Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South

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as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom. David Silkenat has written an astoundingly original history of southern slavery. To the crimes against humanity committed by enslavers, one can add environmental destruction. It is the enslaved, whose interactions with the flora, fauna, and landscape allow them to create alternative geographies of freedom, who emerge as stewards of the south. Scars on the Land reveals perceptively the long afterlives of slavery all around us." -- Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition Scars on the Land is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple DS: Figuring out how to structure this book was a real challenge. I considered lots of different structures initially: chronological, geographic, thematic, etc. One of the big themes in Scars on the Land was how the expanding enslaved frontier transformed the Southern landscape over two hundred years and how environmental devastation drove slavery’s expansion. I also wanted to end the book with a chapter on emancipation. So, showing change over time was very important. But so was geography — recognizing the diversity of ecosystems within the South and how those differences shaped the lives of enslaved people. Ultimately, I decided that a thematic approach was the least messy option, though there are chronological and geographic structures embedded within individual chapters. For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

AXM: Each chapter focuses on a particular characteristic of the environment. Why did you structure Scars on the Land in this manner? AXM: As a scholar interested in enslaved people’s resistance in the Appalachian Mountain South, this statement caught my eye: “In evading slave patrols, fugitives hid in loblolly forests, pocosin swamps, alligator-infested rivers, and Smoky Mountain caves.” How did enslaved people use the Appalachian environment to resist slavery? In examining the American slavery’s impact on the southern environment, Silkenat has accomplished something fascinating. We no longer can be content to just say, “slavery was bad” but must confront the unconsidered consequences of the “peculiar institution.” AXM: How does Scars on the Land help readers understand the historical roots of our current global ecological crisis? animals, and swamps played in the lives of slaves...This volume will be of enormous value in bringing these topics to the attention of students, laypersons, or environmental historians." - Nicholas Cox, H-CivWarScars on the Land is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash. topics to the attention of students, laypersons, or environmental historians." -- Nicholas Cox, H-CivWar David Silkenat (DS): Scars on the Land is something of a departure from my first three books, though there some connections with my second book on Civil War refugees. Writing this book required me to read deeply in lots of new areas. While I was broadly familiar with the scholarship on slavery in the American South, I needed to dive deeply into environmental history. Part of what Scars on the Land attempts to do is put these bodies of scholarship in conversation with each other.

Here we see the outline of a three-dimensional history of slavery: one in which 'power' and 'resistance' and 'work' and 'agency' are to be understood as dynamic material processes. The system's ecological and spatial aspects are understood by David Silkenat as both the determining parameters and agonistic products of its economic and racial aspects." -- Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash. Note: I reviewed this book about a well-known maroon community here: Review of: The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, by Matthew J. ClavinSome societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below. Seven chapters, each chapter examines a theme of slavery’s environmental impact on the land and the people who were made to tame it. We find white land owners who viewed land as a disposable resource, using and discarding acre after acre, soils exhausted by abusive, nutrient sapping crops. We find forests denuded of trees to make room for more “disposable” land. We find slaves literally treated no better than animals. We also find tales of resistance, by the land and the slaves who worked it. Both refused to be tamed and make their bids for freedom. The resulting erosion left the land and people exposed to catastrophic flooding from ever more powerful storms. The horrific treatment by southern land owners caused many slaves to seek shelter in swamps and forests no white man would dare go. What was common to each and every milieu was the mutual abuse of the earth as well as those coerced to work it. Ball mused that the quotient for cruelty towards those who toiled the land seemed roughly similar to the degree that the land was ravaged. Indeed, cruelty abounds: the inhumanity that actually defines the otherwise euphemistically rendered “peculiar institution” stands stark throughout the narrative, supported by a wide range of accounts of those too often condemned to lives beset by a quotidian catalog of horrors as chattel property in a system marked by nearly inconceivable brutality. Adam X. McNeil (AXM): Scars on the Land is a major departure from your prior works that largely engaged the Civil War era. What sparked you to write a monograph on the environmental history of slavery in the United States South?

The enslaved already had to cope with an oppressive collection of unhealthy circumstances that included exposure to extreme heat, exhaustion, insects, a range of diseases including chronic ringworm, inadequate clothing, and an insufficient diet—as well as an ongoing unsanitary lifestyle that even kept them from washing their hands except on infrequent occasions. All this was further exacerbated by the demands inherent in certain kinds of more specialized work.In the end, mining and deforestation left the land useless for anything else. Levees, originally constructed to forestall flooding to enable rice agriculture, ended up increasing flooding, a problem that today’s New Orleans inherited from the antebellum. All these pursuits tended to lay waste to respective ecosystems, leaving just the “scars on the land” of the book’s title, but of course they also left lasting physical and psychological scars upon a workforce recruited against their will.

For those who imagined the enslaved limited to working cotton or sugar plantations, Silkenet’s book will be something of an eye-opener. In a region of the United States that with only some exceptions stubbornly remained pre-industrial, large forces of slave labor were enlisted to tame—and put to ruin—a wide variety of landscapes through extensive overexploitation that included forestry, mining, levee-building, and turpentine extraction, usually in extremely perilous conditions.That such practices were treated as unremarkable by white contemporaries finds a later echo in the routine bureaucracy of atrocities that the Nazis inflicted on Jews sent to forced labor camps. For his part, Silkenat reports episodes like these dispassionately, in what appears to be a deliberate effort on the author’s part to sidestep sensationalism. This technique is effective: hyperbolic editorial is unnecessary—the horror speaks for itself—and those well-read in the field are aware that such barbarity was hardly uncommon. Moreover, it serves as a robust rebuke to today’s “Lost Cause” enthusiasts who would cast slavery as benign or even benevolent, as well as to those promoting recent disturbing trends to reshape school curricula to minimize and even sugarcoat the awful realities that history reveals. (Sidenote to Florida’s Board of Education: exactly which skills did Sallie Smith in her nail-studded barrel, or those disfigured by ferocious dogs, develop that later could be used for their "personal benefit?")