Journal of Southern History

The Civil War took much more than human lives, Joan E. Cashin points out in War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War. Union and Confederate armies consumed a variety of resources as they moved across the South, including food, trees, civilian labor, and buildings, with little regard for official intentions, plans, or antebellum codes of conduct. Cashin describes how the conflict broke down the normal structures of civic life that kept communities attentive to one another’s needs. The result was soldiers taking a range of materials from civilians—a defiance of civility and decency that would rarely have happened in peacetime—using up the “stuff” of life for tactical and personal ends.

War Stuff’s structure alternates between chronological and thematic. The first chapter establishes an antebellum baseline for southern community interactions and resource use. The region possessed a communal and fairly cooperative attitude, Cashin argues, encompassing its white citizens. The war, however, generated “a series of quick transformations in attitudes toward [End Page 170] people and things. . . . that would exploit almost all of society’s human resources and material resources” (p. 29). It is to these exploitations that Cashin turns in chapters 2–5.

Cashin reveals the ways in which civilians were embodied resources, with each side competing for their energies and abilities. Union and Confederate soldiers employed civilians as, among other uses, spies, mail carriers, and hostages. Food was even more sought after than the allegiance of noncombatants. Foraging and impressment kept soldiers fed when regular supply lines left them hungry—a frequent occurrence for both Union and Confederate troops. Timber, too, was a crucial resource, and Cashin argues that the Civil War was particularly hard on American forests. Armies cut standing trees, both for warming fires and to create fields of fire, and they also consumed wood in other forms, raiding sawmills and fencerows for their lumber. Housing, Cashin notes in the fifth chapter, was another wartime resource in high demand, useful for garrisoning officers, shielding snipers, and, when disassembled, raw materials. Approaching armies often caused civilians to flee their homes, which in turn meant that both sides were more likely to use the houses for military purposes. Soldiers also burned homes—both with and without orders—and arsonists were rarely punished.

A recurring argument in these topical chapters is that historians have wrongly assumed that wartime rules and regulations (whether the 1806 Articles of War, General John Pope’s 1862 General Orders No. 5, or Francis Lieber’s Code of 1863) on seizing civilian resources governed how soldiers actually behaved. Cashin finds that both Union and Confederate troops were harder on the resources of the country than the rules permitted, even from the initial year of the war. Overall Cashin is quite convincing that “military policy had a negligible impact on how the two armies” pursued “the ‘stuff’ of war” (pp. 53, 4).

Chapters 6 and 7 are chronological, following the use and abuse of resources in 1864 as combat intensified, at war’s end, and briefly during the years immediately after the conflict. Cashin suggests that normalcy returned haltingly and unevenly. In the final months of the war, food was even more scarce, frequent large battles burned more forest, shelling left houses and even cities as rubble, and civilians increasingly had to confront the specter of dead bodies, graves, and the wounded as casualties spiraled ever higher. Cashin argues that rather than being exceptional, campaigns like that of General Philip Sheridan in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea were fairly typical of the fighting late in the war.

In contrast to recent historiographical trends, Cashin’s portrayal of the antebellum South is one of a region that was pacific, conservative, and communal. She writes of a fairly unified white South where people largely valued forests, conserved soil, and cultivated community. It is true enough that the antebellum South was predominantly rural, and with that came a particular set of agrarian values, but Cashin’s description all but ignores extensive unease, from critics both within and outside the region, about soil erosion, deforestation, and shifting cultivation. Agricultural reformers (with Edmund Ruffin drawing the most attention from historians) were convinced that southerners were destructive rather than conservative, land killers rather than stewards, and Cashin’s opening chapter elides those concerns. [End Page 171]

Her descriptions also ignore just how mobile and acquisitive white southerners were as a group. There may have been some communal spirit in many parts of the South, but southern communities were continually shifting and fracturing as people moved south and west in pursuit of the main chance or a fresh start. And what white communalism did exist, of course, was constructed as much from exclusion as inclusion, built as it was on eliminating Native Americans from the plantation kingdom and extracting nature’s bounty from a bound African American underclass. Cashin’s portrayal thus bears little resemblance to the conflict-ridden and intensely fluid South as reconstructed in the recent work of Edward E. Baptist, Sven Beckert, Walter Johnson, and Joshua D. Rothman, among others.

War Stuff firmly joins the historiographical camp that seeks to define the Civil War as a hard or total war. Cashin concludes that soldiers waged war on their own terms, often with their own individual interests front and center, and the result was a conflict that consumed civilians’ lives and livelihoods as rapaciously as it gobbled up timber, gardens, and hogs. This argument for the total nature of the war is in stark opposition to Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s new The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), in which he shows how civilian officials and soldiers, from leaders to privates in the field, constantly sought to place limits on the war’s violence. Although these efforts at restraint did not always prove successful, Sheehan-Dean’s war was “civil” in a way that Cashin’s was not.

For a story centered on just how consumptive the Civil War was, the conflict’s effects on landscapes and nonhuman life are in few places precisely defined. Whatever a historian’s take on the destruction of the war, the sort of quantitative data that might support claims about the war’s lasting devastation, especially on southern landscapes, is missing from the book. After the war, labor shortages, not timber shortage or a lack of barns or homes, proved to be the central concern of southern landowners. The war destroyed the mastery of one human over another (at least temporarily), but it did not destroy the soil: southern cotton, tobacco, and timber production all peaked in the decades after the war’s destruction, which certainly brings into question the central arguments of the book. And although Cashin claims War Stuff “relies on the new environmental history” of the war, the book rarely engages the natural world in a detailed or substantive way (p. 9). (When it does, there are a few minor but troubling errors, such as labeling pine trees as a species, and longleaf and loblollies as “varieties” [p. 88].) Environmental history’s central assertions—that nature’s details matter, that the historical environment was not infinitely malleable or passive, and that it reacted in conjunction with human action—have little influence on the text.

These critiques aside, there is much to like about War Stuff. In an argument-driven book like this one, it would have been easy to lean on the massive existing secondary literature, but Cashin roots the book firmly in primary sources. Altogether she uses materials from an astonishing eighty different archives, ranging in size from the Library of Congress and National Archives to county historical societies and town libraries, in addition to digitized documents, materials in the author’s collection, period newspapers, and printed [End Page 172] primary sources. This critical mass of primary material lends the book a nicely original tone. And it is clearly and engagingly written, well organized, and as concise as a book that ranges from the antebellum period to Reconstruction can be. Cashin’s argument always remains front and center as she presents readers with her evidence.

Combined with other new work, like Erin Stewart Mauldin’s Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (New York, 2018), War Stuff is part of a material turn in Civil War history. As such it promises that there is still something to learn from that most studied of American conflicts.