Civil War-era Americans expected to be enshrined in history. Self-styled prophets eagerly anticipated future chroniclers: amid roiling sectional conflict, Alabama secessionist William Lowndes Yancey proclaimed that “the pen of the historian was nibbed to write the story of a new Revolution” that would forge a southern republic.Footnote ¹ Others invoked future histories to bestow praise, as when General William S. Rosecrans honored fallen Union soldiers by affirming that “history will inscribe their names among its heroes.”Footnote ² In contrast, those who recoiled from the carnage doubted whether historians could do them justice. “Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors … of the Secession war,” wrote Walt Whitman. The “real war will never get in the books.”Footnote ³

Whether they regarded future scribes as vindicators, commemorators, or purveyors of partial truths, Civil War participants correctly predicted that historians would write about them. Civil War history is famous for its quantity, with the oft-cited figure of fifty thousand books now probably too low.Footnote ⁴ But participants did not foresee the field's incredible variety. Yancey, Rosecrans, and Whitman likely projected that future histories would resemble the narratives written by prominent nineteenth-century historians like George Bancroft and John Lothrop Motley. The narrative tradition remains vibrant, particularly in battle studies, unit histories, and biographies, but Civil War scholarship has developed and diversified in ways that participants could not have foretold. Scholarship on women, African Americans, and other once-neglected constituencies has flourished. Pioneering studies of the war's transnational ramifications and connections to the American West have broadened our geographic horizons. Discussions of the war's causes, consequences, and commemoration stretch the Civil War era's temporal boundaries. Reports of the death of Civil War studies will remain greatly exaggerated.

One reason for this vitality is the proliferation of interdisciplinary scholarship. Efforts to capture the “real war” have brought historians into fruitful conversation with scholars in other fields and disciplines. Civil War scholars have contributed to rapidly growing and innovative fields of study, including the history of emotions, the history of medicine, and environmental history. Their individual and collective contributions are relevant not only to Civil War specialists, but to scholars of the nineteenth century more generally.

Historians of emotions, medicine, and the environment offer three outstanding contributions to our knowledge of the Civil War era and its wider implications. First, they have added valuable nuance to the ongoing turn toward darker, grislier, less triumphant histories of the period. Impatient with accounts that ostensibly glorify war or elide suffering, some recent scholars have sought inspiration in General William T. Sherman's maxim: “War is hell.”Footnote ⁵ Interdisciplinary historians have guided this darker turn in sophisticated directions. While they highlight anguish and desolation, they also remind us of human agency, resiliency, and even victory, amid hardship. Was the Civil War a “good war” or an infernal nightmare? Was it just or barbaric? Noble or deplorable? Perhaps it was all of these, but it was certainly a human war. By balancing “darkness” with historically contextualized analysis of humans’ capacity to adapt, survive, and find meaning in pain and loss, interdisciplinary studies illuminate the lived and felt experience of war. They depict Civil War participants neither as stoic heroes nor as passive victims, but as real people whose tribulations and triumphs must be understood within the context of their nineteenth-century world.

Second, interdisciplinary studies have applied history's basic premise – that we must study past words, thoughts, and deeds within their specific contexts – to concepts that are often treated ahistorically. These include emotions, the human body, and the natural world. Thus some of the methods used by interdisciplinary historians are actually quite traditional. They highlight history's unique insights, while sustaining conversations with scholars in other disciplines. The books and articles covered here engage with nonhistorical disciplines to varying degrees; not all are equally or identically interdisciplinary, nor should they be. But together, historians of emotion, medicine, and the environment have revealed much about the Civil War era while exploring subjects ranging from epidemiology to hydrology. As historians come under increasing pressure to prove the relevance of our work within and beyond the academy, the ability to speak meaningfully to nonhistorians is intellectually energizing and professionally essential.

Finally, interdisciplinary scholars have situated the Civil War era more precisely in the wider sweep of nineteenth-century history. Certainly, not all interdisciplinary studies transcend the era's customary periodization. Some investigate the antebellum period and stop at 1861, others attend to the war years of 1861–65, and some confine themselves to postwar Reconstruction. All have added much to our knowledge of these three phases of the Civil War era. But chronologically broader projects have explored issues of continuity and change across all three. They powerfully remind us, as Margaret Humphreys puts it, that “the Civil War occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century, not in some isolated cocoon of time that began in 1860, say, and stopped in 1865.”Footnote ⁶ Thus they can help us put the Civil War in its place, so to speak, within the wider arc of history. Hopefully, this will produce more conversations with scholars in other temporal and geographic fields, who can both learn from and teach Civil War specialists. Interdisciplinary scholarship has given us a Civil War that is at once more richly human, more widely resonant, and more firmly rooted in its nineteenth-century context.

Civil War historians have mixed feelings about emotions. Clearly, sectional conflict, wartime upheaval, and wrenching postwar change touched participants deeply. Military memoirists recollected hearts “throb[bing] with emotions of joy” and faces “feigning a jollity … which soon subsides into a pale melancholy,” with one insisting that Confederate soldiers evinced an “ardor and intensity of emotion such as have rarely possessed a body of troops in any war.”Footnote ⁷ But the quest for objectivity has left many historians hesitant to analyze something as slippery as emotion. When they appear in Civil War scholarship, emotions sometimes seem like interlopers. This has been especially marked in studies of Civil War-era politics. Political historians once blamed excess passion for causing a needless conflict. Without placing emotions in historical context, scholars in the 1930s and 1940s concluded that emotions intruded into politics and plunged the nation into war.Footnote ⁸ Recently, however, scholars working in the thriving field of emotions history have incisively analyzed how emotions shaped the Civil War era.Footnote ⁹ They place emotions in their cultural contexts to explain how the experience, expression, and interpretation of specific emotions influenced a decisive period in US history.

Civil War specialists are latecomers to the field, but their work has contributed as much to emotions history as to Civil War studies. Through regularly cited as a turning point in US political, social, and economic history, the Civil War figured less prominently in early cultural histories of emotion. Many of these studies charted one emotion across extended periods of time. Peter N. Stearns's history of jealousy, for example, ranged from the colonial era to the late twentieth century, while Karen Lystra's work on romantic love spanned the nineteenth century. They disagreed on whether the 1800s were marked by continuity or change, with Stearns arguing for the latter, but neither focussed closely on sectionalism, war, or Reconstruction.Footnote ¹⁰ By the late 1990s, the editors of an important volume on emotions history identified 1800 and 1920, not the Civil War era, as key moments of change.Footnote ¹¹ Since then, however, scholars have delved into the affective aspects of the Civil War era, producing a series of specialized studies that may point toward a new synthesis. Many of them cover a single phase – antebellum, wartime, or postwar – of the era, sacrificing chronological breadth for analytical depth. They borrow techniques and concepts from a variety of other disciplines, from literary studies to the social sciences, while respecting the unique cultural context of the Civil War era. Together, they provide new insights into the war's origins, course, and consequences, and fresh ideas about how to situate the Civil War in the broader sweep of the nineteenth century.

Historians interested in how emotions contributed to the outbreak of the war have discarded the notion that frenzied passion ignited a needless conflict. Many of them engage with the large literature on emotion and anti-slavery politics in the Anglo-American world. The standard account is that a series of philosophical and material shifts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries fostered sympathy with enslaved people and promoted political activism against the Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself.Footnote ¹² This narrative shows that the politics of slavery aroused, and fed on, powerful feelings rooted in moral values, material interests, and political loyalties.

Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has built on this foundation to explore the complex relationship between slavery, emotions, and Civil War causation. Emotions are politically important because they are inextricably tied to identities and ideologies and because they incite political action. Combining history with literary and cultural studies, some scholars confirm the mutual influence of political activity and emotion while expanding and revising the existing narrative. In his innovative study of abolitionist literature, Kevin Pelletier argues that authors from David Walker to Harriet Beecher Stowe doubted whether sympathy alone could mobilize northern readers paralyzed by apathy and racism. So they appealed to fears of divine wrath and apocalyptic destruction to encourage northern whites to care about enslaved people. Specters of a vengeful God and rebellious slaves haunted the sentimental literature usually associated with sympathy and love. Abolitionists used them effectively in their warnings about the “ultimate penalty for a nation that held other human beings in abject bondage.”Footnote ¹³ Identifying sentimental abolitionism by this unique emotional signature allows Pelletier to demonstrate how seemingly unlikely emotions galvanized radical politics.Footnote ¹⁴ Michelle Abruzzo's equally groundbreaking work adds pro-slavery propagandists to the story. She explores how slavery's defenders and their anti-slavery opponents drew on a shared intellectual tradition as they debated the relationship between benevolence, suffering, and servitude. Pro-slavery writers presented slavery as a beneficent institution which relieved suffering, perhaps better than wage labor. From 1830 to 1861, rival humanitarians competed over “the true reality of slavery,” with partisans in both camps claiming the mantle of benevolence while tarring their opponents as cruelly unfeeling.Footnote ¹⁵ Together, Pelletier and Abruzzo explore previously invisible dimensions of the politics of slavery and sentiment, showing that emotions not only amplified political conflict, but also resonated as topics of intense debate.

A key challenge for students of Civil War causation is to explain precisely how and why a war of words provoked armed conflict. I have attempted to do so by analyzing how specific emotions, including indignation, jealousy, and grief, shaped Americans’ views of, and participation in, the sectional conflict. The arousal of these morally significant feelings encouraged northerners and southerners to identify with antagonistic sectional communities and endorse violence against their foes. When northerners experienced indignation against the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), for example, they gathered with like-hearted neighbors to plan a response. Waves of so-called “indignation meetings” swept the North, boosting the nascent Republican Party and steeling outraged northerners for war. Building on the findings of political scientists, anthropologists, and psychologists, as well as other historians, I argue that emotions forged a crucial link between individual experience, cultural norms, and political mobilization.Footnote ¹⁶

Thus far, US emotions historians have focussed primarily on elite and middle-class whites, particularly in the urban Northeast. But some recent scholarship has refined or broadened this scope in ways that further illuminate the Civil War's origins. John Corrigan's study of the 1858 “Businessman's Revival” in Boston, for example, links emotions to religion, gender, economics, and generational cohorts. Clerks and other commercially oriented young men fortified their religious and occupational identities through intense performances of emotion at lunchtime prayer meetings. Following the economic downturn triggered by the Panic of 1857 and ethno-religious conflict with Catholic immigrants, the Businessman's Revival represented a vigorous reassertion of Protestant and capitalist values which allowed Corrigan's subjects to kindle religious fervor while practicing the self-control necessary for success in a turbulent marketplace.Footnote ¹⁷ Given that the Panic of 1857 also touched off vituperative debates over the relative merits of free and slave labor, future scholars might trace how emotional responses to economic and cultural dislocation influenced sectional loyalties and political decision-making.Footnote ¹⁸

Since most antebellum Americans were not northeastern Protestant urbanites, studies of other groups are essential for understanding Civil War causation. Some scholars of emotion in the Old South have found striking similarities between northern and southern whites, including in the mourning customs which prevailed among southern planters and their affluent northern counterparts.Footnote ¹⁹ Others contend that elite southern men cultivated a touchier, more volatile emotional style than did their northern neighbors.Footnote ²⁰ Future studies of specific emotions might shed further light on whether affective norms sharpened or dulled feelings of sectional difference. Even more work is needed on the large minority of southerners who were enslaved. Rebecca J. Fraser's pioneering study of courtship and romantic love in North Carolina slave communities is an important early contribution. Masters and slaves clashed over enslaved people's most intimate feelings, with slaveholders insisting that black families were emotionally stunted and that black women were either licentious or asexual. Under this cultural onslaught, and the constant threat of forced separation, enslaved people forged domestic bonds which boosted their self-esteem, buttressed supportive communities, and provided emotional autonomy.Footnote ²¹ Fraser contributes to venerable debates about slave communities and resistance and incorporates a long-neglected group of antebellum Americans into US emotions history. Since slave resistance contributed directly to secession, future work on its affective dimensions will help explain the dynamics of sectional politics and disunion.Footnote ²²

The Civil War itself inflicted involuntary separation, physical violence, and suffering upon participants, slave and free, civilian and soldier alike. Not surprisingly, many emotions histories of the war years focus on trauma. It might be tempting to assume that affective experiences of war transcend time and place, but recent studies which historicize emotions disprove this. Take the scholarship on what Civil War-era Americans called “nostalgia,” a feeling their modern descendants would label homesickness. Coined in 1688 by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer to describe a potentially deadly disease which afflicted soldiers deployed far from home, the term “nostalgia” was not widely used in the US until the Civil War. But during that conflict, army surgeons, soldiers, and civilians considered it a grave condition which caused listlessness, wasting, and even death. Union physicians diagnosed more than five thousand wartime cases of nostalgia, seventy-four of them fatal. Medical and military officials disagreed over prevention and treatment. Some called for iron discipline that would keep men's minds from wandering homeward, while others suggested that correspondence and furloughs would sustain the domestic relationships necessary for personal and civic health. Only in the late nineteenth century did Americans use “nostalgia” to refer to longing for an irretrievable past.Footnote ²³

Nostalgia scholarship demonstrates several of emotions history's strengths. First, the authors are scrupulously careful with words. Primary sources cannot speak for themselves, particularly not when they use terms whose meanings have changed so much over time. Second, they place the subjective experience of war into historical context. Frances Clarke notes that modern scholars usually consider combat the most harrowing aspect of military service. But for Victorian-era Americans, who were rooted in tight-knit communities and relied on domestic ties to produce well-adjusted citizens, extended separation from home was simply horrifying. By historicizing nostalgia, Clarke suggests, we can better understand the Civil War's “emotional toll.”Footnote ²⁴ Finally, studies of emotion can bring Civil War scholars into fruitful conversation with specialists in other fields. Nostalgia entered Americans’ vocabularies in the 1860s, just as it was declining in European usage, and then assumed its modern meaning during the jarring period of postwar industrialization. Civil War scholars learned to recognize nostalgia from specialists in early modern Europe; now they might encourage historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to look more closely at the emotional dimensions of rural-to-urban migration and other disorienting changes. Susan Matt's history of American homesickness demonstrates the importance of this topic.Footnote ²⁵

Wartime mobility fashioned new social ties even as it sundered old ones. Recent work on romantic love and courtship has identified another intriguing aspect of the Civil War's emotional history. Anya Jabour argues that the conflict changed elite white southern women's expectations about coquetry and marriage in ways that delighted many young ladies and disturbed their mothers. The movement of white men between the home and battle fronts increased the number of possible romantic partners, relaxed rules for chaperonage, loosened constraints on courting across class lines, and partially detached flirtation from marriage. This created opportunities for intimacy of all kinds, from letter-writing to secret engagements and premarital sex. Unmarried women gained autonomy but also became more vulnerable to abandonment, scandal, and unwed pregnancy.Footnote ²⁶ Scholars might further explore the emotional consequences of these changes. Were expectations for love within marriage transformed during and after the war? How did the threat of death shape the emotional experience of courtship for young women and their uniformed beaux? Steven E. Nash addresses the affective experience of courtship through a close study of Lizzie Alsop, a Virginia teenager whose flirtations with Confederate soldiers strengthened her emotional ties to the nation for which they fought. These bonds were robust and politically salient. Long after 1865, Alsop commemorated the soldiers she courted and the cause she lost.Footnote ²⁷

Like homesickness and love, the emotions associated with death have also received considerable attention from historians of a war that may have claimed 750,000 lives.Footnote ²⁸ Antebellum Americans dwelt upon death, regularly reminding each other how to mourn properly and, when the time came, die a “good death.”Footnote ²⁹ But the overwhelming scale of Civil War mortality, coupled with the fact that most soldiers died far from home, was shocking. How did participants cope? Civil War scholars have debated how much the war changed American ideas about death, grief, and mourning. In a widely influential book, Drew Gilpin Faust argues that northerners and southerners “embarked on a new relationship with death” during and after the war. The unprecedented scale of killing, dying, and grieving changed Americans’ self-perceptions, relation to the government, and feelings about mortality. They became more skeptical and less sentimental, more reliant on an impersonal bureaucracy to transport and bury bodies, and more inclined to question prewar truisms about facing death with resignation and hope for heavenly reunion. By situating emotions alongside technological innovation, state formation, and shifts in material culture, Faust demonstrates the pervasive influence of emotional experience and models the integration of emotions history with other methodologies.Footnote ³⁰ Other scholars, however, have found more continuity across the Civil War era. Mark S. Schantz argues that antebellum Americans’ embrace of death as an affectively and spiritually meaningful experience prepared them to accept dreadful casualty rates.Footnote ³¹ Similarly, Frances Clarke contends that suffering actually bolstered Unionists’ commitment to their cause. Rather than sow disillusionment or despair, suffering and death gave the war didactic and redemptive value. War narratives that now seem sickly sentimental helped northerners learn from suffering, which they considered “an opportunity for religious revelation, a chance to increase civic engagement and social cohesiveness, or a lesson in how to shape a strong character.” By historicizing stories that might seem like gushy Victorian claptrap, Clarke shows that northerners effectively coped with suffering because they were eager to benefit from it.Footnote ³² Whether future studies uncover additional evidence for change or continuity, emotions historians should continue to historicize experiences of suffering and bereavement. This will add depth to Civil War scholars’ “darker” turn, balancing awareness of wartime agony with appreciation for the culturally specific ways in which people responded to it. All wars inflict pain, but only with careful attention to context can we understand how the Civil War felt.

Recent studies of Reconstruction remind us that violence and anguish did not end in 1865.Footnote ³³ But very little has been written on the emotional aspects of Reconstruction. A notable exception is Mark Wahlgren Summers's intriguing study of fear and postwar politics. Though Summers is less attentive to the cultural context in which fear was experienced, he creatively integrates emotion into Reconstruction's Byzantine political history. He contends that pervasive fear shaped the goals and actions of political partisans as they clashed over rebuilding the Union. Reconstruction “was based not just on reasoned argument about the meaning of federalism, freedom, and the Constitution but on unfounded dread and preposterous hope.” Fears of renewed war or the overthrow of the republic may seem far-fetched in hindsight, but Summers takes them seriously, and rightly so. The result is a provocative argument that northerners did not “retreat” from an idealistic Reconstruction program, so much as they embraced opportunities to terminate Reconstruction by ensuring that secession did not recur and republican institutions remained intact. Once northerners decided that these missions had been accomplished, they readily halted the march toward racial equality.Footnote ³⁴ Hopefully, other scholars will further develop the emotional history of Reconstruction. What happened to the sectional hatred that made the war so fierce?Footnote ³⁵ How did domestic emotions change as former slaves reshaped their households and communities? How did emotional appeals and experiences shape Civil War memory, a topic of considerable scholarly interest which invites an emotions history approach? Future scholarship will have to account for “dark” emotions but might also explore the thrills of emancipation, the pride expressed at veterans’ reunions, and other politically relevant feelings.

There is also a need for emotions studies that span the antebellum, wartime, and postwar phases of the Civil War era. Recent work has shown that these can illuminate questions about continuity and change while situating the Civil War in its “place” in nineteenth-century history. Several studies of the South demonstrate the value of chronological breadth. Stephen Berry's work on white southern men integrates emotions and gender history to explore why Confederates fought and how they processed defeat. Focussing on the intertwined feelings of love (particularly romantic love and the much-sought admiration of women) and ambition (to perform a masterful, civilizing historical role), Berry suggests that white southern men were emotionally invested in the war because it would allow them to live up to impossibly high self-imposed standards. The emotional fruits of defeat were doubt, melancholy, and disappointment. Berry integrates the full Civil War era into a compelling study of how macrohistorical events are experienced by flesh-and-blood people. And by crossing the historiographical divides of 1861 and 1865, Berry offers a nuanced account of continuity and change, showing how Confederate men struggled to realize deeply rooted goals amid a crumbling social order.Footnote ³⁶ His study invites a comparison with nationalist and imperialist movements throughout the nineteenth century – movements which likely offered restless young men and women public outlets for intense personal desires.Footnote ³⁷

James Broomall offers similarly insightful arguments about the Civil War-era South. His study of gender and emotion from 1840 to 1890 suggests that the war unleashed emotional displays by white southern men which were consistent with military manliness. Yet the emotional intensity of the war gave way to self-doubt in the Reconstruction period, even as Confederate veterans battled to reestablish white supremacy in the wake of emancipation. A synthesis of these reactionary political goals and powerful new emotional styles emerged in groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which championed a distinctly martial notion of masculinity and channeled powerful feelings into a terrorist campaign against freedpeople and their allies.Footnote ³⁸

In sum, recent interdisciplinary work on emotions in the Civil War era has contributed substantially to our knowledge of how Americans experienced and influenced the war's causes, course, and consequences. By attending to the cultural contexts in which Americans interpreted emotions, from indignation and fear to love and nostalgia, recent scholarship has humanized participants in an often mythologized event. This scholarship has also deepened our understanding of the war's darkest aspects, showing that suffering and death, like more uplifting themes of freedom and emancipation, must be analyzed historically. And by addressing broadly significant issues such as nationalism and gender, emotions histories of the Civil War have contributed to larger conversations among students of the nineteenth-century world.

Iconic Civil War images invite us into the history of medicine. Skeletal prisoners of war, grim-faced amputees, corpse-strewn battlefields: all illustrate “the greatest health disaster” in US history.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, medical history has become one of the most rapidly growing subfields in Civil War studies. The formation of the Society of Civil War Surgeons, the advent of the Journal of Civil War Medicine, and the publication of a specialized encyclopedia attest to its vitality.Footnote ⁴⁰ Historians of medicine, including those with formal medical training, have demonstrated the benefits of interdisciplinary research. They have also done an especially good job of reaching across the chronological boundaries of 1861 and 1865 and beyond US borders, situating the war within an expansive nineteenth-century story. They historicize key concepts such as suffering and disability, complementing the work of emotions historians by studying physical and mental health from a truly historical perspective. But they also situate human subjects within a physiological context that was all too tangible for Civil War participants assailed by a host of lethal enemies.

Given the source material they use, medical historians might seem especially inclined toward the “dark turn” in Civil War studies. Consider the gloomily typical account penned by a Union surgeon in 1862:

Indeed, some specialists in Civil War medical history followed the “dark turn” several generations before their colleagues did. In their accounts, the conflict combined advanced weaponry with antiquated medical practices, producing gruesome results. Noting the tragic timing of breakthroughs in fields like bacteriology, which occurred later in the nineteenth century, George Worthington Adams wrote in 1940 that the “Civil War was fought in the very last years of the medical middle ages.”Footnote ⁴²

Adams set an important precedent by placing Civil War medical history within a broader context that spanned the nineteenth century and encompassed Europeans such as Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur. Recent scholars have followed suit – and have unflinchingly confronted wartime suffering – while also challenging the conventionally bleak appraisal of Civil War medicine. Innovative studies suggest that earlier scholars misplaced the Civil War, overlooking important organizational, technical, and intellectual advances. They identify surprisingly bright spots in the war's darkest corners. Scholars continue to debate the achievements of Civil War medicine, but surgeons, nurses, and other healers are now more often found in the vanguard of medical history than in the rearguard.

Most general histories of Civil War medicine concur that participants made considerable progress in delivering care to soldiers. They highlight organizational innovations, particularly on the Union side, in evacuating, transporting, and housing sick and wounded combatants. Ira M. Rutkow, a trained surgeon who writes with unique authority on excisions, amputations, and other procedures, argues that Union officials achieved considerable success in organizing and administrating health care delivery. He suggests that the quality of treatment remained mostly unchanged. But after tragic lapses early in the conflict, Union soldiers and civilians developed a sophisticated network of charities, military hospitals, licensing bureaus, and government agencies that brought order out of the chaos and permanently improved American medicine. A key figure in this account is Jonathan Letterman. The designer of an effective ambulance corps for the Army of the Potomac, Letterman saved lives and reduced suffering by moving wounded men swiftly out of combat zones and into hospitals.Footnote ⁴³

Other scholars have crafted a similar narrative, of professionalism and organization triumphing over amateurism and disorder, about Civil War medical technology. Guy R. Hasegawa, a professor of clinical pharmacy and former director of the Society of Civil War Surgeons, argues that the production and distribution of prosthetics represented another area of wartime improvement. Starting from scratch, Union and Confederate officials built systems for designing, manufacturing, and fitting prosthetics to thousands of amputees. Their “remarkable logistical achievement” brought advanced artificial limbs to an unprecedented number of badly wounded men. With more abundant resources, skilled workers, and money, the Union achievement was greater. But the need was tremendous on both sides of a war in which three-quarters of the roughly 60,000 soldiers who underwent amputations survived.Footnote ⁴⁴

Other scholars, particularly professional historians, have further challenged the old orthodoxy by arguing that Civil War medical practitioners were more scientifically and intellectually innovative than previously thought. They maintain that medical research and treatment developed significantly during the conflict and that wartime progress contributed to more famous postwar breakthroughs. Among the most powerful statements of this thesis is Shauna Devine's award-winning Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science. Devine upends the “Middle Ages” characterization by arguing that the war promoted new opportunities for research, particularly in experimentation and dissection; that medical professionals developed networks and institutions, especially the Army Medical Museum, to capitalize on these opportunities; and that this yielded crucial improvements in medical education, specialization, and care, including the containment of infectious diseases. These advances swiftly benefited civilians and soldiers alike. Medical practitioners used knowledge and professional networks built during the war to combat cholera in the late 1860s and early 1870s. “By 1866,” Devine argues, “the many wartime experiences, challenges, innovative research ideas, and management strategies were gradually being adapted in the postwar period to manage new crises and health threats. Nowhere was the impact of the war more apparent than on the management, understanding, and investigation of infectious disease.” Knowledge generated and circulated with support from the Surgeon General's Office and the Army Medical Museum was deployed to protect public health after the war.Footnote ⁴⁵ Along with these improvements came increased respect for medical professionals and their principles, including laboratory experimentation and formal training. As Kathryn Shively Meier has shown, however, ambitious young physicians could not simply command public esteem. Rather, by adopting elements of folk medicine and middle-class reform impulses, they avoided charges of elitism and gained popular credibility.Footnote ⁴⁶

Of course, long-term improvements in medical experimentation and professionalization offered little comfort to soldiers and civilians facing disability, disfigurement, and death. But some scholars, particularly those influenced by cultural history, have explored how Civil War-era Americans coped with physical and mental trauma. Whether buoyant or melancholy in tone, these works put wartime suffering in its cultural context. They complement other interdisciplinary histories by historicizing themes of suffering and survival that dominate “darker” histories of the Civil War.

Several inventive studies explore the diverse implications of the Civil War's most infamous surgical procedure: amputation. Brian Craig Miller skillfully integrates cultural history and the history of medicine to analyze amputation's varied, lasting, and unsettling consequences in the South. Miller begins by challenging persistent misconceptions about amputations and the surgeons who performed them. Like Devine, he finds that medical practitioners honed their skills and learned not only about how to remove limbs, but also when – and when not – to do so. Amputation remained a terrifying prospect for soldiers, but surgeons were not ignorant butchers and few operations were performed without anesthetic. The heart of Miller's book, however, is what came after the cutting. How did soldiers, their loved ones, and white southerners in general deal with the disturbingly large number of men who returned home with missing limbs? Cultural context is vital because the war did not occur in a vacuum. Miller notes that in the antebellum South, the white male body represented “the defining power of manhood,” ostensibly superior to female and nonwhite bodies. Steeped in these ideals, Confederate soldiers enlisted to reaffirm their manliness, but war left thousands of them physically shattered. Their responses were intertwined with the postwar regeneration of white southern society. Amputees and their families coped within a political and social context in which gender norms, race relations, and political power structures were hotly contested. Eventually, veneration of “empty sleeves” became part of Lost Cause mythology, as physically damaged veterans reclaimed their manhood by emphasizing their heroism. But it took time for white southerners to accept amputees’ persistent dependence on female caregivers, philanthropists, and the state. Miller's insightful incorporation of cultural and gender history, and his extension of the narrative from the antebellum era to the early twentieth century, models an effective approach to Civil War medical history.Footnote ⁴⁷

Most wounded soldiers, however, were not amputees. In an important essay, Sarah Handley-Cousins argues that veterans with less publicly perceptible injuries struggled even harder to win respect, access health care and economic support, and weave their experiences into narratives of courageous sacrifice. Using the grisly wounds suffered by famed professor-turned-warrior Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain as an example, Handley-Cousins shows that there was little postwar glory for men like Chamberlain, who was rendered incontinent and impotent by a bullet wound to the groin. Though physically and emotionally excruciating, his wound was not readily observable. Thus he faced a devastating choice: keep his injuries hidden, and forego the material and social support granted to “empty sleeves,” or reveal them and face embarrassment and emasculation. Challenging amputee-oriented accounts which argue that veterans overcame adversity by finding meaning, even satisfaction, in their noble wounds, Handley-Cousins highlights veterans forced to live with “unobserved disabled bodies and minds” who found “little solace in the part their loss may have played in the success of the cause.” Chamberlain won some postwar victories, including four terms as governor of Maine, but also suffered from marital discord and other private agonies. Handley-Cousins's call for a more inclusive and varied history of wounded veterans is timely and important.Footnote ⁴⁸

Some of the war's least visible wounds are now attracting significant attention from historians, particularly those who extend their analysis past 1865: psychological trauma. In 1997, Eric T. Dean Jr. published a pioneering study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among Civil War and Vietnam War veterans. His comparative arguments about the nature of combat and the availability of treatments provoked ire among some Vietnam veterans and their advocates. For many Civil War historians, however, Dean's findings were revelatory. PTSD is not a twentieth-century novelty, Dean argued, and by using pension records, asylum commitment documents, and other neglected sources, we can find similar symptoms, if not the same diagnosis, among Civil War veterans. Focussing on a sample of 291 Indiana veterans, Dean showed that telltale problems of anxiety, depression, arrhythmia, and sleeplessness plagued former Civil War soldiers. But because mental health was poorly understood and disorders were often attributed to character flaws, many nineteenth-century veterans failed to receive adequate care. Some wound up in asylums, others were incarcerated, and many more struggled to function in civilian life. Dean contributed to the darker turn in Civil War studies by urging scholars to address “trauma, pain, and tragedy,” which are often omitted from reenactments and other popular commemorations. Most importantly, his book invited future scholars to broaden the search for mental health problems and treatments. No longer could historians assume that all Civil War soldiers served manfully and then moved on with their lives; nor could they view twentieth-century warfare as exceptionally damaging to the psyche.Footnote ⁴⁹

Subsequent scholars have expanded upon Dean's findings. As a result, the study of Civil War mental health is thriving, though access to essential patient records can still be difficult, even after a century and a half, perhaps because of the stigma still attached to mental health disorders.Footnote ⁵⁰ Brian Matthew Jordan's grim portrait of Union veterans documents their struggles with physical disability and poverty, as well as mental health problems like alcoholism and laudanum addiction. His narrative extends the “dark” Civil War theme into the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵¹ Other scholars have begun to explore similar issues among Confederate veterans, who faced ruination and revolution at home without the consolation of victory. Diane Miller Sommerville's work on trauma, mental illness, and suicide in the wartime and postwar South has paved the way. Arguing that the war's psychological toll was even higher for Confederates than for their blue-clad foes, Sommerville details Confederate veterans’ struggles to reenter civilian life. Some lashed out violently against their families, while others succumbed to despair. Those who could not cope ended up in prison or insane asylums, further destabilizing the patriarchal order that was already tottering after emancipation.Footnote ⁵² Others followed Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin and committed suicide. Amid the suffering and upheaval of war, religious inhibitions against suicide weakened, and although suicide rates did not soar, those who took their own lives were viewed with pity rather than condemnation. By placing war trauma within its cultural context, Sommerville illuminates how white southerners navigated the pain of combat, invasion, and defeat.Footnote ⁵³ Her work also connects to recent scholarship in emotions history, inviting future collaboration between emotions and medical historians that could enrich both subfields. What we now call “depression,” for example, probably afflicted Civil War veterans. But only the combined efforts of medical and emotions historians can uncover precisely how it felt, how patients coped, and how nineteenth-century understandings of affect, mental health, and warfare changed throughout the Civil War era.

Such collaboration would situate psychologically traumatized veterans solidly within their nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual context, and may help reconcile historians of mental health with their critics. Some scholars have objected to the dark turn in veterans’ studies, particularly the emphasis on PTSD, arguing that it projects modern sensibilities about modern problems onto the nineteenth century and that it depicts unusually traumatized people as the norm.Footnote ⁵⁴ Certainly all historians must avoid universalizing experiences of war. Many innovative studies of Civil War medicine, however, have successfully integrated modern scientific knowledge into analysis that is firmly grounded in nineteenth-century sources. Malaria killed thousands of soldiers, regardless of whether surgeons understood disease transmission; perhaps PTSD afflicted people who had no vocabulary for diagnosing or treating it. Interdisciplinary research may help resolve what has become a fierce debate. Medical historians should continue to explore the physiology of injury and disease, including mental health disorders, while emotions historians must carefully historicize the subjective experience of soldiering and postwar adjustment. Careful attention to context, coupled with a candid admission that there was never one “typical” veteran experience, would clear the historiographical air and improve our understanding of the war's costs and consequences.

Whether focussed on Unionists or Confederates, the medical histories discussed thus far feature a predominantly white cast of characters. But other recent work has widened the scope of Civil War medical history to include African American actors as well as issues of race and prejudice. Building on several older unit histories and specialized studies, Margaret Humphreys has written an important medical history of black soldiers in the Union army. Proceeding from the fact that African American soldiers had much higher mortality rates from disease than their white counterparts, Humphreys braids intellectual and cultural history with modern-day findings from medical science to understand why this was so, and why it was meaningful to contemporaries. Multiple factors rendered black soldiers especially vulnerable to diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. Most importantly, Humphreys powerfully argues that they were, quite literally, victims of prejudice. Even by nineteenth-century standards, the medical care afforded to black soldiers was dismal: surgeons were scarce, segregated hospital facilities were poorly maintained and undersupplied, and many Union medical officials were either ignorant or intentionally cruel. When combined with preexisting conditions stemming from antebellum enslavement, inferior rations, and black units’ frequent assignment to the unhealthiest regions of the Deep South, the result was a death rate approaching 20 percent, compared with less than 14 percent for white soldiers. Humphreys insightfully connects these material realities to the intellectual currents of the mid-nineteenth century. Northern whites scrutinized black military service for clues about racial difference and the likely effects of emancipation. Unfortunately, many of those who did not simply forget about African American military service used the disease statistics to support arguments for innate racial inferiority. Humphreys has added a tragic twist to the often exultant story of black soldiering by showing that racist speculations became self-fulfilling prophecies.Footnote ⁵⁵

African American soldiers were not alone in suffering the often fatal consequences of racism. Among the virtues of recent Civil War medical history is its attention to civilians, who confronted a dangerous wartime environment, often without the modicum of health care available to men in uniform. Freedpeople, who combated poverty, discrimination, and social dislocation as they escaped from slavery, were especially vulnerable to disease. In a sobering history of health and emancipation, Jim Downs estimates that between 1862 and 1870, perhaps 500,000 former slaves – one in eight – perished from disease or malnutrition. Typically categorized separately from “soldiers,” these freedpeople were, Downs argues, casualties of the Civil War's “biological crisis.” Indeed, they were more likely to die than soldiers. Often deprived of food, medicine, shelter, and clean clothing, and uprooted from the antebellum communities that had fought to sustain their health under the oppression of slavery, freedpeople were frequently regarded as pestilential nuisances by Union medical and military officials. Yet without health and health care, freedom was far less meaningful to people recently liberated from slavery. Eventually, the Union army and the Freedmen's Bureau's Medical Division made some efforts to assist freedpeople, marking a new era in the federal government's responsibility for public health. But wartime disruptions and outright racism limited their effect, contributing to tens of thousands of deaths. Particularly susceptible were women and children, whose health seemed less important to Union officials who valued black bodies primarily for their capacity to work.Footnote ⁵⁶

Downs demonstrates that even the history of emancipation has a darker side. But there were silver linings within this story. One of them appeared in politics. No one familiar with the Affordable Care Act would deny that health care has a political history, and, as Gretchen Long has shown, emancipation was a turning point. In a study that stretches from slaves’ efforts to control their own bodies, through emancipation and beyond, Long shows that black Americans’ struggle “for the right to health care and the right to become professional healers themselves” was central to the broader “story of their struggle for freedom and autonomy.” Thus, while Humphreys and Downs primarily focus on the attitudes and actions of white northerners, Long examines how African Americans responded to the new opportunities and challenges created by the Civil War. Materially and ideologically, the war was a battle over black people's bodies: their ownership, their fitness for labor and liberty, and their relations to white bodies were central points of conflict. As they emerged from slavery, African Americans strove not only for bodily autonomy but also for the means to preserve their health. Black healers battled for the right to medical education and the status of medical professionals. Black laborers pooled their resources to fund hospitals and care for the indigent. Black veterans demanded that the government they served now provide them with medical care. By writing a chronologically expansive history, Long has linked the medical crisis of the war years to a much broader contest over racial equality and the relationship between citizenship and health.Footnote ⁵⁷

Gender, like race, has garnered increased attention from historians of Civil War medicine. Scholars have long known that thousands of northern and southern women served as nurses, often confronting prejudice and opposition from those who considered female labor in military hospitals inappropriate.Footnote ⁵⁸ Other gendered dimensions of Civil War medical history are similarly significant. As studies of amputees have shown, crippling wounds challenged and ultimately changed American notions of masculinity. At the same time, gender and notions of femininity shaped medical care even in contexts where no women were physically present. Margaret Humphreys has creatively integrated gender into a wide-ranging history of the Civil War's health crisis. The need to treat thousands of sick and wounded men expanded the “home front” and “women's work” in unexpected ways, bringing women physically and conceptually into an ostensibly masculine military realm. Nineteenth-century Americans believed that the best place to recuperate from illness or injury was at home: nursing by female kin, comfortable sickrooms, wholesome food, and a familiar environment would speed recovery. With huge numbers of men convalescing far from home, the delivery of ideal medical care was difficult, but women on both sides joined forces with men to provide the best health care possible. Through institutions like the United States Sanitary Commission, women and like-minded men brought domestic comforts into the military sphere, replicating as closely as possible the experience of home treatment. The Union's comparatively greater success, Humphreys argues, yielded better medical outcomes, lower death rates, and more men who were fit for duty.Footnote ⁵⁹

Most of the patients in military hospitals suffered not from battlefield wounds, but from disease. Generations of Civil War historians have acknowledged that disease struck and killed more soldiers than bullets did, yet the emphasis in much of the medical historiography has been on the latter. In an early contribution to the interdisciplinary history of Civil War medicine, Paul E. Steiner, a professor of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school, emphasized that disease directly shaped the outcomes of specific battles and campaigns, and that military historians could not afford to ignore it.Footnote ⁶⁰ After the publication of Steiner's book in 1968, few sustained studies followed up on his thesis. As scholarly interest in both medicine and the environment grows, however, this is starting to change. In a slim but thought-provoking volume published in 2010, Andrew McIlwaine Bell argues for the importance of mosquito-borne illnesses, particularly malaria and yellow fever, in the conflict. The “South's large mosquito population,” Bell contends, “operated as a sort of mercenary force, a third army, one that could work for or against either side depending on the circumstances.” Civil War participants recognized this point even if they did not understand disease transmission. Drawing on antebellum experience, Confederates expected that disease would ravage Union armies as they operated in the South's notoriously sickly climate. Ultimately, however, disease helped and hurt both sides. Bell argues that malaria, perhaps as much as Confederate resistance, doomed Union General George B. McClellan's ill-fated effort to take Richmond in the 1862 Peninsula Campaign. Conversely, by stockpiling quinine prior to his final drive on Vicksburg the following year, General Ulysses S. Grant gained a decisive advantage over his Confederate foes, nearly half of whom succumbed to malaria by the end of the campaign.Footnote ⁶¹ Civil War medical history provides rich insight into the subjectivity of suffering, while placing human bodies in a physical context in which bullets whizzed and mosquitoes buzzed. By connecting medical and environmental history, Bell's work enhances and diversifies both fields.

With its deep roots in the history of the American West, ties to political activism, and emphasis on nonhuman agency, environmental history may seem an unlikely element of Civil War studies.Footnote ⁶² But the thriving subfield of Civil War environmental history has matured rapidly since Jack Temple Kirby's 2001 call for scholars to attend to environmental influences on the conflict.Footnote ⁶³ It offers a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the war's causes, course, and consequences, with important implications for specialists in political, military, economic, and cultural history. It may also help bridge the divide between the humanities and natural sciences, including biology, geology, meteorology, and epidemiology. Like historians of medicine, environmental historians have drawn on modern scientific research to understand the physical context in which Americans waged war. And much like emotions historians, environmental historians reevaluate aspects of human experience – including interactions with flora, fauna, disease, and weather – which are sometimes treated as timeless and universal. Attention to the cultural and intellectual context in which Americans confronted their environment has enriched our understanding of the entire Civil War era, including the depth of suffering and the resilience of human participants. Civil War environmental studies have delved deeply into the prewar and war years, with somewhat less attention to Reconstruction. The time is also ripe for work which connects all three phases.

Antebellum environmental histories tend to concentrate on agriculture. Thus they respond constructively to Donald Worster's call for an “agroecological” approach to environmental history which would collapse the false distinction between “natural” and “human” domains and explore the ecology of economic production.Footnote ⁶⁴ Interestingly, the first effort to write an argoecological study of Civil War causation pre-dates modern environmental history. Published in 1942, William Chandler Bagley Jr.’s Soil Exhaustion and the Civil War presented a clear, if predictable, account of the war's origins. Slave-based plantation agriculture depleted the soil, forcing southern planters to seek new land in the West. Their ambitions collided with northern farmers who wanted to bar slavery from the western territories. This clash spawned the Republican Party, paving the way for Abraham Lincoln's election, secession, and war.Footnote ⁶⁵ Political historians sharply criticized Bagley, an economist, for oversimplifying the sectional struggle, ignoring soil exhaustion outside the South, assuming that slave labor depleted farmland more swiftly than free labor, and supposing that southern expansionists fought for the literal extension of slavery rather than for an abstract right.Footnote ⁶⁶ But Bagley's book remains historiographically important. Often cited by environmental historians as a milestone in Civil War studies, Soil Exhaustion and the Civil War also demonstrates that environmental historians have much to contribute to our knowledge of the entire Civil War era, not the war years alone.

Strikingly, several recent agroecological studies have focussed on the antebellum North. The notion that the war pitted an “industrial North” against an “agricultural South” remains prevalent in popular histories, textbooks, and lesson plans.Footnote ⁶⁷ But as Adam Wesley Dean and James L. Huston both demonstrate, the North's vibrant agrarian interests and ideals were essential factors in Civil War causation. Their findings overturn much received wisdom about antebellum politics and show that environmental history can alter a prevailing Civil War narrative. Dean contends that the Civil War-era Republican Party was essentially agrarian in outlook, supported by a predominantly rural constituency, and committed to wise land use. Convinced that prudent cultivation of the soil by small farmers was essential to future prosperity, Republicans resolved to preserve the West for a hardy yeomanry. This meant keeping wasteful, slave-based, plantation monoculture out. Whether Republicans’ critique of southern agriculture, which closely resembled Bagley's, was correct is not the issue. What mattered was that Republicans convinced northern voters, especially farmers, to join their opposition to a rapacious planter aristocracy. Dean covers the entire Civil War era, identifying continuity between Republicans’ antebellum ideals and their wartime and postwar policies. During the war, they created the Department of Agriculture and passed the Land Grant College Act and Homestead Act. Afterward, they promoted small farming in the South and West, though their attempts to transform freedpeople into yeomen now appear more enlightened than their efforts with Native Americans.Footnote ⁶⁸

James L. Huston's deeply researched study also links sectional politics to conflicts over land use and ecological resources. He stresses the size disparity between northern family farms and southern plantations. Northerners feared that deep-pocketed planters would claim sprawling estates and squeeze small farmers out of the West, a process with English precedents that was already occurring in the South. The clash over the West was, therefore, “a battle over a natural resource.” Republicans’ free-labor ideology would protect laborers’ opportunity to become independent family farmers. Northerners, including the nearly three-quarters of them who lived in rural areas in 1860, relished this democratic principle. In contrast, the pro-slavery ideal was fundamentally aristocratic, predicated on vast estates worked by cheap (in Britain) or enslaved (in the South) laborers. When Abraham Lincoln, the upwardly mobile rail-splitter, won the presidency, southern planters seceded and tried to make a nation of their own.Footnote ⁶⁹ Huston's analysis of agroecological politics makes a powerful argument for the Civil War's origins.

Some scholars have applied agroecological analysis to the war years, when agriculture was essential to military mobilization. R. Douglas Hurt highlights the Mid-west's important role in providing food and animals for the Union army. Despite the enlistment of legions of farm workers, agricultural production actually increased during the war, thanks to machinery and women's labor. Often depicted as an industrial Goliath, the North was also an agricultural powerhouse, able to produce the organic materials needed to sustain massive armies while meeting civilian needs as well.Footnote ⁷⁰ The story of Confederate agriculture is quite different. Initially, Confederate leaders proclaimed that their vast agricultural resources gave them a decisive advantage. But the Confederacy never realized its agroecological potential. The failure of Confederate agricultural production and policy determined what soldiers and civilians could – and could not – eat, and thus had a decisive impact on the war's outcome. Agricultural mobilization required maintaining or extending mastery over restive slaves, defiant landowners, and nature itself. Hurt argues that Confederate agriculture flunked all three tests. Loss of territory, labor shortages, poor transportation, and the inability to sustain public programs to increase food production left southern agriculture in ruins by 1865.Footnote ⁷¹ Historians have spilled considerable ink debating the reasons for Confederate defeat. Some point to internal collapse; others to the Union's overwhelming power.Footnote ⁷² Hurt synthesizes these interpretations, revealing that outside invasion and failed domestic policy together undermined the Confederacy's agricultural foundation. Local studies refine this argument without contradicting its essential points. Timothy Silver's analysis of Yancey County, North Carolina shows that inclement weather (torrential rain, killing frost, and drought) and a scarcity of white male laborers created a severe food crisis.Footnote ⁷³ In contrast, Drew A. Swanson's study of Piedmont Virginia and North Carolina finds more continuity than change, as bright leaf tobacco farmers remained committed to their profitable staple crop. High prices, coupled with the biological reality that the tobacco could grow in poor soil, outweighed Confederate efforts to incentivize food production.Footnote ⁷⁴ Along with Yankee invaders and runaway slaves, market incentives and nature itself contributed to the collapse of Confederate agriculture.

More typical are the Civil War environmental histories which focus on military matters. They can be divided into two categories: studies of the environment's material effects on the war and vice versa, and studies of the cultural history of human interaction with nature.Footnote ⁷⁵ Material studies sometimes touch on environmental destruction, but generally concentrate on how the natural world shaped military operations. In a pioneering 2004 essay, Mark Fiege stressed that Civil War armies depended on natural resources – including food, lumber, and livestock – even as they contended with weather, topography, disease, and other natural obstacles. The war was therefore “an organic struggle in which two societies fought to use and overcome nature in the service of competing national objectives.” To illustrate this point, Fiege noted that Confederate General Robert E. Lee launched his 1863 invasion of the North, which culminated in the three-day showdown at Gettysburg, in order to pull the contending armies away from war-ravaged Virginia and draw supplies from ecologically rich Pennsylvania. Though scholars have fixated on the war's most modern aspects, such as the use of railroads, Fiege reminded us that Civil War armies were largely “collection[s] of organisms, of biological entities,” which depended on other organisms for sustenance.Footnote ⁷⁶

Other scholars have refined this approach to Civil War environmental history. In a series of perceptive essays and an invaluable book, Lisa M. Brady examines how contests over natural resources shaped Civil War strategy.Footnote ⁷⁷ In War upon the Land, Brady argues that increasing awareness of the environment's importance influenced the strategic decisions of Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip Sheridan. Early in the conflict, most Union leaders avoided assailing Confederates’ plantation-based agroecological system. But by 1863, they systematically battered the southern landscape, particularly its plantation ecology, in order to deny Confederates the natural resources necessary for war. “By targeting the South's agricultural sector,” Brady writes, “this new Union strategy undermined the region's most basic relationship to the natural world,” toppling the Confederacy's “agroecological foundations” and contributing “significantly to ultimate Federal victory.” Union destruction and appropriation of resources, and liberation of enslaved laborers, shattered Confederates’ mastery over their environment, transforming much of the South into a wilderness: an uncontrolled, unproductive, and thoroughly frightening place. Simultaneously, Union officers, engineers, and soldiers conquered difficult southern landscapes, from swamps to forests, in order to transport supplies and maneuver massive armies. Union victory depended on mastering southern landscapes while depriving Confederates of the mastery they had enjoyed before the war.Footnote ⁷⁸

More specialized studies have focussed on environments very different from the farmland and forests where the war's most iconic campaigns unfolded. Megan Kate Nelson has examined the war in the desert Southwest, where Confederate imperial ambitions withered under a scorching sun. Large-scale maneuvers were impractical where water was scarce and humans and animals quickly succumbed to intense solar radiation. After early mistakes, Union soldiers adapted to the perilous environment, enabling them to defeat Confederate incursions from Texas.Footnote ⁷⁹ Matthew M. Stith contributes an environmental perspective to the burgeoning literature on guerrilla warfare in and around Missouri. Ecological expertise was essential to survival in a challenging landscape. Large armies were unsustainable, so both sides operated in small bands which exhausted local supplies of food and animals. Their life-or-death struggle for natural resources fostered a notoriously brutal guerrilla conflict.Footnote ⁸⁰ Future studies might range further afield, exploring how nature materially shaped the war in other unique locales, including the Appalachian mountains, western rivers, and the sea. Others might examine environmental aspects of emancipation. Amy Murrell Taylor has blazed an important trail in this direction. In a recent essay, Taylor surveys the far-reaching consequences of a bitter winter storm that killed the son of a black Union soldier whose family was forcibly expelled from a camp for freedpeople in Kentucky. Public outrage accelerated emancipation in the border states, which had been exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation.Footnote ⁸¹

By exploring what participants thought about the natural world as well as how they interacted with it, Brady, among other scholars, bridges the gap between material and cultural approaches to environmental history. To date, the latter remains less common in Civil War studies, but historians have begun to use cultural and intellectual history to understand the war's environmental history. John C. Inscoe has surveyed wartime and postwar novels, short stories, and memoirs to understand northern views of the Appalachian mountains. Northerners embraced an image of Appalachia as a wildly beautiful, premodern landscape, unsullied by slavery and inhabited by hardy, freedom-loving Unionists. There was a kernel of truth to these accounts, but they oversimplified a deeply divided region that was frequently targeted by Confederate campaigns against draft dodgers, deserters, and other dissidents. Still, depictions of the Appalachian mountains as a Unionist refuge proved extremely durable, as Inscoe shows in his analysis of Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain (1997).Footnote ⁸² Like Inscoe, Aaron Sachs extends his cultural analysis past 1865, contending that wartime destruction changed American views of wilderness. They once defined deforestation as progress, but comparisons between ruined landscapes and damaged human bodies created considerable anxiety, which was channeled into conservationist and preservationist movements.Footnote ⁸³

Megan Kate Nelson offers a more detailed discussion of American responses to their hideously destructive Civil War in an innovative book that draws on visual culture studies, gender studies, and the history of science. Nelson historicizes Americans’ understandings of ruined cities, homes, forests, and bodies, demonstrating that scholarship on the war's darker side must place damage and suffering in historical context. Nelson's nuanced analysis highlights ruination's varied, sometimes contradictory, impacts on those who witnessed, inflicted, or felt it. Participants found beauty and excitement in ruined cities, while they recoiled from the obliteration of forests and the violation of domesticity that accompanied the destruction of private homes. By analyzing built environments as well as ostensibly more “natural” landscapes, Nelson reminds us that fields, fences, and farms – and even towns and cities – are fair game for environmental historians. Intriguingly, she also links medical and environmental history by analyzing ruined bodies. Wounded soldiers raised especially disturbing questions about ruination. Were empty sleeves badges of honor? Or did convalescents’ dependence on female caregivers and mechanical prosthetics make them incomplete? Americans rushed to resolve these tensions by erasing most war ruins and fostering a nostalgic (in the twenty-first-century sense) view of the Civil War that persists to this day.Footnote ⁸⁴

Inscoe, Nelson, Dean, and Sachs all explore how wartime shifts in views of humans’ relationship with the natural world influenced later political and intellectual developments. But much less is known about the environmental history of Reconstruction. Two recent studies, one material and one cultural, indicate the importance of this topic. In his study of fertilizer use in post-Civil War southern agriculture, Timothy Johnson argues that planters relied on guano-based fertilizers to revitalize worn-out lands and to reassert control over recently liberated black laborers. Sharecroppers borrowed against the value of their crop to purchase fertilizer, which locked them into a cycle of debt. Blending political, economic, and environmental history, Johnson shows that fertilizers figured prominently in the South's notorious system of debt peonage.Footnote ⁸⁵ Turning our attention westward, James D. Drake ingeniously shows how reconceptualization of the natural world promoted rapprochement between Unionists and Confederates. He argues that the Continental Divide – the hydrological boundary between river systems draining into the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans – emerged from the yearning for postwar reconciliation and the development of western railroads. Civil War-era Americans often viewed the Rocky Mountains as a natural border between the eastern and western regions of North America, one that contrasted with the unnatural political division between North and South. Railroads that crossed the Rockies came to symbolize not only human triumph over nature, but also American triumph over disunity. The fact that railroad promoters could sell tickets to tourists eager to see the Continental Divide only sweetened the deal. According to Drake, the Divide is “a place where the United States created a national monument in the guise of a geographical phenomenon, a place where the nation turned its history into nature.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Future studies might explore the cultural history of other “natural” barriers, particularly the Ohio River, throughout the Civil War era.

Together, Civil War environmental histories are starting to situate the conflict in the broader sweep of nineteenth-century history. They indicate that the war was not a uniformly “modern” one by highlighting civilians’ and soldiers’ dependence on flora and fauna, as opposed to the petroleum, plastics, and plutonium of later wars. They remind us not to neglect agriculture, including northern agriculture, even though the industrial revolution often dominates nineteenth-century studies. And they suggest that the meaning of that quintessential nineteenth-century word “progress” began to change during the war, as Americans questioned the old assumption that “improving” a landscape meant felling trees and draining swamps.

Future environmental histories might explore these themes across all three phases of the Civil War. Two extended histories, both focussed on Georgia, provide admirable examples. Mart A. Stewart's innovative history of the rise and fall of coastal Georgia's plantation society shows that human–environment interactions decisively influenced a story often told in terms of political ideology, racial identity, and economic interest. The swampy Georgia Lowcountry stymied early efforts to develop a colony of small farmers. Determined to grow rice and other staple crops, but recognizing that this required mastery over huge numbers of laborers in order to subdue a stubborn landscape, Georgia planters imported thousands of enslaved Africans. The collapse of planters’ mastery during and after the Civil War doomed the hydraulic system of rice cultivation that had prevailed for over a century. New economic activities, including logging, turpentine production, and tourism, flourished instead. By placing the master–slave relationship in its biological and hydrological context, Stewart's richly interdisciplinary study shows how command over labor facilitated the subjugation of nature. The Civil War marked a turning point not only in race and labor relations, but also in human interaction with the environment.Footnote ⁸⁷

In her similarly astute analysis of southeastern Georgia's Okefenokee swamp, Megan Kate Nelson uses the concept of “ecolocalism” to explore the diverse identities and economies that are intimately tied to a specific ecosystem. She argues that human relationships with the swamp have changed dramatically over time because more than one identity can be rooted in a given place. Thus Nelson avoids environmental determinism while situating human cultures firmly in their ecological contexts. Once again, the Civil War era represents an important turning point. Prior to the conflict, Okefenokee swamp was associated with nonwhite people, particularly Native Americans and fugitive slaves, who used their knowledge of the swamp's intricate landscape and unique resources to shelter themselves from, and resist, white supremacy. During the war, however, poor whites fled into the swamp to avoid Confederate conscription. This, coupled with a muscular effort by postwar white boosters to conquer Okefenokee in the name of progress, rendered the swamp a “white” space.Footnote ⁸⁸ Like Stewart's work, Nelson's book gains persuasive power from its extended chronological scope. Both authors reveal continuities and changes which might not appear in narrowly focussed studies. Other scholars might expand the spatial as well as temporal scope of Civil War environmental history through comparative analysis. The comparative study of slavery is a well-developed field. The comparative histories of swamp cultures, environmental influences on nineteenth-century military strategy, and wartime agricultural policies might offer equally fertile soil.

Finally, future scholars might also integrate all three subfields to gain an even richer appreciation of how Civil War Americans experienced the conflict. The physical and mental experience of the war cannot be replicated, but it can be understood. Kathryn Shively Meier's stimulating study of soldiers’ health and morale offers one model for such a history. In Nature's Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia, Meier explores how enlisted men maintained their physical and mental health in the sickly environments of army camps. Often mistrustful of surgeons and accustomed to relying on home remedies and folk knowledge, soldiers developed, taught each other, and practiced a variety of self-care techniques. Whether this meant killing mosquitoes, improvising shelter, securing clean water, supplementing their rations, or taking unauthorized leaves of absence, soldiers who practiced self-care were healthier and happier than those who did not, even if their activities drew officers’ ire. By exploring the “interconnectivity of nature, health, morale, and behavior,” Meier shows that the environment threatened soldiers’ bodily and emotional well-being, but that they took active steps to cope. Robust, high-spirited men could march faster and fight harder than wan, dispirited comrades, so self-care regimens directly affected military maneuvers. Meier's work thus braids medical, environmental, and emotions history in ways that compel the attention of even the most rigidly traditional military historians, while drawing on other disciplines to better understand Virginia's wartime environment. With her careful attention to nineteenth-century context, particularly understandings of disease causation, and emphasis on coping as well as on misery, Meier demonstrates how interdisciplinary methods can historicize the suffering that dominates darker accounts of the conflict.Footnote ⁸⁹

Civil War Americans were not uniformly more resilient than their twenty-first-century descendants; nor were they passive victims of disaster. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has given historians, and hopefully scholars in other disciplines as well, new ways to think about wartime triumph and tragedy. Future students of emotion, medicine, and the environment in the Civil War era should remain attentive to historical context, willing to learn from other disciplines, and eager to share history's unique insights. Undoubtedly, they will continue to diversify the people and places that they explore, and hopefully they will connect the war years to the broader nineteenth-century world. Whether future interdisciplinary histories would satisfy Walt Whitman is doubtful. But he did not entirely lack confidence in properly focussed history, for Whitman believed that “so much of a race depends on how it faces death, and how it stands personal anguish and sickness,” and that we could learn more from “glints of emotions under emergencies” than from the “formal history” of bygone peoples.Footnote ⁹⁰ Now more than ever, historians have the tools to uncover these aspects of the Civil War era.