Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South

Eschewing historical trends that see environmental conditions as secondary influences both during and after the Civil War, Erin Mauldin’s well researched tome Unredeemed Land assigns southern lands, and their soils, a central role in the conflict and the uneasy peace that followed. Her book links post war agricultural shifts to the results of long-term ecological legacies that were exacerbated by the Civil War and emancipation. Focusing on the late antebellum period through the 1880s, Mauldin argues that war and emancipation hastened ecological changes that rippled throughout the former Confederate state. A changing landscape widened social fissures between southerners, both black and white, who were not able to “redeem the land” to its antebellum capacities. Environmental changes brought forth by the Civil War, then, accelerated racial disparities, political divisions, and economic hardships for the region, which impoverished the postwar South and disenfranchised its citizens