JULY 12, 1865:
George Washington Carver
(d. 1943) was born this day in Diamond, Missouri, the human property of a
recalcitrant slaveowner who had not yet emancipated his slaves. As a newborn,
Carver was among a group of slaves snatched by (or sold to) night-riding
Confederate holdouts. Among the other slaves involved in this incident were
Carver’s mother and sister, both of whom were never seen again. The infant
Carver was eventually returned to his father by an Abolitionist raider who was
involved in an attack on the night-riders.
He
was taught to read by his remaining relatives. Around the age of seven, hearing
that there was a “negro school” in Neosho, George Washington Carver walked the
distance (about 12 miles), and was
admitted. He was the school’s star pupil. At thirteen, he graduated, and moved
on to Fort Scott, Kansas’ local black “Academy.” However, a lynching in Fort Scott convinced
him to move to Minneapolis, Kansas, where he completed his Primary education.
Although
he was accepted to Highland College in Highland, Kansas based on his grades, he
was not admitted to the school due to his race. At loose ends, he became an
“Exoduster,” an African-American permitted to homestead the prairie, and thus began his fascination with botany.
He also became an avid portrait artist of trees and plants.
In
1891, he became the first black student at Iowa Agricultural College (now the
University of Iowa) in Ames. He
completed his Master’s Degree in botany in 1896, and became the first black
professor at the College / University.
Invited
by Booker T. Washington to teach agricultural science at the Tuskeegee
Institute, Carver remained on the faculty there for 47 years.
Although
Carver is most famous for his improvements to the peanut crop, he also improved
sweet potatoes, soybeans, pecans, and other crops. Carver’s work was critical
to the ecosystem and the economy of the South, since unrelenting cotton
agriculture had morbidly depleted the soils of the old Confederacy. He
instituted crop rotation as a normative practice as well as the nitrogenization
of soils. Carver’s work undoubtedly saved lives, as, beginning in 1915, the
boll weevil destroyed nearly the whole of the cotton crop for the next four
years. Able to replace cotton with other, edible, crops, Southerners had both
crops to sell and crops to eat during the infestation.
In
1921, Carver testified before Congress on agronomy and agribusiness. Although
several Congressmen had tried to block his testimony (based on color), Carver
proved to be such an erudite and fascinating speaker that he presented a
lecture that lasted several hours and resulted in the passage of new farming
regulations. During the Dust Bowl Years
of the Great Depression, Carver worked with American industry (including the
usually unpleasantly racist and anti-semitic Henry Ford) to develop new
plant-based products to aid struggling farmers. With Ford’s industrial muscle
backing him, Carver was able to do much to ameliorate the suffering of farmers.
Perhaps most impressive, at a time when racism was at its zenith, Carver was
publicly credited and respected for his work.
Carver’s
work ultimately undid some of the tremendous ecological damage wrought by the
Civil War, damage traces of which
remain today.
Wars
are, by their very nature, environmental catastrophes. Armies destroy not only farms
and livestock, but the natural homes of wild creatures of all sorts. Armies
consume forests like termites, both by harvesting them and by using them as
battlefields. They foul surface waters by using them as immediate sewage
systems, and foul ground waters by having the chemical components of military
material leach into water tables. They spread disease via garbage dumping and
by the introduction of new microorganisms into previously pristine areas. They devour the natural environment like
monsters.
Civil
War armies were, if not highly mechanized, huge, larger than almost all
Southern cities in population. As they moved across the South, they were the
equivalents of hordes of locusts, stripping bare the earth down to its very
soil. The once-bucolic South, with its
ordered lanes and farms and woodlots, was reduced to a moonscape by 1865.
The
North consumed forests too --- for wagons, ships’ masts, caissons, and
firewood, among myriad other things. At least two million trees were killed
during the war. The Union and Confederate armies annually consumed 400,000
acres of forest for firewood alone.
With
its natural ecosystems destroyed, the States of America --- United and
Confederate alike --- suffered through epidemics and pandemics, especially in
the close-packed army camps and P.O.W. camps. It was said that, “A Confederate prison is the place/Where
hunting for lice is no disgrace.” Men ate rats (“They taste very much like
a young squirrel,” wrote Lt. Edmund D. Patterson), and the fleas on the
rats drank the blood of the hungry soldiers. It is perhaps the greatest of
miracles that an outbreak of the Black Death did not accompany the scourge of
war.
Every
mineral that had an industrial use was extracted and put to use, in
significantly larger numbers than before the war. The Civil War saw the birth
of the petroleum industry, in part because the Yankee whaling fleets were being
destroyed by Commerce-Raiding.
A
comparison of the 1860 and 1870 censuses reveals a dramatic surge in all of the
extractive industries, and every sector of the American economy, with one
notable exception – Southern agriculture, which would need another decade to
return to prewar levels.
It
is doubtful that any species loss was sustained during the war itself, despite
the death of large numbers of animals who wandered into harm’s way: It has been
speculated that more than a million horses and mules were casualties of the
war. But we should note that the most notable extinction of the late 19th century
and early 20th century --- that of the passenger pigeon --- began at the end of
the Civil War. Repeating rifles were a wartime development, and they were
turned against birds and bison indiscriminately. They declined from billions to
dozens between the 1870s and the 1890s. The last known passenger pigeon,
Martha, died on Sept. 1, 1914. The bison remains in much reduced numbers.
George
Perkins Marsh, the world’s first professional ecologist, recognized the heavy
price of the Civil War when he wrote in 1864, “Man has too long forgotten that
the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less
for profligate waste.”
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| A Passenger Pigeon c. 1896. Once numbered in the tens of billions, the species went extinct in 1914. |
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| This immense heap of bison skulls on the western plains represents just a slight fraction of the animals killed off between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War |
One
hundred and fifty years later, facing climate change and the exhaustion of
planetary resources, too many people have yet to learn the lessons Carver and
Marsh tried so hard to impart. *
*This
post was adapted in part from The New
York Times: The Civil War’s Environmental Impact by Ted Widmer, November
15, 2014.
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