Roiling the Waters

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be some changes to the audio you hear above.**

ED: We’re back with BackStory, the show that looks to the past to understand the America of today. I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, we’re marking the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act with an hour on Americans’ changing ideas of wilderness.

ED: A century before the Wilderness Act, Americans were mired in their civil war. Ulysses Grant had taken the citadel of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Philip Sheridan was raging through the bountiful Shenandoah Valley, and William T. Sherman was getting ready to march through Georgia. Wherever the Union Army went, it stripped the fields and slaughtered the livestock.

For many Southerners, this slash and burn strategy was terrifying. Their farms, their barns, their fences, all these were the things that they and their families had created to beat back the wilderness. And if those things were destroyed, then wilderness might soon reassert itself.

LISA BRADY: Yeah, this was the threat.

ED: This is Lisa Brady, a historian at Boise State University. I sat down with Lisa to talk about the threat of wilderness, not only on the landscape of the South, but also on the psychological well-being of Southern whites.

LISA BRADY: The Southern people, whether they supported the Confederacy or not, had spent generations in managing and trying to exert some kind of control over their ecosystems, over their environments. And to take that control away was to throw them back into a state of wilderness. And so these battles where Grant in Mississippi, and Sheridan in the Shenandoah, and Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas, went through and destroyed agricultural implements, and laid bare the agricultural landscapes, they were taking civilized landscapes and making them into wildernesses. And so that’s the language they used. This was the threat of taking Southern civilization, and throwing it back into an uncivilized wild state.

ED: “Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can. Carry off stock of all descriptions, so as to prevent further planting. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”

How literally should we take this? I mean, how much did they really convert this bucolic landscape to a wilderness, Lisa?

LISA BRADY: Well I think that there is certainly some hyperbole on the side of Sheridan and Grant. And I would suggest there are even some hyperbolic statements on the part of those who experienced the campaign, some of the Southerners. But I don’t think we can dismiss their views entirely. Especially not those who were the victims of it.

There are some really fantastic letter and diary entries by some of those who lived in the Shenandoah Valley who talked about how Sheridan had, in fact, turned this lovely, gorgeous, fertile valley into a wasteland. And so, again, whether or not it was materially turned into a place where nothing could grow– which I think we could demonstrably say was not true– psychologically, had that impact.

ED: Now I can’t help but notice that Yosemite and Yellowstone are a long way from the Shenandoah Valley. But it’s also 1864 that the same Republican regime that’s prosecuting the American Civil War, also makes a big move toward protecting wilderness. Can you tell us about that, and what the connection is, do you think?

LISA BRADY: Yeah, here we have incredible devastation. And there is a sense that humans are capable of doing some pretty horrible things, and that needs to be offset by humans doing some pretty wonderful things. And in my sense of reading the letters and the official reports and some of the political tracts and that sort of thing, it’s that they see that protecting nature– and in particular these grand landscapes of the West that are unique to the United States, things that will bring some kind of awe to visitors to the United States– I think that that is something that the Republicans want to counterbalance the war with.

ED: So does the definition of wilderness somehow change during the war, then? It goes from being something that was already there, just given by nature, to something that humans can create themselves if they’re not careful? And so you need to compensate for humans’ power by preserving something that’s sort of beyond humans’ power to create?

LISA BRADY: I think that’s a perfect way of saying it. And then what we see in the West is actually not wilderness, but sublime nature. They don’t actually apply wilderness to it, because wilderness in 1860 still does have that negative connotation. They talk about it as this sublime nature. Wilderness really comes into something that has a positive notation to it in later years in the 1870s, 1880s.

ED: Lisa Brady is a historian at Boise State University. She’s the author of War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes During the American Civil War.