Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)

Reviewed by: Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat Greg O'Brien (bio) Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South. By David Silkenat. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 272. Cloth, 34. 99. ) The latest work by David Silkenat, senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and acclaimed Civil War historian, provides a valuable overview and analysis of the role of the environment in shaping American slavery and of slavery's role in changing the southern environment. It may seem obvious that slavery and the environment were intimately intertwined; the moist southern climate and sufficient stretches of frost-free days meant that only in southern colonies and states could cash crops like tobacco, rice, cotton, indigo, and sugar be successfully grown. Yet even though parts of this environment-slavery interface have been explored by scholars in certain regions, there has been no synthesis that examines the entire geographic South and the full timescale of slavery in one book, until now. The result is energizing. The overall argument in Scars on the Land insists that the degradation of the southern environment caused by the expansion of southern slavery as seen in diminished soils, remade landscapes, denuded forests, spoiled waterways, and loss of flora and fauna is mirrored by the simultaneous negative impact on enslaved people via neglect, extreme violence, and early death. Silkenat reveals that enslaved people understood the connection, highlighting the frequent complaint by them that masters considered their slaves to be nothing more than animal brutes who were to be used and then discarded when they could no longer physically work. Of course, some readers might respond that some masters were "benevolent" and did not view their slaves that way, but even there Silkenat shows that environmental realities provide a different interpretation. For example, when Sea Island cotton producers repeatedly lost their crops, slaves, and slave housing to tropical storms and rising tides, they responded in the early nineteenth century with sturdier tabby concrete slave housing that proved cooler in the summer and, more importantly, could survive the winds and water of a hurricane. The book is filled with subtle but enlightening historiographical interventions that offer new perspectives and context to many received truths about American slavery. Historians of North American slavery will be at once familiar with the peoples and events in the book and learning anew the crucial role of the environment in shaping long-range trends and specific moments. In recent literature about antebellum slavery, the role of capitalism looms large as an explanatory force to describe why southern planters sought constant expansion of slavery to tap into new investments End Page 116 and growth. But Silkenat points out that in many ways they had no choice because the lands cleared for cotton became nearly sterile in short order, while the deforested topsoil washed away, and the oppressive heat and humidity killed people forced to work all day outside. Until chemical phosphate fertilizers were introduced in the South after the Civil War, masters of slaves and cotton could only maintain high profits if they had access to new unspoiled acreage. This ecological explanation is not usually cited among scholars examining the causes of secession. Silkenat uses the environment to organize his study topically into seven chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on exhausted soils from the eighteenth- century Chesapeake to the Deep South cotton fields, with a detailed excursion into slave-based mining and its impact on the environment. Chapter 2 explores the role of animals (native and introduced) to illustrate how the slave-based economy consumed certain species (deer, bear, fish) while promoting others (hogs, cattle, bloodhounds) to reshape the environment. Chapter 3 enters southern forests to expose the impact of the slave-based southern timber and forest products industries that resulted in habitat loss and severe erosion in certain areas. Chapter 4 immerses readers in the South's rivers that underwent massive transformations as slaves built levees and, especially in Lowcountry Carolina, remade the landscape with canals, gates, sluices, and ponds in service of the rice industry. Chapter 5 examines the role of weather, especially hurricanes and other extreme events, in exposing. . .