War Upon the Land:

Military Strategy and the Transformation
of Southern Landscapes During

the American Civil War

By Lisa M. Brady

University of Georgia Press, 2012, 188 pp., $24.95 (paper)

Reviewed by Gordon Berg

A postwar observer of the desolate South after the Civil War commented on the condition of the land over which General William T. Sherman's army had traveled.  “Truly might it have been said,” wrote Englishman John A. Kennaway, using the Bible as his text, “'The land is as the garden of Eden before him, and behind him a desolate wilderness.'  The spirit of the South fairly broke down under the infliction, and her soldiers in many cases refused any longer to fight for a Government which had proved itself powerless to protect their families and their homes.”

Lisa Brady examines four important Union campaigns from Kennaway's point of view.  She argues, eloquently and persuasively, that the ecology of the Southern landscape and the way 19^th century Americans interacted with it, were crucial to the military successes achieved by the Federal armies along the lower Mississippi River, at Vicksburg, in the Shenandoah Valley, and through Georgia and the Carolinas. 

Dr. Brady creatively combines the disciplines of archeology, environmental studies, sociology, and military history to show how the strategies and tactics of Generals Grant, Sheridan, and Sherman made war not only on Confederate soldiers and civilians, but on the very land itself.  “Union forces,” she argues, “attacked the Confederacy's resources, its physical and imagined landscapes, and its relationship with nature.”

The bottom lands bordering the lower Mississippi River often proved to be a greater obstacle to the invading Union armies than the Rebel soldiers defending it.  Indeed, General Grant's initial failures to capture Vicksburg were in large measure due to unfriendly natural environments and diseases which they spawned.  These failures, Dr. Brady concludes,  “led him to more innovative tactics that targeted not just the military defenses around the city, but also the city's supporting landscape.”   It was a tactic the southern population would, to their dismay, come to know very well. 

A noted historian of the campaigns waged in the Shenandoah Valley has written that it was “the lynchpin of the Southern Cause and a primary target of the Northern war machine.”  In 1864, Grant ordered Sheridan to bring “hard war” tactics to Virginia's verdant fields.  Sheridan, according to Dr. Brady, waged a war “against the Valley, one that attacked the agricultural and industrial improvements that previously had sustained its citizens and supplied the Confederate army.”  Dr. Brady interprets that Sheridan's orders “were to destroy the means by which Shenandoah Valley residents managed the natural environment, transforming it from a civilized, improved landscape into a virtual wilderness.”

Dr. Brady's pioneering work shows that many new insights into the Civil War can be gained by employing a combination of new disciplines to examine long accepted facts.  The trail she and other young historians are blazing should be followed by many others.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

To the Battles of 
Franklin and Nashville and Beyond: 

Stabilization and Reconstruction
in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1864-1866

Benjamin Franklin Cooling

University of Tennessee Press, 2011, 526 pp., $45.95

Review by Gordon Berg

After the war, Tennessee cavalryman Thomas Black Wilson declared, “I look on Fort Donelson as one of the most important battles of the war.”  Benjamin Franklin Cooling has spent much of his career corroborating the prescience of Black’s observation about this Union victory in early 1862 and the war in the Western theater that followed. 

This triumphal volume concludes Dr. Cooling’s definitive trilogy detailing the war in Kentucky and Tennessee.  He deftly combines the insights of an historian with the expertise of a national security analyst to vividly portray how the Confederacy’s hope for nationhood became shipwrecked in the rugged hills and rolling heartland of the upper South.

Assessing the military situation after Ulysses S. Grant’s decisive victory over Braxton Bragg at Chattanooga in November 1863, Dr. Cooling eloquently concludes that “dreams of ’going back to Tennessee’ dissipated in the winter snows of north Georgia and became moot when spring blossoms presaged renewed Federal movements southward on the rail line to Atlanta as well as in Virginia.”   Overly optimistic rebel strategists lacked the men and material to throw the Federal juggernaut off balance and, Dr. Cooling concludes, “the Confederate moment had passed by May.”

But, 16 months of hard fighting for the soldiers and severe economic deprivation for the civilians still lay ahead.  Dr. Cooling punctuates his monograph with poignant anecdotes revealing the how the divided loyalties among the citizens of the two states made for tense and unsettled conditions behind the lines and President Lincoln‘s hopes of reintegrating areas occupied by Northern armies back into the Union an illusive chimera.  He quotes the editor of Union-appointed Tennessee governor Andrew Johnson‘s papers, Leroy Graf, as observing “until the disorders and insecurities created by roving bands of Confederates were quelled, the prospects for successful civil government were dim.”

Dr. Cooling also distinguishes himself as a master of battle narrative.  His descriptions of the fighting at Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville are spirited and analytically insightful.  This book is a must read for anyone wishing to understand why the Civil War really was won in the West.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.