A Historical GIS of Organic-Industrial Assemblages: The American Civil War, 1860–65

In the 1840s, due to the amount of anthracite and bituminous fossils being extracted to fuel the thousands of furnaces, forges and factories, that had sprung up across the expanding United States, period journals declared that the nation had entered the “Coal Age.” By 1861, with the eruption of the Civil War, the United States’ growing industrial base was extracting and burning fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate in human history. The war fostered large corporate investments in bituminous mining, and by the 1870s, the softer, sootier coal became the dominant fuel of the second wave of the American industrial revolution, which launched the United States as a global economic power. This paper drawing on Mark Fiege's work (2004) discusses a Historical GIS of American Civil War 'Organic Industrial' Assemblages which integrated the United States’ emerging fossil fuel industry in with the organizations, technologies and personnel of war. Comprised of linkages between coalfields, mines, miners, railroads, iron and steel furnaces, factories, railways, steamships, armaments, infantry and the emerging mechanized processes, systems and structures of the Union and Confederate armies. Linking theatres of war with sites of resource extraction, 'Organic-Industrial' assemblages inextricably enmeshed armies, battlefields, strategies, tactics and matériel of combat with the physical geographies of battlefields. These assemblages fulfilled a Napoleonic vision of modern warfare, and bolstered the foundations of the American imperium. Introducing regional, national and international geo-political templates for resource extraction and cooperation which by the twenty-first century manifested into the Industrial-Military Complex. Ironically, such assemblages now situate the U.S. Department of Defense as both a global leader in climate change research and the largest institutional fossil fuel consumer on earth.