workers the industry ensnared by debt to company stores no less hopelessly
than contemporary coal miners. It seems entirely possible that more tur-
pentine workers became de facto slaves—that is, caught in debt peonage—
than cotton sharecroppers. Yet even as these doleful postbellum decades
dragged on in the forested South, the commons suffered other wounds,
the commoners’ elemental economy was restructured, and the region was
reformed ecologically and politically. The reformation seems unthinkable
without the manifold destructions of the Civil War.
tFirst, of course, the war reduced the white male, mostly young adult,
population by more than a quarter-million, unevening the sex ratio and
connubial and other opportunities for women for perhaps a generation.
Many of the dead were victims of disease, often ‘‘old’’ maladies that Euro-
peans had inflicted on natives long before yet were still capable of killing
Euro-Americans. Scarlett O’Hara’s hastily married first husband inGone
with theWind, one will recall, perished not in battle but in camp, of measles,
as did many nonfictional men on both sides. The United States remained
an overwhelmingly rural nation in , the South somewhat more so than
the North, and isolated people, brought together in masses for induction
and training, exchanged pathogens, sickened, and sometimes died. South-
erners became, temporarily anyway, an urban and a seriously ill people.
Existing industrial cities such as Richmond and Augusta grew enormously,
along with new production sites, in response to war. So newly crowded civil-
ians suffered as well.
Horses and mules also perished by the thousands, as eastern military
fronts drew essential cavalry mounts, artillery caisson- and wagon-pullers,
and pack animals from virtually the whole continent. Horses and mules,
too, were congregated en masse from relatively isolated and disparate
places and paid the price. Equine glanders, a killer apparently unknown
in Virginia before , became a plague persisting to the end of the war.
Late in , on a single day at a northern Virginia depot, a Union cap-
tain ordered the shooting of poor horses. They amounted to a pittance
among many thousands of glanders victims who perished more slowly. Sur-
vivors, meanwhile, were maimed and killed by the thousands in battle, if
not worked to death carrying troops and supplies to battle sites. Since the
carcasses of mules and horses are so much larger than men’s, their re-
mains presented daunting sanitary challenges after battles. Onsite burial
was usually hasty and incomplete, and nature, according to some observ-