War Upon the Land, by Lisa M. Brady
War Upon the Land: Military Strategy and the
Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War
(authored by Lisa M. Brady) was certainly a book that took me by surprise. Going into it, I thought the book was going
to be more-or-less a bash against the military and that Brady was just another
“tree hugger.” – Not that I have anything against hugging trees, I just think
trees are a little too prickly to the touch; I prefer hugging a person,
instead. – However, much to my surprise that is not what the book was like at
all. As she writes, she melds two
differing spectrums that I will label as “militarists” and “environmentalists.”
She takes the Civil War from two
different perspectives, both from the Union and Confederate sides of the war.
First of all, from the Union side
of things, she overviews their basic strategy in the later years of the war and
how their implementation of chevauchée1
that focused on how those events not only aided them in the war effort against
the Confederates, but also how that effected the landscape; it also
demonstrated the power of the environment itself. One such example of the power of the
environment is the Mighty Mississippi River.
During the war, the Union sought to divert the river to cut off
Confederate-controlled Vicksburg; this ended in a miserable failure, but
sparked a new plan that I previously mentioned: chevauchée. This was much
more successful as the Union was able to cut off supplies to the South while,
in turn, supplied the Union forces.
On the
other side, the Confederacy was drastically affected by this destruction, as the
South was extremely dependent on its agriculture to survive. This is very much the opposite for their
northern brothers as they focused on industry and the production of war
machines and weapons, while maintaining sufficient agricultural resources from
their raids of southern lands. So,
South’s dependence on agriculture turned out to be their demise; it was both a
great strength and a horrible weakness, as without it, they could not survive.
As for the
other side of the spectrum, the environmental side, and as I had mentioned
before, the South was largely dependent on agriculture for survival and one
main reason why the North did not need to focus nearly as much on it as the
South was because of their use of chevauchée. Brady hints that even though the Union was
doing well with a focus on agriculture, they would eventually need to turn a
focus to it after the war.
In a
broader scale, I believe one of Brady’s points of writing War Upon the Land was to establish our dependence on the
environment. That is, we do need the
environment to survive as a human race and if we continue to “mistreat” it
without attempting to repair it, we will eventually lose the ability to use
it. On the other side of things, she is
not completely oblivious to the flaws of humanity and that wars do (and will)
occur. Overall, I find that War Upon the Land is a great resource
for both sides of the spectrum. Military
historians can use it for studying past tactics to see what is (and isn’t)
effective in warfare. On the other hand,
environmentalists and environmental historians can use it to identify how
humanity is dependent on the environment.
Book Information: War Upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of the Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War. By Lisa M. Brady. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8203-4249-8
No comments:
Post a Comment