Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and theEnvironment in 1862 Virginia,
Kathryn Shively Meier, University of North Carolina Press, 2013, appendices,
notes, bibliography, index, 219 pp., $39.95
Stephen Berry’s
2012 top ten list of “predictions for how broader professional trends will
reshape Civil War historiography in the coming decades” offers #7: The Blue and
Gray Will Go Green. Berry predicts that by 2022 ignoring the natural
environment “within which human events unfold will be as ludicrous as conflating
all history with the activities of a few white men.” [1] In the same issue of
the Journal of the Civil War Era,
Lisa Brady states that environmental studies of the American Civil War has much
more to offer than a catalog of the landscapes blighted by battles and cities
crushed by armed conflicts. [2]
Kathryn Shively
Meier’s Nature’s Civil War: Common
Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia examines how troops on
campaign challenged the marching, fighting and the natural environment when
they sought to ruin the soldiers’ health.
Meier introduces her work with a discussion of public health issues as
understood by both Confederate and Federal soldiers. Both “believed nature to
be a significant and sometimes definitive force in shaping their physical and
mental health”. [3] Sleeping, marching and preparing food out of doors made
each of the natural environments challenging.
Furthermore, typhoid, malaria, diarrhea, dysentery, rheumatism, scurvy,
sunstroke, and a variety of emotional depressions were not limited to a single
natural environment.
Nature’s Civil War is both a medical history and an
environmental history of eight months of military campaigns in Virginia. It
offers the common soldiers’ perspectives on the environment and their feelings
on how the natural environment is killing them. The Peninsula Campaign was
fought in the midst of swamps and the Shenandoah Campaign was fought in what
would appear to be a healthier environment of clear streams and rivers. The
Shenandoah River Valley’s Eden is contrasted with the insalubrious swamps of
The Peninsula. Readers may come to Nature’s
Civil War with the notion that obviously the Shenandoah Valley must have
been a great deal healthier environment than the Peninsula’s. The author finds that the 1862 Shenandoah
Valley campaign that began in January with the Confederates marching to and
encamping at Romney in the northern portion of the valley. The march was challenging to the Confederate
troops’ health. On picket duty, soldiers
froze to death. Mountainous terrain, quickly changing temperatures and weather,
constant marching, and the general failure of Confederate logistics created
health hazards during a season when foraging was less possible and self-care
networks were not yet likely to be in place.
Meier
understands troops’ seasoning process to be lengthy, constant and complex. The
author states that the Army of the Potomac in 1862 was the second largest city
in the Confederacy after New Orleans and that the Army of Northern Virginia was
twice the size of Richmond. The initial stage occurs during the first large
encampment during which measles, chicken and small pox, mumps, whooping cough, and
diphtheria assault the recruits. Meier
intuits that urban recruits may indeed have become less sick from diseases than
did rural recruits. A second stage occurs
during campaign marching and battle. A third stage occurs after combat when
burials of the battlefield dead, emotional shocks and melancholy rained blows on the survivors’
bodies and minds. Not in Meier’s Nature’s Civil War is a discussion of
battlefield surgery; diseases not bullets were the primary cause of the 750,000+
deaths during the war. The book is social history; combat is not a topic
reviewed here by the author. It is the
time between the battles that is the focus of Nature’s Civil War.
In the era
before the war, the notion of heroic medicine was waning and homeopathic
medicine was becoming licensed. During this era, medicine was performed by home
members who followed popular and readily available guidebooks. The troops and
doctors of the Civil War were products of Jacksonian America and they were
often at odds regarding exactly what was good mental and physical health.
Middle and upper class reformers in the U.S. Sanitary Commission challenged the
U.S. Army’s Medical Department. Meier understands that possibly most of the
soldiers of 1862 in Virginia had begun the seasoning process or had nearly
completed it. During this year, the author believes that the soldiers were
developing two networks of health care: one consisted of the regular army’s
medical service and the other consisted of self-care assisted by
comrades-in-arms and others. Meier
believes that it was midway through the seasoning process that soldiers began
constructing their own network of self-care routines and friendships which
included both comrades-in-arms and civilians.
Civilians who were in and around the camps and in the path of a march
became members in individual soldiers’ self-care networks. Often women and African-Americans were a part
of this network. The author concludes that “self-care often demonstrably
improved physical health and morale.” [4]
Meier describes
self-care and how it was performed. It was very individualistic and was
concerned with what may appear to today’s readers as mundane activities. Soldiers
sought to bath outdoors more frequently than ordered. Bad water was made drinkable by boiling it
with coffee beans. Of course, the
soldiers’ self-care methods engendered disputes with regimental surgeons and
other regimental officers. Unaccustomed to professional care, the soldiers of
1861 and 1862 were suspicious and critical of medical services that followed
regulations and disliked surgeons who
were wary of enlisted men and thought them to be likely shirkers. One method of self-care included straggling
which at times became an exercise to obtain vegetables and fruits. Straggling
also occurred when soldiers believed that they needed rest in order to
recuperate from long marches performed in staggering heat or drenching
rain.
Increased spiraling
upward rates of sickness and poor morale frustrated commanders during the 1862
Shenandoah Valley and Peninsula campaigns. During these campaigns, officers as
well as enlisted men developed personal health communities that included wives
visiting camp and African American servants.
Concerns relating to cooking out of doors, finding clean water, and protection
from inclement weather were constant. Fevers, fleas, flies, and frostbite were
just a few of the medical concerns which were addressed by self-care networks.
At the heart of
Meier’s book is a sample of soldier letters, diaries and memoirs from winter
1861-1862 through mid-August 1862 created by 205 individuals. The author
reinforces this sample by consulting The Medical and Surgical History of the
War of the Rebellion, Outlines of the Chief Camp Diseases, the regulations of
the Confederate army, the papers of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and other
documents. One of her several goals for Nature’s Civil War is to serve as a
reminder to military historians to “look beyond the battlefield to understand
fluctuations in morale”. [5] Though beyond the mid-August 1862 limit of Meier’s
book, an historian who dwelt upon this issue is Joseph L. Harsh. His trilogy, Confederate Tide Rising, Taken at the Flood and Sounding the Shallows are studies of
Robert E. Lee’s strategy, tactics and his troops’ deteriorating health during
the 1862 Maryland Campaign.
In The Life and Billy Yank and The Life of Johnny Reb, Bell I. Wiley
established a field of Civil War literature that places the voices of the
soldier in the forefront. Throughout the
Meier’s Nature’s Civil War the words
of the soldiers are frequently offered and readers may be reminded of Wiley’s
legacy. The bibliographic resources of Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the
Environment in 1862 Virginia are numerous.
Notable is the amount of archived collections of personal papers,
newspapers, government documents, published medical sources and personal
narratives, and secondary works including books, articles and chapters consulted
by the author. Meier’s work is well
written and is accessible to the general reader. Certainly it contributes to
emerging field of environmental studies of the American Civil War and is a fine
example for others seeking to develop a thesis regarding Lisa Brady’s request
for environmental studies that do much more than “catalog the physical
destruction caused by war and its related studies.” [6]
[3] Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the
Environment in 1862 Virginia, Kathryn Shively Meier, page 2.
[4] Nature’s
Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia, Kathryn
Shively Meier, page 5
[5] Nature’s
Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia, Kathryn
Shively Meier, page 3
This review first appeared in The Civil War Book Review [Spring 2014] published by Louisiana State University.
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