Battles of the Wilderness: Ecology, Ideology, and the American Civil War

This dissertation exhumes a single theme in two dimensions and three timeframes. The theme is the battle between civilization and the wilderness, the dimensions are ecological and ideological, and the timeframes are before, during, and immediately after the American Civil War. The resulting claims revise the historiography of both the war and the American South to treat the conflict as a rupture within the larger process of “civilizing” the landscape. Wartime chaos temporarily reversed the ecological trajectory of the South by halting the “improvement”of forests and wetlands while allowing wildlife populations to recover. Before the war, secessionists had prophesied a rewilded future that they called “Africanization,” but they assumed it would derive from the abolition of slavery. Thus they campaigned to exit the Union, scorning Unionist fears that secession would unleash disorder. During the war, occasional hunting and fishing by soldiers did not outweigh the general reduction of these activities caused by ammunition shortages, the dangers of entering the woods, and the disruption to ordinary life. Hated species like wolves multiplied while millions of acres of abandoned farmland produced only weeds, broom sedge, pine trees, and other features of successional growth. After the war, as former Confederates attempted to reassert control over the landscape, they continued to predict that the formerly enslaved would let the South revert to jungle. Yet thousands of freed people utilized the Southern Homestead Act to venture into unclaimed wilderness to create productive farms. Considered together, the ecological and ideological dynamics of wartime regrowth reframe the environmental history of this period.