A Beastly Ceasefire: Wildlife in the Civil War South

Recent scholarship has greatly expanded what historians know about the environmental context and consequences of the Civil War. Much of the existing literature emphasizes the various kinds of destruction wrought by the conflict. This article reconsiders that paradigm as it applies to the wild animals of the American South. Contemporaries observed that wildlife proliferated during and immediately after the war, a consequence of humans turning their hunting rifles on one another and abandoning vast swaths of agricultural land—counteracting trends in place since the colonial period. By rebutting the notion that soldiers annihilated wild game and then investigating evidence for animal population growth, the article proposes that a full environmental history of the Civil War era must include analysis of wild ecosystems.