Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South

by Erin Stewart Mauldin

How did the Civil War and the emancipation of four million slaves reconfigure the natural landscape in the South and the farming economy dependent upon it?

An innovative reconsideration of the Civil War's profound impact on southern history, Unredeemed Land traces the environmental constraints that shaped the rural South's transition to capitalism during the late nineteenth century. Dixie's "King Cotton" required extensive land use techniques across large swaths of acreage, fresh soil, and slave-based agriculture in order to remain profitable. But wartime destruction and the rise of the contract labor system closed off those possibilities and necessitated increasingly intensive methods of cultivation that worked against the environment. The resulting disconnect between farmers' use of the land and what the natural environment could support intensified the economic dislocation of freed people, poor farmers, and sharecroppers. Erin Stewart Mauldin demonstrates how the Civil War and emancipation accelerated ongoing ecological change in ways that hastened the postbellum collapse of the region's subsistence economy, encouraged the expansion of cotton production, and ultimately kept cotton farmers trapped in a cycle of debt and tenancy.

The first environmental history to bridge the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods, Unredeemed Land powerfully examines the ways military conflict and emancipation left enduring ecological legacies.

Genres: History, American Civil War, American History, Civil War, War, Environment

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 2, 2018

Reviews

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Civil War caused great environmental damage in the south. Many previous historians, however, understood this as an interruption. A slave-based cotton system existed before the war. After emancipation, the sharecropping and tenant farming in a segregated society replaced the slave system, but it still rested on cotton. In this traditional view, the post-war is really an adaptation of the pre-war system to accommodate for emancipation. In Unredeemed Land, Erin Stewart Mauldin argues that the pre-war and post-war agricultural systems are two different models. Contrary to the view that cotton dominated the south, Mauldin demonstrates that extensive farming (planting of multiple crops, including food stuffs), free-range livestock rearing on common lands, land maintenance, soil conservation, and flood control defined the antebellum south. Driven by debt, social change, depredations of war, changes in the national and international economic and financial systems contributed the emergence of a new regime of land use. Instead of extensive farming, the south as a region intensively planted cotton, almost exclusive to other crops. Food was imported. Loss of common lands and forests matched the decline in livestock and hog rearing. Marginal lands were plowed to make room for more cotton. As this single crop drained the soil of its nutrients, farmers became increasingly reliant on chemical fertilizers that created more debt and damaged the land. Increasing commodity prices in the 1860s lured many farmers to benefits of cotton. By the 1870s, when prices fell, most were trapped in a cycle of perpetual debt, unable to escape.

[John Racioppi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Agricultural history is an extremely overlooked study that desperately needs more attention not just from scholars, but also from the general public. This book is a great example to start with for anyone that wants to get into reading about agriculture, and the Antebellum and Civil War Southern agriculture in general.

The author covers nearly everything that needs to be covered. From the agricultural practices before, during, and after the Civil War, to hog cholera that livestock transport and penning unintentionally spread, and the chemical fertilizers that did more harm than good.

Extensively researched and wonderfully written, this is a must-read for any history buff or farmer.