The Potter House, Atlanta,

1866

The Civil War is mainly understood as a conflict among people, but it was also a war on the land, in which both sides inflicted widespread devastation—sometimes intentionally, as a strategic tactic. These four images all relate to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s brutal Atlanta and Savannah campaigns of 1864 and show the blasted landscapes that resulted. Each includes felled or dead trees and stumps, considered by contemporaries as metaphors for the human lives similarly cut short by the conflict. Associations between human beings and trees had a long history in Romanticism: Thomas Cole wrote in 1835 that “trees are like men,” worthy of respect and representation. Tapping this tradition, images by Barnard and Homer extend the damage of the war to the earth itself. For the contemporary artist Kara Walker, whose signature silhouettes overlay a Civil War–era illustration of a denuded battle scene, the axe-wielding child suggests that destruction of land tainted by racial inequity might also be cathartic and necessary.