The Landscapes of Reconstruction

The four years of the American Civil War devastated the landscapes of the rebellious states. Combat and new forms of “total warfare” cut swaths of devastation through the Shenandoah Valley and the Carolina Low Country. But more significantly, the destruction of the institution of slavery, and what the sociologist W. E. B. DuBois called the “general strike” of the enslaved people of the South led to a rapid and near-complete reordering of how Southern landscapes were made and maintained.

Despite their power being dealt a major blow in the war, the planter class worked tirelessly to maintain their historical dominance over land and labor. Victorious in war, the anti-slavery Republicans used the newly muscular federal state to counter planter power and implement their economic plans. The struggle of Reconstruction played out in the landscapes of the South, as the federal vision of an industrialized, engineered republic transformed the land of plantations into the infrastructural landscape of today.

John Dean Davis is an environmental historian and associate professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University. He is the author of Reconstructors: Land, Work, and Engineering After the Civil War (University of Chicago Press, 2026) and co-editor of Military Landscapes (Dumbarton Oaks, 2021).