R. Douglas Hurt’s Agriculture and the Confederacy represents part of an emerging field of environmental histories of the American Civil War. In keeping with the various calls for scholarship from Brian Drake’s edited volume, The Blue, the Gray, and the Green, (2015), Hurt joins the chorus of historians who have opted to tackle the environmental history of this crucial period. What sets the author of this work apart, however, is his focus on an environmental history of the war with a decided fusion with the history of capitalism. Despite the rise of the “new” history of capitalism in the wake of 2008 recession, few scholars have waded into the American Civil War. Hurt’s attempt here, then, is a concerted attempt to bring these two worlds closer together—and one that he does quite masterfully.

Agriculture and the Confederacy traces the evolution of Confederate agriculture over the course of the war as a symbol of Confederate power. Taking a chronological approach to the target, Hurt describes how the Confederacy evolved from one that held a supreme confidence in its abilities to subsist on its own foodstuffs, to a realization that the war would cause a strain on these goods, to a final collapse of the Confederate agricultural system by war’s end. According to Hurt, the fall of the Confederacy centered on a myriad of factors, including poor transportation, bureaucracy, the fall of slavery, and what he describes as “notions of states’ rights and personal independence that hindered agricultural organization” (5). Over the eight chapters of the book, Hurt effectively details how each of these various factors led to the decline of the Confederacy from within. The Confederacy was a very different world depending on which side of the Mississippi River you resided on by the middle of 1863, and this too drastically impacted Confederate policy and the experiences of its citizenry. When coupled with the northern military progress during the second half of the war, one can see the closing window of Confederate success worked in tandem with the ever-closing access to key foodstuffs.

Where Hurt’s work truly shines is when he couples his analysis of the collapsing world of Confederate agriculture with its financial implications in the Confederacy. While Hurt’s meticulous research reveals the devastating inflation that took place to varying degrees in parts of the Confederacy, it’s his efforts at relaying how the Confederacy attempted to effect a change in its financial status that he is at his best. By coupling the financial importance of such acts as the produce loan—a bond issue backed by Confederate goods (including cotton), with the actual goods such loans were predicated on and the larger financial ramifications of such acts, Hurt illuminates the larger repercussion of Confederate agriculture.

Additionally, Hurt should be applauded for his detailed examination of how the Confederate government and its own people failed the national experiment. In keeping with recent work by historians such as Stephanie McCurry and her work, Confederate Reckoning (2010), Hurt details how Confederate policymakers failed to adequately support those at home. Foodstuffs provided to the veritable killing machine of the Army of Northern Virginia meant that civilians in the surrounding Confederate states did without. While such frustrations culminated (at least in common lore) in events such as the Richmond Bread Riots in April 1863, Hurt details how many of these acts were larger frustrations directed at the Confederate government that centered on inadequate support of the home front. Furthermore, Hurt complicates this narrative by demonstrating the significant segment of Confederates who hurt the Confederacy from within by trading with the enemy. Moving beyond simple soldier exchanges of coffee for tobacco, Hurt details the increasing scope of Confederate smugglers who sold cotton to the federal government, or grew extensive cotton because of its perceived valuation despite the glaring need for food across the entire Confederacy. As Ed Baptist (The Half Has Never Been Told, 2014) and Sven Beckert (Empire of Cotton, 2014) have recently shown, the power of cotton and the slave industrial complex was key to the rise of cotton and subsequently the southern United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. What Hurt illustrates, however, is that this larger thirst and pursuit of profit did not diminish during the war, despite overtures to do so. Cotton was indeed king for many within the Confederacy, and that was a key figure in the downfall of the failed insurrection.

In order to detail the downfall of the Confederacy, Hurt mined an extensive amount of primary source material, including newspapers from throughout the Confederacy. He also incorporated a plethora of manuscript sources from virtually every state in the Confederacy. These voices—male/female, soldier/civilian, white/black, free/slave—go a long way toward illuminating for the reader the range of emotions that enveloped the Confederacy from the outset of secession to its waning days. Such thorough primary source research not only gives the reader a true sense of how the agricultural situation in the Confederacy evolved over time, but also provides a human story of suffering and frustration to an increase in flour prices, for example, that simple data cannot relay. The author should be applauded for this extensive level of research on the topic and the way in which he rather seamlessly weaves between the nuts and bolts of Confederate agricultural practices, policies, and prices and the human cost left in its wake.

Despite the overall strength of the work, one cannot help but wonder if there was perhaps an opportunity to further expound on the larger international significance of Confederate power as it related to agricultural policy, broadly defined. While Hurt touches on the desire for international recognition early on in the conflict and the larger influence of cotton, it would have made his work even stronger to more fully incorporate this international narrative that he alluded to, especially as entities such as the Erlanger Loan relied on Confederate agricultural products to underwrite the issue. This minor reservation aside, Agriculture and the Confederacy is a welcome addition to the world of Civil War environmental history, as well as the history of capitalism. It is my hope that Hurt’s piece is one of many that helps to rejuvenate in particular the world of financial histories of the Civil War era. If others come close to matching Hurt’s work, it will be a wonderful sign for this subfield.