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I thought one of the most intriguing aspects of Lisa M. Brady’s War Upon the Land was her depiction of General Sherman’s famed march through Georgia and the Carolinas. Growing up I heard a lot about Sherman’s destructive march from Atlanta to Savannah, including many comparisons ending with “like Sherman went through Georgia.” That said, none of my classes ever delved beneath the surface of Sherman’s Civil War-defining march. I really enjoyed the varying eyewitness perspectives that Brady provided on Sherman’s march, including Union, Confederate, and civilian accounts of the destruction. I was not surprised that the Union and Confederate soldiers disagreed over the morality of Sherman’s tactics, but I was fascinated by Brady’s assertion that the morality dispute could be traced back to the Roman military in Britain in 84 AD (p. 127). In a sense, this dispute hinges largely on whether people are considered to exist in nature or separate from it–a discussion we have had several times already. If humans exist in nature, then the argument can be made that the destruction of the land is acceptable since, by extension, the land is associated with the people. If humans exist outside of nature, however, then attacking the land would seem to be the equivalent of assailing an innocent bystander. During our in-class discussions we have failed to reach a consensus on the relationship between humans and nature, and this may indicate why from the time of the Romans through the Civil War and even into the present day people still cannot agree on the morality of land destruction during war.
Wherever one sides on this issue, the regenerative power of nature cannot be denied. Even though many soldiers documented the destruction of the land in Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley, immediately following the war many Southerners returned to their land and set to work restoring some resemblance of the agricultural order that existed before the war. Brady writes about Randolph Barton, who returned home to the Shenandoah Valley in 1865 and “his sword was turned into a pruning hook” (p. 133). The Confederates could not afford to dwell upon their defeat, as they relied upon the land for their livelihood. As a result, the land healed much quicker than most soldiers involved in the war ever imagined.
When reading Brady’s book, I agree with Manish that nature needs to be understood as its own person. Throughout her work, Brady details the importance of the landscape in terms of Confederate defenses at cities such as Vicksburg and Savannah. Likewise, Brady details the difficulties Sherman’s army faced traveling through South Carolina due to the many swamps and marshy areas. Furthermore, the diseases transmitted by mosquitoes during the hot summer months inflicted a great toll on the Union forces throughout the war. Because of the impact of nature on the Civil War, it is very helpful to think of nature as a third party in the war–one without a rooting interest. At different times during the war nature seemed to favor both the Union and the Confederacy, but it was really just an uninterested third party acting on whatever army it came into contact with.