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• W4385993362 abstract "Reviewed by: Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat Caroline Grego (bio) Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South. David Silkenat. Oxford: Oxford University, 2022. ISBN: 978-0-19-756422-6. 272 pp., cloth, $35.00 David Silkenat’s Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South has “a simple premise: between 1665 and 1865 the environment fundamentally shaped American slavery, and slavery remade the Southern landscape” (1). Silkenat’s accessible, tightly written synthesis of Southern environmental history provides a fast-paced, thematically organized overview of those processes. Within the book’s first six chapters, each based on a different element of the Southern environment, and the final one, which examines the role of the environment in emancipation, Silkenat plumbs classic “slave narratives” and accounts of travel and agriculture for their environmental and ecological commentary; and surveys the secondary literature on Southern environmental history. In chapter 1, “An Exhausted Soil,” Silkenat looks at perhaps the most thoroughly debated area of the region’s environmental historiography: soil fertility and erosion. From agriculture to mining, slaveowners exploited enslaved laborers to manufacture profit and largely “saw land as a disposable commodity to consume and abandon” (11). Enslavers “saw short-term profits as preferable to sustainable practices” because “fertilizing an old field cost more than twice as much as buying virgin soil” (12, 16). This generated a “feedback loop” in which enslavers chose to buy more land rather than tend their fields with greater care, as the US government seized territory from Indigenous peoples to feed the machine of American slavery (16). Enslavers were greedy not only for the agricultural potential of Indigenous land, but also for what lay underneath: Silkenat concludes the chapter with a section on the use of enslaved laborers in the ante-bellum gold mines of southern Appalachia. In chapter 2, “An Animal without Hope,” Silkenat considers the types of animals that enslaved Southerners encountered, from domesticated creatures to fish and game to fearsome reptiles. Drawing on key monographs, Silkenat opens with descriptions of the “free-range husbandry” of cattle and pigs (33). While pigs especially contributed vital calories to the diets of enslaved laborers, this unfettered pastoralism also created a massive feral hog population that uprooted topsoil, disrupted native flora and fauna, and terrorized travelers. Enslaved Southerners had to dodge hogs as well as venomous snakes and alligators, but they took that risk to hunt, trap, and fish; their enslavers generally approved of these practices, as they lessened the cost of feeding their enslaved workforce. Silkenat draws parallels between two domesticated animals in particular: horses and dogs. Slaveowners used both as tools of surveillance and control, even taking advantage of [End Page 59] how many enslaved people kept dogs for companionship (50). Finally, Silkenat also points out that enslaved people frequently made connections “between their experience and those of the animals around them” (55). Chapter 3, “Dragged Out by the Roots,” features longleaf pine forests, which once covered 130 million acres of the American South. While Silkenat also discusses the diminishment of the South’s floodplain forests and the logging of Appalachian hardwoods, longleaf pine, tapped for turpentine, dominates. Sometimes it is too easy to lose sight of the timeline of longleaf pine destruction, which reached its most rapacious pitch in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rather than the antebellum era. But Silkenat’s discussion of the remote lumber camps of enslaved turpentine workers and loggers delivers a compelling example of how enslaved laborers in the pines could both suffer brutalization at the hands of a violent camp manager and find greater independence due to the difficulties of “close surveillance” over workers scattered across isolated acreage (70). Similarly, Silkenat notes that forests generally served as “places of refuge” for enslaved Southerners: woods were the “venue” for “independent Black religious communities,” a “foraging ground,” a “natural apothecary,” and a space to plot rebellion or escape (75–77). In chapter 4, “Breaches in the Levee,” Silkenat contends that “the South’s waterways served as arteries for slavery’s expansion. . . . Yet these same waterways that made enslaved agriculture possible also..." @default.
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• W4385993362 title "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)" @default.
• W4385993362 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/cwh.2023.a904826" @default.
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