the wilderness of war: nature and strategy IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

LISA M. BRADY

IN 1865, THE SCARS on the land wrought by the American Civil War were painfully evident and, for some, took on an ominous countenance. Union Major George Ward Nichols described the war-torn countryside in northern Georgia after William Tecumseh Sherman's Federal and Joe Johnston's Confederate armies clashed there in late 1864: "The soil which formerly was devoted to the peaceful labors of the agriculturalist has leaped up, as it were, into frowning parapets, supported and surmounted by logs, and guarded in front by tangled abattis, palisades, and chevaux de frise." These fortifications were "reflected in quiet, rippling streams," still guarded by abandoned tetes du pont.1 If at times the transformation of the earth appeared an active process to Nichols, at others it seemed as though "some giant plowshare had passed through the land, marring with gigantic and unsightly furrows the rolling plains, laying waste the fields and gardens, and passing onto the abodes of men, upturning their very hearths, and razing even towns and cities." Nor were hills and mountains immune: Nichols imagined what a future traveler might see—Kennesaw Mountain rising before him, "with its grandeur of 'everlasting hill' intensified by the mute records of human warfare—with its impregnable front furrowed and crowned with the marks of war."2 Subject and object both, nature bore silent testimony to the awesome conflict of the Civil War.	1
Across the South and in a few places in the North, massive armies collided, leaving trenches and rifle pits gaping like open sores; pits from the explosions of underground mines pock marked the ground, and where thick woods once stood, little but broken trunks and shattered limbs remained. In the most heavily contested areas, the effects of the Civil War were akin to a natural disaster, a comparison often made by those who witnessed its destructive power. Major Henry Hitchcock, a staff officer under Sherman, likened the random devastation of war to the damage done by thunderstorms. Indeed, he believed that the "outrages of war" were "as much a part of the inscrutable and all-wise providence of God, and as necessary and ultimately as beneficial, as the terror which His wisdom has made part of the visible phenomena of Nature."3	2
Figure 1. N. Barnard, "Atlanta, Ga. Confederate Palisades." Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. This series of chevaux de frise protected the Confederate positions near Atlanta, Georgia, during the summer of 1864. Those trees not used for the fortification were cut to clear the view and used for fuel by the soldiers.
Hitchcock's analogy was an appropriate one, for like a violent storm, war does not discriminate when meting out its awful destruction: urban or rural, human or not, nothing is immune from war's ruinous power. War can turn cities into piles of rubble and farmland into wasteland. War's power is not absolute, however; it is, after all, a human endeavor, constrained by the technologies and the ideologies brought to the conflict by those involved. The wartime relationship between humans and nature is a complex arrangement, characterized at times by collaboration, at others by adversarial competition. In the Civil War, both Union and Confederate forces continually negotiated the terms of this relationship, attempting to overcome nature's obstacles as they fought to defeat their human foes.	. . .