ABSTRACT
After a day spent exploring Hilton Head Island’s beaches, fi elds, and swampy forests, Wesley T. Harris ducked into his tent carrying several cotton bolls and a palm leaf. The cotton was for his family; he enclosed it in a letter he wrote to them that night. The palm leaf was for the tent, which he and his messmates pitched earlier that day. Harris was looking forward to a dinner of fresh meat, which a scouting party had “picked up” that afternoon. “This looks like living again,” he wrote in his diary. It was the second week of November 1861. 1
Harris and his fellow soldiers in Company F, 3rd New Hampshire Volunteers, had taken part in the Union’s Port Royal expedition that fall, establishing a foothold for the federals in South Carolina. Now they were setting up a permanent camp on Hilton Head and digging fortifi cations to shield them from Confederate attacks that could come by land or sea. All hands were assigned to these duties, leveling out the campsite and transporting sand to the earthworks that reared up from the shore like breaching whales. Harris went out the next day and cut down several trees – most likely evergreens such as loblolly or red bays, or perhaps a black gum, whose leaves would have been fl aming a deep red in early November. These were not for burning in campfi res, at least not yet. They were “shade trees,” which he carefully placed in front of his tent. “Our new home looks the most inviting of any we have ever been in,” he wrote proudly, “though it is quite sandy.” 2
As crisp autumn days turned into often-frigid winters, Civil War soldiers spent a great deal of time transforming the southern countryside into new kinds of landscapes. One Northern soldier described the process of converting forests to camps in 1863:
The small pines were soon leveled to the ground and our dingy looking tents occupied their places. Let as many men as there are here go into a piece of woodland to camp, and in half a day where the giants of the forest stood in all their towering majesty, a large city of tents with their inhabitants will appear, putting one in mind of the Arabian tales. 3
George Henry Caperton, a cavalryman in the 2nd Virginia Infantry, also noted how quickly forests became camps in December 1861. “Sunday meets with no
observance. Men busy chopping and building huts,” he wrote in his diary. “It requires little time to build a village.” 4 When they constructed these camp villages across the South between 1861 and 1865, Civil War soldiers experimented with different forms of architecture, domestic decor, and landscape design. They did so in order to combat the boredom of daily life in camp but also to recreate domestic life in places that seemed alien and unsettling and form new spaces of privacy and comfort within the bureaucratized public sphere of warfare. This chapter recovers soldiers’ attempts to create new, domestic landscapes of war, illuminating an often-overlooked component of their lives and of Civil War history. It reveals that war was a continual process of destruction and creation, and the making of war necessitated different forms of place-making.
