Erin Stewart Mauldin has accomplished the incredibly difficult feat of finding something meaningfully new to say about the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath. Asking how and with what consequences southern farmers became even more exclusively focused on growing cotton after slavery than before, Mauldin weaves analysis of private and government records together with historical ecology and soil science into a refreshingly concise and well-written account of how southern landscapes shaped and were shaped by agricultural and military practices over the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods.

The first chapter describes how, northern criticism notwithstanding, antebellum southern-style shifting cultivation (westward migration, free-range animal husbandry, and the forcing of enslaved people to maintain land against erosion and flooding) was actually highly rational and, from an environmental perspective, more successful at displacing the ecological limits of southern ecosystems than were ecologies of freedom.

Chapter 2 argues that the contradictions of antebellum land-use practices were exploited and exacerbated by Union and Rebel soldiers during the Civil War, revealing ecological vulnerabilities the antebellum regime had been able to displace. But interestingly, Mauldin argues, “the damage wrought was not particularly destructive, nor unique, in the tactics and strategies employed by militaries toward civilians in wars before or since. So why was the South affected for so long by the physical damage of war?” (p. 44). Her answer: Military operations led to breakdowns in land-use practices with ripple effects beyond the places and times of battles and sieges by removing vital animal and mineral resources, accelerating soil erosion and deforestation, and constructing siege landscapes and battlefields that left enduring wastelands on which not even grass would grow for a generation.

Chapter 3 reconstructs the economic and ecological processes through which white southerners, especially yeomen, shaped and were shaped by changes in the land after the war as they increasingly transitioned to cotton monocropping and intensive, continuous cultivation. The ecological crises unleashed by the Civil War meant that to survive in the postbellum land regime, farmers needed substantial quantities of fertilizers, and to get the cash to pay for fertilizers, most saw cotton as their only option. But perhaps the most interesting section of this chapter is Mauldin's examination of hog cholera. A devastating epidemic that further disrupted soil nutrient cycles by killing off a majority of the hogs that had survived the Civil War, hog cholera outbreaks were an unintended consequence of the very laws meant to improve and increase agricultural productivity by encouraging the penning of livestock.

Mauldin's approach reveals another surprising tragedy in the fourth chapter, where she demonstrates how the sharecropping system, which formerly enslaved people wrested as a compromise from those who sought to re-enslave them, led to both erosion and pestilence. At the center of this tragedy was a contest over the work of digging ditches. Planters expected freedmen to dig ditches alongside crops of cotton to help maintain the land against erosion and flooding. Ditching also prevented the spread of a devastating pest known as the cotton caterpillar. The problem was that planters refused to pay for this labor. As Mauldin argues, “the true tragedy of the caterpillar's appearance, of course, was that ex-slaves, who rightly wished to be paid for extra plantation work, refused to spend time away from their own crops or families to ditch a landlord's field. At the end of the year, low cotton yields due to the worm's defoliation of the plants reduced them to the ‘necessity of begging’” (p. 113).

The final chapter advances the provocative argument that what contemporaries and many historians described as blacks engaged in “labor unrest” and poor whites who migrated “as victims of the war's devastation and destruction of property” should both be seen as “ecological refugees” fleeing the same ecological displacements (p. 150). The white farmers moving up mountains, into swamps, or onto piney lands to grow cotton were not just acting on economic incentives; they were also ecological refugees fleeing from the older “degraded” plantation zones (p. 153). Similarly, one reason so many freedpeople migrated from the East to work on new cotton plantations in the West was the intersection of the ecological crises “pushing both black and white farmers and laborers out of the plantation centers and into their peripheries” with the failure of federal and state officials to equitably distribute land to freedpeople (pp. 148–49). The people who formed the postbellum industrial proletariat in the South should also, Mauldin argues, be viewed as ecological refugees.

Most of the weak points in the book flow from attempts to bypass political analysis. For example, Mauldin's ecological account of slavery and abolition is surprisingly devoid of struggle. Principally concerned with changes in the land itself, rather than in humans’ relationships either with one another or with the land, Unredeemed Land tends to strip away the politics from one of the most intensely contested periods and places in modern world history. Moreover, except for the excellent fourth chapter—which centers on the experiences and struggles of freedpeople—Mauldin almost always privileges the accounts and perspectives of white southerners. In a book that sets out to explain how white planters, enslaved and freed black people, poor whites, and cotton plants were entangled in changes in southern landscapes, persistently telling the story from the point of view of the white people who left most of the records presents problems of agency and framing that could have been avoided by reading against the grain to construct alternative narratives.

Such critiques notwithstanding, the three incredible final chapters—exploring the postbellum ecological contests and crises driving a region's inhabitants to increasingly, and self-destructively, devote themselves to raising cotton—make Unredeemed Land an indispensable contribution not only to the history of southern environments but to studies of economic life, social upheaval, and business practices during Reconstruction. I highly recommend this book for all audiences.