Looking at Landscapes of War

Looking at Landscapes of War Megan Kate Nelson (bio) As I drove slowly through a suburban subdivision I thought, “This can’t be right.” I pulled over and looked at the map of the park. Then I checked my iPhone map. Yep, it was right. Battlefield Park Road, off Route 5. I pulled back out onto the road, feeling a bit like a thief casing the neighborhood. And then, suddenly, there they were, tucked between the tri-levels and the ranch houses: cresting waves of grass and dirt, covered with leaves and shady in the midmorning sun. Earthworks, heaved up by Confederate soldiers and overrun by Federals between 1862 and 1865. Erosion and souvenir hunting have taken their toll, but the works are still here; they are the ghost marks of war.1 Some visitors to Battlefield Park Road will tell you that by being there, they have direct access to the past; they stand on (or near) hallowed ground and let its history seep up through the layers of clay, dirt, and topsoil. Most historians are somewhat skeptical of this assertion, the idea that one could travel through time by standing in place. However, most do believe in the value of preserving Civil War landscapes (battlefields in particular), and many write with a sense of place, of topography and hydrology, and argue for the ways the environment shaped battles and campaigns. But most historians have not, until very recently, looked—really looked—at the landscape of war: the natural and built environments that were destroyed, created, and reshaped over four years of violent conflict. As the landscape historian John Stilgoe has urged, we need to “go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around.” When we do this, we find that a “concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people ... the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted—all of it is free for the taking, and taking in.”2 This “deliberate movement” of looking around tells Civil War historians about not only the dynamics of the war’s military histories but also the experiences of soldiers as they changed the land by marching, camping, and fighting through it. Both Union and Confederate soldiers used landscapes of war to articulate their experiences; when we [End Page 439] look more closely at the words and images in their letters and diaries, we see more clearly the ways they sought to exert control over their lives by explaining the world around them to themselves and their loved ones. When we really look at Richmond’s earthworks, what do we see? We see, in part, the nature of Civil War battles. Men on both sides spent most of their time camping and marching, but when they reached a place that was about to become a battlefield—or had already become a battlefield, moments before—they set to work. Sometimes they only had time to dig up small mounds of dirt to protect themselves from the minié balls, shot, and shell that came whistling through the air and into their lines. But other times, as multiday battles and urban siege campaigns became more common in 1863 and after, soldiers and pioneer corps changed the land under their feet into a protective landscape of war, building larger and more complex structures, “forts” consisting of interlocking trenches and pitched dirt walls, anchored in place with bundles of twigs and tree limbs culled from nearby woodlands. We see in these earthworks the advances in killing technologies, and campaign strategies and battle tactics that relied on massed charges against defensive positions. We see the initiative that soldiers took, responding to this disastrous combination of mismatched technology and tactics by building their own landscape of protection and giving themselves the best chances of survival. As we stand beside our cars and look, then take some photographs, then look again, we also see the houses nearby, the abandoned bikes in the yard, the other tourists checking maps and saying, “This can’t be right.” There is a sense of disjunction, of both time and place. You can imagine the armies withdrawing, civilians

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