Stumps littered the American landscape in the decades before the Civil War. Americans were intimately familiar with them—although, as in the paintings of Thomas Cole, a given stump field might take on complex and seemingly contradictory meanings (see Fig. 5.1).¹ Sometimes stumps signaled clearing, progress, development, expansiveness. Sometimes politicians climbed on top of them, filled their lungs, and speechified for hours. At the same time, stumps also suggested a certain kind of loss, and they were capable of breaking plows: they sometimes caused Americans to stumble. Once war broke out, of course, the stumps multiplied unimaginably (see Fig. 5.2)....
...MoreBook Brian Drake (2015) The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War.
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