Industrial War of Organic Beings, the American Caesura 1860–1865

The American Civil War (1861–1865) was an internecine conflict pitting an industrialized, mechanized North against the South’s feudal, agricultural slaveocracy. The war, fought for the preservation of the United States in opposition to secession, was sparked by Southern efforts to expand slavery, countered by Northern calls to limit and abolish the practice. Manifesting as an “industrial-organic event,” the clash in ecological terms can be described as the earth’s first Anthropocene War. In this chapter, the clarifying lens of Emily Dickinson’s (1830–1886) poetry contextualizes the complex industrial-organic-assemblages between humans, carboniferous fuels, technologies, and the physical geographies and environments of war. This chapter explores the relationship between environment and war in the following campaigns of the American Civil War: General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North in 1862, the Union’s Anaconda Blockade of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865, General Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea”, General Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, and the Battle of the Crater at the Siege of Petersburg in 1864.