorganisms living in their bodies. Armies larger than many American cities confronted each other on the confines of the battlefield, bringing to rural areas all the problems of sanitation and waste disposal associated with urban life. Thousands of animals accompanied the troops—horses and mules that moved men, artillery, and supplies, as well as cattle and hogs that provided meat for sustenance. Along with people, the animals were part of a massive mammalian migration that had enormous implications for the natural world. Dead animals and dead people had to be disposed of, sometimes on a massive scale. Peculiarities of terrain often dictated what armies could do, and the armies, in turn, altered the land they occupied. As historian Stephen Berry writes, "The Civil War was a massive stir of the biotic soup, and in many ways that stir, more than the battles themselves, was the real story of the war." It also constituted, we would add, a significant episode in the changing story of the American environment.¹¹

Rethinking the Civil War in these terms immediately presents a problem of chronology. For the humans who fought in it, the Civil War began in April 1861 and ended in April 1865. Key battles and campaigns are easily identifiable. The natural world, however, moves to its own rhythms, influenced but not bound by human notions of time and space. Recognizing that distinction but firmly believing that modern readers prefer linear stories with a beginning and an end, we have made the difficult choice to focus on certain environmental themes during specific seasons of war.

In chapter 1, we examine the health of soldiers in the first six months of the conflict. We explore how the assembly of thousands of troops in preparation for war caused outbreaks of infectious disease, and we delve into the multiple disease environments created by the various campaigns. We also discuss other factors that affected the bodies of the volunteers, such as marching in the summer heat, as well as the quality and quantity of the food and water that soldiers received. In chapter 2 we focus on how the weather of 1862 shaped military campaigns from California to Virginia. Floods emerged in the midst of a decade-long drought, forcing commanders, soldiers, and civilians to make decisions that dramatically affected the direction of the war. We situate chapter 3 in the year from the summer of 1862 to the summer of 1863 to analyze how both sides provided food for their armies and civilians amid the increasingly destructive conflict. The lack of food influenced the origins and conclusions of campaigns from Antietam to Vicksburg.

Animals take center stage in chapter 4, as we follow the plight of horses, cattle, and hogs from the summer of 1863 through the winter of 1864. These animals provided the engines and protein for the armies, and the war brought suffering, disease, and wholesale death to them just as it did to humans. In chapter 5, we examine the death and disability of soldiers during the spring and summer of 1864—grim seasons dominated by the brutal Overland Campaign in Virginia. The armies struggled for supremacy while confronting myriad problems created by tens of thousands of wounded and dying men. In chapter 6, we look at the various landscapes on which battles took place from the fall of 1864 until the spring of 1865. We examine how terrain influenced the fighting and how battles altered the land, including something as basic as the quest for salt, to monumental military conquests like the capture and destruction of Atlanta. In the epilogue, we discuss the environmental legacy of the war and the ways it continued to shape Americans’ relationship with nature after Appomattox.

No organization scheme is perfect. Infectious diseases endured well beyond 1861; turbulent weather did not suddenly stop in 1862; people and animals died long before 1864. With that in mind, we necessarily stretch our chronological parameters, looking forward or backward a bit in each chapter to provide context and complete the story. With more than 50,000 books currently available on the Civil War, we are also keenly aware that no important battle, leader, or tactic has escaped scrutiny from scholars. We make no claim to undiscovered sources or unrecorded events. Instead, what we offer is a more holistic way of thinking about the Civil War, one that did not escape some of the most astute observers of people and nature in the nineteenth century. When Herman Melville sat down to compose a poem about the bloody battle at Malvern Hill along Virginia’s James River in July 1862, he turned his attention not to strategy or tactics but the natural world. He took note of surrounding forests where rigid comrades lay in death and spoke of the leaf-walled ways that allowed for the passage of men, animals, and weapons of war. But Melville also seemed to recognize that, whatever the plans of troops and generals, nature stubbornly went its own way, often oblivious to human designs. The elms of Malvern Hill, he wrote, Remember everything / But sap the twig will fill / Wag the world how it will / Leaves must be green in spring. So it is in war, as nature and people influence each other. And so it will be as we examine the events of the Civil War and its environmental legacy, starting with the illnesses that emerged as thousands of young men flocked to join the great adventure in 1861.¹²

One

SICKNESS

SPRING–WINTER 1861

On April 24, 1861, eleven days after Fort Sumter surrendered, eager Confederate recruits gathered in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a sleepy village on the Tar River in the eastern coastal plain. Secession sentiment ran strong in the Edgecombe County town. Since January, residents had attended rallies, listened to speeches, and raised a lone star flag in support of the Confederate cause. On that April day, seized by rage militaire, 83 local young men volunteered to serve in a company of state troops—four weeks before North Carolina formally seceded from the Union. One month later a second company formed with 93 enthusiastic enlistees. Like many new soldiers, some of those troops probably worried that the war might end before they could take part in the great adventure. These 176 recruits rejoiced when orders finally came to depart for training. A few weeks later, the men arrived at a military camp in Garysburg, North Carolina, near the Virginia border. There they joined another thousand or so recruits from eight other Carolina counties. Together they formed the Fifth North Carolina Volunteers and began to learn the basic skills of war. Similar scenarios played out in hundreds of towns and cities across the North and South that spring as local volunteer companies became building blocks of the Union and Confederate armies. Everywhere, it seemed, men were on the move, preparing for an endeavor that would change their lives.¹

The initial musters also brought immediate and profound changes in the natural world. The large gatherings of humans provided a new and nearly ideal environment for an invisible organism that quickly took up residence in the noses and throats of many recruits. Within days, the microbe made its presence felt among the Rocky Mount contingent. At first, a few men reported feeling tired and sluggish. Within a day or so, high fever left some of them shivering, even in the warmth of a Carolina spring. A bright red skin rash followed, appearing first at the hairline and spreading over the rest of the body. At that point, medical personnel realized that the rash likely signaled the presence of measles, but doctors could do little to protect the new soldiers from what soon became a raging epidemic. One soldier remarked, I had thought as a matter of course, every grown man had had the measles when a boy, but in this I have made a grave mistake. Known to physicians as Rubeola, measles results from a virus that lives in human mucus. The microbe needs people to survive and propagate but, because infection also confers a measure of immunity, the virus cannot sustain itself for long without a steady supply of fresh nonimmune humans.²

By 1860, measles had become a fact of life in many American cities. Residents frequently contracted the disease in childhood when the body’s natural defenses were better equipped to fight off the virus and provide immunity. City populations also tended to be mobile and transient, supplying Rubeola with fresh adult victims. The virus had more trouble establishing itself in rural America, where smaller and more stable human populations provided fewer children and nonimmune adults. Over time, epidemics became more infrequent until the virus eventually disappeared from small communities. Country people were often healthier than their urban counterparts, but freedom from rash and fever came at a biological price, as rural folk also lacked the immunity that some city folk enjoyed.³

When both sides mustered troops, small communities like Garysburg, North Carolina, became instant cities, populated by thousands of men in training for war. On the Confederate side, many of those who rushed to join up came from rural areas where they had not been previously exposed to measles. It took only one infected individual to release the virus into a large population of nonimmune hosts. Once set loose in that environment, measles became especially virulent, resulting in a longer than normal recovery time for those who survived. Doctors on both sides knew that the disease spread through contact and that quarantining victims might save others from infection. Even so, it could be difficult to identify measles in its early stages. Victims first suffered from a cough, runny nose, or conjunctivitis—symptoms common to a variety of ailments. Though such persons were contagious, the initial absence of the telltale rash, which usually did not appear until several days later, made it difficult to determine which soldiers should be quarantined and for how long.⁴

As preparations for battle transformed the relationship between virus and host, measles quickly became a scourge of Confederate training camps. The disease broke out among soldiers at Richmond and Raleigh. At Camp Moore, near Kentwood, Louisiana, an entire garrison fell victim to the malady. At another camp, 4,000 of 10,000 new soldiers came down with measles at the same time. As one Virginia recruit recalled years later, It seemed that half or more of the army had the [measles] the first year of the war. By autumn, some 8,000 would-be Confederate soldiers had been infected, including one out of every seven in the Army of Northern Virginia.⁵

Things were only slightly better among Union recruits. Wherever groups of men assembled, measles could be a threat. Serving with the Army of the Potomac, chief surgeon Charles S. Tripler noted, In many of our regiments [measles] broke out before [soldiers] left their homes. … Some were more severely scourged than others, but nearly all suffered to some extent. The disease ran rampant through Union camps in the Midwest as well. From Cairo, Illinois, in November, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wrote that more than 2,200 of his 18,000 soldiers were sick with measles, while Gen. Henry Halleck wrote from St. Louis in December that among his new recruits, measles are prevailing and daily increase our sick list.⁶

Officers and medical personnel knew that if a soldier could endure the symptoms and survive the disease, he gained a measure of immunity. Treatment usually consisted of keeping victims as comfortable as possible and waiting for the sickness to run its course. Surgeons on both sides also encouraged the use of seasoning camps, where new arrivals could be isolated from the general population and prepared for the battlefield. Such preventive measures helped, but given the peculiarities of Rubeola and the delayed onset of identifiable symptoms, some soldiers fell sick even in quarantine.⁷

Measles can kill the nonimmune, but more commonly fatalities result from pneumonia or another secondary infection that sets in as a weakened body fends off the virus. Overall, about one of every fifteen soldiers infected probably died from the contagion and its complications. As historian G. Terry Sharrer has suggested, more Confederate soldiers perished from measles than fell to northern gunfire in 1861. That same year, Union surgeons reported 21,676 cases of Rubeola and attributed 551 deaths to the contagion. Though Union figures may not account for all who died of various complications, the lower death rate suggests that measles took a greater toll among the predominantly rural southern soldiers.⁸

Putting people in motion in preparation for war unleashed other invisible shockwaves in the microbial world. During the first fiscal year of war, the Army of the Potomac reported 1,786 cases of mumps. Bacterial infections such as whooping cough (sometimes called chin cough) and diphtheria (often lumped with strep and other ailments as contagious diseases of the throat) surfaced in Union camps, along with other viral maladies such as chicken pox. Though specific evidence is more difficult to ascertain, southern soldiers probably suffered from all of those and more. According to Confederate officer John B. Gordon, The large number of country boys who never had the measles also ran through the whole category of complaints that boyhood and babyhood are subjected to. In the new disease environment, officers and medical personnel faced a fundamental tactical problem: how to keep aspiring soldiers healthy enough to get them ready for action. Time proved the only solution. Commanders simply had to wait until the various diseases ran through the available human hosts. For early recruits, like those at Garysburg, it took until early July for the initial epidemics to abate. By then, the troops had begun to move out from the training camps in preparation for the war’s first pitched battles.⁹

Believing one military victory might end the war, President Abraham Lincoln pushed his generals to engage the southern armies. In Virginia, Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell grudgingly put the inexperienced Army of the Potomac in motion in mid-July, hoping to defeat a Confederate force camped near Manassas Junction, thirty miles west of Washington. At the same time, halfway across the country, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon mobilized his Union army of the West to drive away the secessionist Missouri State Guard gathered near Springfield, Missouri. Another 1,000 miles to the southwest, a Union garrison retreated as a large Confederate force approached their isolated fort in the New Mexico desert. These simultaneous campaigns resulted in the battles of Bull Run (July 21) and Wilson’s Creek (August 9), and the retreat from Fort Fillmore (July 27), respectively—all of them Confederate victories.

During those first contests, new recruits encountered another serious threat to their health, one that came not from microbes but from the physical environment in which the fighting took place. Even as they fought each other, soldiers on both sides grappled with a common enemy: heat-related illness brought on by a blazing sun. The heat itself was nothing new, of course. Nineteenth-century people were accustomed to being out of doors and dealing with the elements. But the demands of war made prolonged exposure to the sun far more dangerous.

Marching under heavy packs and wearing woolen clothing not conducive to evaporative cooling, Civil War soldiers became especially vulnerable to heat-related ailments. The most common affliction was heat exhaustion, a condition brought on when the body can no longer dissipate enough heat to avoid dehydration and electrolyte abnormalities. As a result, blood pressure drops, causing the victim to faint. The remedy is usually simple. Victims need to cease activity and gradually cool their bodies so that they can again employ the usual defenses against overheating. A second, much more serious condition, known as heat stroke, occurs when prolonged exposure causes the body’s methods for regulating temperature to break down. Victims stop sweating and their temperature soars. Multiple vital organs, including the brain, lungs, and kidneys fail and death ensues. Even if one recovers, the damaged internal organs do not function properly, often leaving a survivor permanently disabled.¹⁰

Inadequate hydration increased the risks of debilitation and death from heat. Today, the USDA dietary reference intakes (DRI) for water consumption recommend that men over the age of eighteen drink at least 3.7 liters (roughly 125 ounces) of fluids per day—more if engaged in strenuous exercise in a warm climate. Given the unreliability of water sources for an army on the move and the limited capacity of army canteens (usually no more than 32 ounces), few Civil War combatants drank their recommended daily allowance of water. The lack of liquids inevitably weakened the body’s regulatory systems, especially those designed to cope with prolonged exposure to the sun.¹¹

The typical soldier’s diet did not help either. The 1860 U.S. Army ration guide called for each man to consume 20 ounces of beef or 12 ounces of pork or bacon; 18 ounces of flour or 20 ounces of cornmeal; 1.6 ounces of rice or 0.64 ounces of beans or 1.5 ounces of dried potatoes; 1.6 ounces of coffee or 0.24 ounces of tea; 0.24 ounces of sugar, 0.54 ounces of salt, and 0.32 ounces of vinegar each day. Confederate commissary officers frequently made substitutions—more bacon,

Reviews for An Environmental History of the Civil War

[gregdehler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent overview on the interaction of man and nature during the Civil War. Shows how this interaction affected the outcomes of battles, campaigns, decisions, and the war. Chapters are both topical and chronological, centered on a particular event to illustrate the importance of that subject. Ties together over a decade of scholarship over the last decade into one account. Highly recommend to those interested in military history, the American Civil War, or environmental history.