GEOGRAPHY, GEOLOGY, AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

In the context of military operations, geography and geology have demonstrated - time and again - that human and natural landscapes have had a compelling and direct influence on battles and military campaigns. Hence, there is an immutable link between geography, geology, and warfare. Factors such as weather, climate, topography, and the human landscape have had a decisive influence on the outcomes of military conflicts throughout history. Likewise, the important and timeless geographic concepts of location, time, space, and distance have demonstrated that they are as important as tactics and weapons. The pervasive influence of geology on warfare was clearly influential on the ebb and flow of the campaigns and battles of the American Civil War. This paper examines the disparate geographic realities of the landscapes in the Eastern and Western Theaters of the Civil War and how the scale and tempo of the operations in each theater were a function of those factors.