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Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books

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William Cronon, Editor

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Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books explore human relationships with natural environments in all their variety and complexity. They seek to cast new light
on the ways that natural systems affect human communities, the ways that people affect the environments of which they are a part, and the ways that different
cultural conceptions of nature profoundly shape our sense of the world around
us. A complete list of the books in the series appears at the end of this book.

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The

Republic
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Nature

of

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A n E n v i ron m e n ta l H i s t ory of t h e U n i t e d S tat e s

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Mark Fiege

University of Washington Press

Seattle and London

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The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States

is published with the assistance of a grant from the Weyerhaeuser
Environmental Books Endowment, established by the Weyerhaeuser
Company Foundation, members of the Weyerhaeuser family,
and Janet and Jack Creighton.

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2012 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of America
Design by Thomas Eykemans
Composed in Sorts Mill Goudy; display type set in League Gothic;
courtesy The League of Moveable Type
16 15 14 13 125 4 3 2 1

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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University of Washington Press

PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145, USA
www.washington.edu/uwpress

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fiege, Mark.
The republic of nature : an environmental history of the United States / Mark Fiege.
p. cm. (Weyerhaeuser environmental books)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-295-99167-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1.Human ecologyUnited StatesHistory.
2.NatureEffect of human beings onUnited StatesHistory.
3. United StatesEnvironmental conditions.
I. Title.
GF503F54 2012304.20973dc232011035457
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.
FrontispieceDedication of the Lincoln Memorial, May 30, 1922.
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC-F81-19718

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For Alexandra

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Contents

Land of Lincoln3

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Foreword
Environmental History Comes of Age by William Crononix

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1 Satan in the Land

Nature, the Supernatural, and Disorder in Colonial New England23

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2 By the Laws of Nature and of Natures God

Declaring American Independence57

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3 King Cotton
The Cotton Plant and Southern Slavery100

4 Natures Nobleman
Abraham Lincoln and the Improvement of America156
5 The Nature of Gettysburg
Environmental History and the Civil War199
6 Iron Horses
Nature and the Building of the First U.S. Transcontinental Railroad228
7 Atomic Sublime
Toward a Natural History of the Bomb281

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8 The Road to Brown v. Board

An Environmental History of the Color Line318

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9 Its a Gas
The United States and the Oil Shock of 19731974358
Paths That Beckon403

Acknowledgments430
Notes434
References509
Illustration Credits557
Index560

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Illustrations

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Gallery No. 3
Iron Horses265
Nature Study271
Natural Hazards275
Lipids and Liberty278

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Gallery No. 2
Animal Familiars139
Political Ecology142
Hard Labor148
Butchers Bill151

Gallery No. 1
Mountains and Monuments15

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Foreword
Environmental History Comes of Age

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William Cronon

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Once in a great while, perhaps every decade or two for a given field, a book
comes along that changes the way one thinks about an entire subject. Sometimes this happens when a writer of unusual creativity revisits a familiar topic
and somehow manages to find in it insights so fresh that its hard to believe
no one noticed them before. Sometimes it happens when a scholar of unusual
range wanders across a vast historiography and ties it together in an act of synthesis that discovers unexpected connections among disparate elements that
few imagined might be brought together in such a surprising way. And sometimes it happens when an intellectual of unusual generosity takes the questions
and findings of a specialized subfield and so compellingly demonstrates their
relevance to other fields and disciplines that the subfield suddenly feels far
more mainstream than one thought.
It is rare enough for a single book to succeed at one of these tasks; it is rarer
still for one book to accomplish them all. And yet that is precisely what Mark
Fieges The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States does.
It is surely among the most important works of environmental history published since the field was founded four or more decades ago. No book before
it has so compellingly demonstrated the value of applying environmental perspectives to historical events that at first glance may seem to have little to do
with nature or the environment. No one who cares about the American
past can afford to ignore what Fiege has to say.
Having declared my enthusiasm so unabashedly, I should hasten to make
sure that I dont misrepresent the volume you hold in your hands. Despite its
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subtitle, this is not a comprehensive narrative synthesis of American environmental history. Squeezing such a vast subject between the covers of a single
book is such a daunting task that few scholars have even attempted it. (The
best is Ted Steinbergs Down to Earth: Natures Role in American History, first
published in 2002, which can now be supplemented with the superb historiographical essays gathered in Douglas Sackmans A Companion to American
Environmental History, published in 2010.) Mark Fiege chose for himself quite a
different task when he embarked on this project more than a decade ago. Fearing that an encyclopedic account might fall victim to the familiar textbook
problem of too much obligatory information trading depth for breadth and
thereby undermining storytelling and analysis alike, he chose instead to concentrate on a few carefully chosen but far-flung episodes. Rather than try to
synthesize everything that he and his colleagues had learned over the past half
century about American environmental history, his goal would be to illustrate
by example the kinds of questions and interpretive insights that have become
central to the field.
Fieges real stroke of genius lay in the way he selected episodes to demonstrate the value of an environmental historical perspective for scholars,
students, and other readers unfamiliar with the field. As a committed undergraduate teacher, he wanted to write a book that could be used in U.S. history survey courses, where he knew full well that most high school and college
teachers must necessarily rely on a standard textbook to guide their students
through the vast terrain of the American past. A parallel environmental history textbook with a similar table of contents would have little chance of being
adopted in such classrooms, and might even feel repetitious if it were. At the
same time, Fiege wanted to write a book that would convey to nonacademic
readers the ways environmental history can alter our sense of the past by
encouraging us to see familiar events from radically different points of view.
The solution he hit upon was to identify historical episodes that were so
utterly familiar that every high school and college teacher was bound to include
them in a U.S. history syllabus and every reader would recognize them. Then
he applied a more daring and surprising criterion. He decided to seek out classic episodes in American history that are rarely if ever viewed in environmental
terms so he could then reinterpret them through the lens of environmental history. Revisiting and rewriting the most familiar of histories to make them seem
unexpectedly unfamiliar: this was the high bar Fiege set for himself.
If my own description of the book suddenly feels less abstractly academic
x Foreword

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and more genuinely intriguing, then youve got a sense of why I was so excited
when Mark Fiege first described this project to me. Just let your mind wander
a bit: what would be on your own list of classic moments in the American past
that are usually discussed as if they had no connection to the natural world? Its
a fascinating question, and Fiege ranged far and wide in his efforts to answer it.
As he did so, though, he began to realize that writing this book would be a good
deal harder than he first thought. Much of the initial excitement that the field
of environmental history generated arose from the fact that it studied topics
that had been largely ignored by other historians: the impact of epidemic diseases on Amerindian populations; the unrecognized ways that native peoples
had used fire to alter landscapes; the consequences of introducing non-native
species to North American ecosystems; the effects on soils of cutting down forests and planting agricultural crops in their stead; the harnessing of rivers in
the name of progress; the role of national parks in expressing American ideas
of nature and nationhood; and so on and on. These and many other subjects
were hardly central to American historical scholarship when environmental
history began to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s. Few textbooks made more than
a passing reference to any of them, so demonstrating their importance was a big
part of what made the field feel new.
These early triumphs had helped define what environmental history was . . .
and yet they were precisely the topics that Mark Fiege was choosing to downplay
as he selected episodes to explore in his individual chapters. It was not that he
would ignore them altogetherThe Republic of Nature is an environmental history to its corebut by focusing his chapters on topics that had not previously
been thought of mainly in environmental terms, he entered historiographical
territories that were relatively unexplored by environmental historians. As
a result, each new chapter required Fiege not only to read and synthesize the
huge secondary scholarship that topics like these necessarily generate, but also
to do original primary research to discover environmental aspects that had
been previously ignored or downplayed. Each new chapter, in other words,
required research and synthesis on a scale that many scholars typically bring to
bear on an entire book. Although it wears its scholarship lightly, The Republic
of Nature has a rigor, literary grace, and depth of interpretive energy that represent historical writing at its very best.
So which classic episodes did Mark Fiege select to show that environmental
history has something new to say even about subjects that scholars have been
writing about for generations? The Salem witch trials. The Enlightenment
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invocation of natural law in the founding of the American republic. The rise
of cotton agriculture in the slave South. The quasi-mythic biography of Abraham Lincoln. The Battle of Gettysburg. The building of the transcontinental
railroads. The invention of the atomic bomb. Brown v. Board of Education. The
oil shortages of 19731974.
As I name these, you may be saying to yourself: Wait, I can think of environmental aspects to each of those events. I thought he was going to pick topics
that had nothing to do with the environment. But that would be impossible.
There is nothing in the worldnothing in place or time or historythat is
ever outside of nature or the environment. The point is that few of these topics would be top-of-mind for anyone wanting to illustrate the importance of
the environment for understanding the American past. Thats what makes The
Republic of Nature so bold and unusual. Although most readers might guess at
a few of the many environmental insights that Mark Fiege shares on the pages
of this book, even specialists would fail to think of all of them. That is why the
book is such a joy to read, and why it is so worth savoring. Peruse it carefully,
and you will make surprisingly intriguing discoveries even about events you
already know well. More important, you will learn ways of asking questions
and seeking answers that will likely change the way you think about history
itself, perhaps even those parts of it that you yourself have lived. And finally, it
may change the way you think about nature and its role in the human past. For
one book to do all of that is no small achievement.

xii Foreword

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