For a little over a decade, scholars have examined nature’s impact on the Civil War. Studies like Brian Allen Drake’s edited collection, The Blue, The Gray, and the Green [University of Georgia Press, 2015], Lisa M. Brady’s War Upon the Land [University of Georgia Press, 2012], Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver’s An Environmental History of the Civil War [University of North Carolina Press, 2020], and Kenneth W. Noe’s The Howling Storm [Louisiana State University Press, 2020] collectively work to integrate the methods employed by environmental historians into the standard narrative of Civil War history. In her new book, Plants in the Civil War: A Botanical History, Judith Sumner lays the groundwork to push this process forward.
Drawing on the fields of ethnobotany, economic botany, and plant science, Sumner highlights the role that plants played in the war, arguing that “[b]otanical history illuminates the conflict between the North and South, wartime stringencies and solutions, and the overarching importance of plants in daily lives… which was followed by years of regeneration—natural, agricultural, and social” (168-169). Sumner is a botanist by trade, and neither an environmental historian nor a Civil War scholar. Consequently, her knowledge of plants, their taxonomy, usage, and cultivation exceeds the complexity of her historical analysis. For historians, Plants in the Civil War will become an important reference source, elaborating on all the ways in which plants were integral to the lives of nineteenth-century Americans.
Plants in the Civil War is organized thematically, with each of the eight chapters highlighting different uses for plant varieties. Sumner lays the groundwork in the first chapter, “The Botanical Roots of Slavery,” which considers the relationship between cash crops, colonialism, and the rise of enslaved labor. From there, she moves onto “Plantation Landscapes” as well as “Agriculture and Crops.” The chapter on “Foods and Diet” blends information on standard civilian cookery and food preservation with military rations and forage. Sumner also takes care to note how African crops such as peanuts, eggplant, and okra, “played a significant role in the evolution of southern food traditions” (72). There is a chapter on “Medical Botany and Medical Practice,” which highlights Confederate struggles to deal with pharmaceutical shortage in the wake of the Union naval blockade. “Gardens and Horticulture” offers a fascinating glimpse into the cultivation of ornamental plants and the evolution of botanical studies, and “Fibers and Dyes” pushes beyond clothing to consider tents, paper, insect netting, and bandages. The last chapter, “Timber and Wood,” challenges readers to consider trees as important resources for making furniture, gunstocks, military drums, and prosthetic legs.
In all, Plants in the Civil War is a helpful book, highlighting the ways in which the botanical world provided for humans’ needs during times of peace and during times of war. With that said, it is not necessarily comprehensive. Despite the book’s title, alluding to a study focused on plant life as it affected both the Union and Confederacy, Sumner’s work is more heavily focused on the South. Nevertheless, the study raises new questions that should keep environmental historians of the Civil War engaged for years to come.
Lindsay Rae Smith Privette is associate professor of history at Anderson University (SC). Her first book, The Surgeon’s Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War, is forthcoming with UNC Press.
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