Silkenat, David. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 272. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780197564226. £27.99 (hardback).
Environmental history has become a critical field of study in recent decades. In an article for Civil War History, Lisa M. Brady defines environmental history as “the study of the changing relationships [that] human communities develop with nonhuman nature over time and place” (308). Several academic works, including Brian Allen Drake’s The Blue, the Gray, and the Green, Erin Stewart Mauldin’s Unredeemed Land, and Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver’s An Environmental History of the Civil War, have explored the ecological impact of the U.S. Civil War. By contrast, there are surprisingly few environmental histories of slavery. Recent examples include Oscar de la Torre’s The People of the River, Mark Hauser’s Mapping Water in Dominica, and Christopher Michael Blakley’s Empire of Brutality. However, there is still much to uncover about the ecological impacts of slavery.
David Silkenat’s Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South offers an innovative framework for exploring how slavery ravaged the natural landscape of the U.S. South. Silkenat examines how the natural environment “shaped the lives of enslaved people” and, conversely, “how they shaped their environment” (2). He argues that “slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems” (1) and that “no environment could long survive intensive slave labor” (2). Drawing upon manuscript collections, slave narratives, memoirs, travelogues, newspapers, and other primary sources, Silkenat illustrates that “looking at slavery through an environmental lens reveals how the chattel principle poisoned everything it touched” (5). Scars on the Land surveys several regions within the South, such as the Piedmont, Appalachia, the Carolina Lowcountry, the Cotton Belt, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Delta, over roughly two hundred years. While some states, such as Florida and Texas, receive comparatively less attention, Silkenat excels at detailing the diversity of the natural environment, including flora, fauna, woods, swamps, rivers, fields, and plantations.
Scars on the Land is organized thematically, although it broadly follows a chronological structure. Throughout the book, the reader is shown how the institution of slavery and environmental racism fundamentally altered and devastated the South’s natural landscape. Chapter One explores how slavery’s expansion and unsustainable agricultural practices contributed to soil depletion and erosion. The second chapter examines how enslaved people interacted with animals in the southern landscape, focusing on hunting and fishing, open-range husbandry, and escaping from bondage. Other chapters explain how slavery’s expansion went hand in hand with deforestation and the dramatic transformation of southern waterways, including via the construction of levees. Indeed, Silkenat contends that “rivers flooded more often and proved increasingly inhospitable to the native aquatic life” as a direct consequence of enslaved agriculture (99).
Furthermore, Scars on the Land illustrates how enslaved economies exploited the natural landscape. While previous studies of southern slavery have emphasized the centrality of rural plantation economies, Silkenat’s book demonstrates that enslaved people were critical to the development of various industries in the rural South. He notes that “mining in Southern Appalachia produced approximately forty million dollars in gold, much of it extracted by enslaved laborers, nearly ten thousand of whom toiled with shovel, pick, and rocker at its apex in the 1830s” (20). Moreover, enslaved laborers were deeply involved in other “extractive industries,” including “coal, iron, copper, salt, and potassium nitrate mining operations” (30). Elsewhere, Silkenat describes how enslaved laborers were critical to the growth of lumber, iron works, and turpentine industries. By analyzing the plantation and beyond, Silkenat offers important insights into the surprising diversity of enslaved labor in the southern landscape. Scars on the Land thus serves as a valuable intersection between environmental and labor histories of slavery in the antebellum South.
Climate and weather are also central to Silkenat’s analysis. In Chapter Five, he examines the impact of storms, hurricanes, and severe temperatures on enslaved communities. Extreme weather could pose a significant threat to the lives and safety of enslaved people. For example, Silkenat writes, “Hurricanes and tornadoes that spared robustly constructed plantation mansions (and their inhabitants) were less kind to the slave quarters” (105). This chapter naturally raises questions about whether slavery directly (or indirectly) contributed to climate change. Silkenat contends that slavery “did not cause an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century version of climate change,” but that it did “exacerbate the effects that severe weather had on the ecosystem and on the human geography” (105).
Scars on the Land also demonstrates how the natural environment was both a space of exploitation and independence for enslaved people. On the one hand, enslaved people were forced to perform various types of labor in the natural environment, and living and working in the wilderness came with challenges and risks. Enslaved laborers lived in temporary, make-shift accommodations. Threats like wild animals and venomous snakes existed in forests and swamps. Yet enslaved people could exercise greater degrees of freedom and autonomy in the natural environment. Enslavers and overseers could not monitor their enslaved workforce in forests and swamps to the same extent as on farms and plantations. “Turpentine workers,” Silkenat claims, “had more autonomy than most enslaved people” due to the greater physical distance from their enslavers (72). By hunting, foraging, and fishing, enslaved people found ways to support themselves.
The natural environment could serve as a springboard to liberty. Freedom seekers concealed themselves in the southern landscapes during escapes from slavery. In Chapter Six, Silkenat examines the proliferation of maroon communities, most notably in the Carolina Lowcountry, Louisiana, and the Great Dismal Swamp. “Ranging in size from less than a dozen individuals to settlements numbering in the hundreds,” he writes, “these communities took advantage of the ecological defenses that swamps created” (125). Over time, white Southerners attempted to dismantle maroon settlements with mixed results. By establishing independent communities in swamps and forests, maroons utilized the natural environment to assert their claim to freedom and resist their enslavement.
In the book’s final chapter, Silkenat explores how environmental factors contributed to the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. “Environmental destruction,” Silkenat writes, “undergirded the argument for Southern secession and the formation of the Confederacy” (149). The rise of the Republican Party in the late antebellum U.S. North and their “call for restricting the spread of slavery into the [western] territories” represented “an existential threat” (149). Southern fire-eaters, such as Edmund Ruffin, called for the “slave” states to secede from the United States to protect their slaveholding interests. Scars on the Land illustrates that environmental factors were entwined with economic ones in southern justifications for secession.
Freedom seekers fled from their enslavers en masse during the war, making use of “their environmental and geographic knowledge to secure their own freedom” (155). Contraband refugee camps presented environmental hazards, such as “overcrowding, poor sanitation, and frequent disease outbreaks” (158). White Union soldiers often responded to the arrival of self-emancipators with hostility. Yet refugees from slavery served as guides, spies, and soldiers. Enslaved labor was also necessary to the Union Army’s wartime engineering strategies, such as digging canals and destroying levees to circumvent the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg. “The mass exodus of enslaved peoples from Confederate plantations,” Silkenat notes, “prompted widespread land abandonment, especially in the regions of the South closest to Union lines” (166).
While previous scholarly works about the Civil War have emphasized the human toll, Scars on the Land asks readers to consider its ecological impact. Indeed, with the notable exceptions of the aforementioned texts, the natural environment is conspicuously absent from most studies of the sectional conflict. Of course, the environmental impact of the Civil War is intricately tied to slavery’s demise. During the Civil War, the South’s agricultural economy was effectively brought to a standstill. As Silkenat notes, cotton fields were left uncultivated, while tobacco plants “became subsumed in weeds” (166). The mass flight of enslaved people toward Union lines exacerbated the wartime challenges of maintaining slave economies in the plantation and rural South.
Scars on the Land is not without shortcomings. For instance, the experiences of enslaved women in the southern landscape are relatively overlooked. While Silkenat engages with enslaved women throughout the book, it is notable that enslaved men’s voices comprise a much higher proportion of the referenced source materials. The words and testimonies of well-known enslaved men (such as Charles Ball, Henry Bibb, and Solomon Northup) are regularly incorporated into the analysis, yet given the large subfield of women’s histories of slavery, Silkenat could have better amplified the voices of enslaved women to elucidate their unique experiences in the natural environment. Doing so would present a more complete picture of how enslaved men and women encountered, endured, and survived in the natural environment.
Overall, Scars on the Land is an exceptional study of slavery’s devastating ecological impact on the southern landscape. Silkenat’s ambitious study demonstrates how enslaved people experienced and utilized the natural environment in different ways throughout the South, from laboring in mines and plantations to seeking refuge in swamps and forests. The book successfully bridges various fields of study, including environmental history, labor history, economic history, social history, political history, military history, comparative and regional history, and histories of slavery and emancipation. Indeed, Silkenat deserves tremendous credit for skillfully managing this delicate balancing act. Scars on the Land will surely inspire future scholarly works on slavery’s environmental history and ecological legacy.
Oran Patrick Kennedy
Works Cited
Blakley, Christopher Michael. Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023.
Brady, Lisa M. “From Battlefield to Fertile Ground: The Development of Civil War Environmental History.” Civil War History, 58, no. 3 (2012): 305-321.
Browning, Judkin and Timothy Silver. An Environmental History of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
de la Torre, Oscar. The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
Drake, Brian Allen, ed. The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
Hauser, Mark. Mapping Water in Dominica: Enslavement and Environment Under Colonialism. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021.
Mauldin, Erin Stewart. Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of the Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.