A Historical GIS of Carboniferous Extractions and Industrial Assemblages: The American Civil War 1860-1865

Charles Travis, University of Texas at Arlington

The opening of anthracite coal fields in Pennsylvania and across the Appalachian Mountain range in the 1830s provided factories in the industrial northeast with an inexpensive fuel that burned at the high temperatures required for superior-grade metallurgy. By the 1840s, the amount of anthracite and bituminous fossils burning in thousands of American furnaces, forges and factories, prompted period journals to declare that the United States had entered the “Coal Age.” In 1861, on the eve 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, rendering the softer, sootier coal the dominant fuel of the second wave of the American industrial revolution. This paper discusses methods and the pros and cons of deploying Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS) formatted data to map the integration of war and the industries generated by the revolution, that created technological-organic assemblages between soldiers, armies, armament works, coalfields, mines, miners, railroads, iron and steel furnaces, factories, cotton mills, laborers, the enslaved, steamships and emerging mechanized processes and systems. These assemblages generated new theatres and practices of manufacture and warfare in which armies, troops, food supplies, battlefields and the matériel of combat became inextricably enmeshed with the physical geographies of battlefields and their underlying carbonate geologies. U.S. Civil-War organic-industrial assemblages bolstered the foundations of the American imperium, introducing regional, national and international geo-political twentieth century templates for resource extraction, cooperation and conflict, which by the twenty-first century have left debilitating human footprints on the earth’s regional environments, and significantly impacted the stability of planetary climate and life systems.

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 Presented in Session 59. Unearthing the Past with Historical GIS Data: Sourcing, Visualizing, Interpreting