“A Demonstration to the World”

This chapter offers an art historical perspective on the American Civil War by highlighting several creative works that reveal the global dimensions of its political ecology. It utilizes ecocritical art history to highlight examples of creative work pertaining to the American Civil War that made “a demonstration to the world,” either through engagement with international audiences or through the deployment of far-reaching environmental and aesthetic knowledge. By approaching art of the American Civil War in an expanded field, it attempts to model a more global art history responsive to the transnational impulses of ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. As an artistic “demonstration to the world,” Prisoners from the Front revealed the environmental destruction of the Confederacy as a price worth paying to preserve the American republic. “Economy” and “ecology” are etymologically related terms describing complex systemic relationships, usually with political inflections.