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In War Upon the Land, Lisa Brady seeks to show us how much nature influenced Northern incursions on Southern soil during the Civil War. According to her, nature influenced Northern strategy in key regions a great deal. For this reason, she labels nature as an historical agent with the power to shape human decisions. She doesn’t go as far as Linda Nash in ascribing some sort of consciousness to nature, but she does manage to tie nature to both strategy and the war’s causes.
Manish’s point about the significance of perceptions of land usage and wilderness ties Lisa Brady’s argument to larger 19th century ideas of progress and industry. These cultural ideas about nature informed the Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan’s strategic planning. This includes the idea that control over nature is possible through the application of science and technology. In this context, agriculture presents a means for improving or civilizing nature. And most important of all, despite these perceived powers over nature, controlling nature is difficult and liable to be undermined in an inexhaustible variety of ways. For example, despite all of the North’s successes in canal building over the course of the 19th century, Sherman wrote of the Siege of Vicksburg, “The Mississippi River was very high and rising, and we began that system of canals on which we expended so much hard work fruitlessly” (43).