That such practices were treated as unremarkable by white contemporaries finds a later echo in the routine bureaucracy of atrocities that the Nazis inflicted on Jews sent to forced labor camps. For his part, Silkenat reports episodes like these dispassionately, in what appears to be a deliberate effort on the author’s part to sidestep sensationalism. This technique is effective: hyperbolic editorial is unnecessary—the horror speaks for itself—and those well-read in the field are aware that such barbarity was hardly uncommon. Moreover, it serves as a robust rebuke to today’s “Lost Cause” enthusiasts who would cast slavery as benign or even benevolent, as well as to those promoting recent disturbing trends to reshape school curricula to minimize and even sugarcoat the awful realities that history reveals. (Sidenote to Florida’s Board of Education: exactly which skills did Sallie Smith in her nail-studded barrel, or those disfigured by ferocious dogs, develop that later could be used for their "personal benefit?") Here we see the outline of a three-dimensional history of slavery: one in which 'power' and 'resistance' and 'work' and 'agency' are to be understood as dynamic material processes. The system's ecological and spatial aspects are understood by David Silkenat as both the determining parameters and agonistic products of its economic and racial aspects." - Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash. Adam X. McNeil (AXM): Scars on the Land is a major departure from your prior works that largely engaged the Civil War era. What sparked you to write a monograph on the environmental history of slavery in the United States South? In examining the American slavery’s impact on the southern environment, Silkenat has accomplished something fascinating. We no longer can be content to just say, “slavery was bad” but must confront the unconsidered consequences of the “peculiar institution.”

For those who imagined the enslaved limited to working cotton or sugar plantations, Silkenet’s book will be something of an eye-opener. In a region of the United States that with only some exceptions stubbornly remained pre-industrial, large forces of slave labor were enlisted to tame—and put to ruin—a wide variety of landscapes through extensive overexploitation that included forestry, mining, levee-building, and turpentine extraction, usually in extremely perilous conditions. David Silkenat has written an astoundingly original history of southern slavery. To the crimes against humanity committed by enslavers, one can add environmental destruction. It is the enslaved, whose interactions with the flora, fauna, and landscape allow them to create alternative geographies of freedom, who emerge as stewards of the south. Scars on the Land reveals perceptively the long afterlives of slavery all around us." -- Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

Here we see the outline of a three-dimensional history of slavery: one in which 'power' and 'resistance' and 'work' and 'agency' are to be understood as dynamic material processes. The system's ecological and spatial aspects are understood by David Silkenat as both the determining parameters and agonistic products of its economic and racial aspects." -- Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States Without considering the impact that slavery had on the environment, or vice versa, you will never fully understand either. Slavery profoundly shaped this land, and the wounds are still fresh in many ways, though more often than not, they go unnoticed. Silkenat has written an insightful and well researched overview that helps to make them visible. Scars on the Land is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade animals, and swamps played in the lives of slaves...This volume will be of enormous value in bringing these topics to the attention of students, laypersons, or environmental historians." - Nicholas Cox, H-CivWar

Note: I reviewed this book about a well-known maroon community here: Review of: The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, by Matthew J. Clavin AXM: How does Scars on the Land help readers understand the historical roots of our current global ecological crisis? A number of maroon communities appeared in secluded geographies that were populated by escapees mostly on the margins of settled areas, with inhabitants eking out a living by hunting and gathering as well as small scale farming, supplemented by surreptitious trading with the outside world. The largest was in the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina, where thousands managed to thrive over multiple generations. calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged

Beatings and whippings were standard fare. Runaways, even those who intended to absent themselves only temporarily, were treated with singular harshness. Sallie Smith, a fourteen-year-old girl who went truant in the woods to avoid repeated abuse, was apprehended and “brutally tortured: suspended by ropes in a smoke house so that her toes barely touched the ground and then rolled across the plantation inside a nail-studded barrel, leaving her scarred and bruised.” [p78]