A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era by Andrew F. Lang (review)

swamps of South Carolina and echoes other historians in noting how enslavers viewed “swamps as unruly slaves, requiring discipline before they would submit to cultivation and mastery” (124). He ventures from the various types of maroon settlements in Lowcountry and Savannah River swamps, to the lower Mississippi Delta, to the Great Dismal Swamp—home to the “most successful maroon community in the American South” where “hundreds, possibly thousands” of maroons lived and even raised “several generations” (138). In his final body chapter, “Landscape of Freedom,” Silkenat brings the reader to the Civil War era and concludes that “environmental destruction undergirded the argument for Southern secession and the formation of the Confederacy,” as “proponents of this new slaveholding republic articulated an environmental vision predicated on territorial expansion and enslaved Black labor” (149, 151). But as Silkenat describes in the book’s conclusion, the abolition of slavery ended neither racial oppression nor environmental degradation. While “freedom presented a new set of environmental opportunities and challenges” for Black Southerners, slavery had already “polluted everything it touched” (169). The sharecropping regime into which white landowners and former enslavers forced many African Americans only exacerbated the environmental destruction that they had put into motion under slavery (171). Silkenat closes the book with the briefest of invocations of the climate crisis, as he argues that the ongoing reckoning with American slavery must also “see the scars on the land” that the institution left behind (172). Nonetheless, it is impossible to read Scars on the Land without reflecting on the climate crisis’s growing impacts on the contemporary southern environment, and Silkenat’s compact synthesis is a valuable primer on the precedents for how intertwined environmental and racial exploitation, as well as resistance to those regimes, can manifest. Caroline Grego Queens University of Charlotte