ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Apples versus Oranges: Debating the Effects of the Ice Age in Civil War America”

• In Event: Histories of Biogeography Part 1

English Abstract

This talk draws on chapter 6 of my recent book, How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton, 2024). I will show how mid-19th-century Americans engaged in biogeographical debates to determine nothing less than the fate of the nation. At the end of the shattering Civil War (1865), US naturalists converged on the idea that some climates were better suited than others to national reunification. Fueled by the new concept of the "Ice Age," first promoted by the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz and extended by US scientists from the 1840s onward, post-Civil War naturalists agreed that God's plan for US reunification was made plain in the rocky traces of the distant epoch that had once gripped North America in its icy clutches. The ice sheets had reached down the continent to nearly the 36°30′ parallel, the northern limits of slavery in the western territories. These ice sheets, driven by the finger and fiat of God, had scoured the land and deposited the loamy soil that now, after 1865, would grow the apples and wheat that filled the national belly. Only white workers were suited to this sort of agriculture. By contrast, only black men were suited to farming the tropical regions of the American South, with its beating sun and wilting humidity good only for cotton and citrus.

Author

• Caroline Winterer, Stanford University