BOOK REVIEW: Under Alien Skies

BOOK REVIEW: Under Alien Skies: Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America by Vaughn Scribner (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024) $29.95 Paperback

Historians’ interest in the environment has remade our understanding of the past in recent years. We are now more inclined to appreciate the role that the natural world played in shaping historical events, including the American Revolution. For example, in Washington’s Crossing, David Hackett Fischer argues that the stormy winter of 1776 had more to do with the Continental Army’s success at the Battle of Trenton than a drunken Hessian Christmas party.[1]

Vaughn Scribner continues these efforts to place nature at the center of the American War for Independence in Under Alien Skies. Drawing on the diaries and correspondence of British and German soldiers and their families, Scribner explores the effects that the North American environment had on the mental abilities of those sent to defeat the colonial rebellion. Doing so, he asserts, corrects a glaring omission in the historiography. “By overlooking foreign soldiers’ myriad tribulations in the American environment,” Scribner writes, “scholars of the Revolutionary War have . . . removed from the proverbial ‘muck’ of that especially devastating human creation: large-scale warfare” (page 2-3).

Under Alien Skies is less an account of the American environment than a history of how the troops imagined it. To wit, the book begins with the opinions of troops before they even left Europe. “British and Hessian soldiers entered the Revolutionary War with a complicated collection of (mostly negative) perceptions surrounding North America’s environment,” Scribner observes; “thus, their war began at home” (p. 18). This low opinion was quickly made worse by the Atlantic crossing. “Heaven help us!” lamented Hessian corporal Carl Philip Steuernagel before he sailed. “Country, parents, family, all our friends, yes, even the world seemed to have deserted us and delivered us up to the unknown ocean and its waves” (p. 17). Nor were such fears entirely unwarranted. Scurvy, fevers, and nausea, as well as volcanos, icebergs, and sea creatures, tormented the approximately 50,000 soldiers who sailed to America as well as their families, leading to a mortality rate of almost ten percent before the troops even made it across the ocean.

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British and German soldiers’ poor opinion of America only worsened once they stepped off the ship. “The devil take this country!” wrote British lieutenant colonel Francis Downman in 1778, and many of his compatriots agreed with him (p. 41). The physical terrain of American forests and swamps bedeviled the king’s forces. It slowed troop movement and caused the men to turn on one another. Likewise, impassable rivers, frozen harbors, and unexpected floods debilitated the redcoats and their allies. Yet even worse than the environment itself was the psychological toll that it took on the men who feared Americans lurking in every dark corner. The Continental Army used these fears to their advantage. “For this reason,” Scribner argues, the foreign soldiers felt “utterly vulnerable at the hands of their two most prominent enemies: the environment and the Continental Army forces (in that order)” (p. 59).

Under Alien Skies is organized thematically rather than chronologically. After examining terrains, Scribner moves on the British and German soldiers’ views of America’s flora and fauna, which they believed to be “a veritable hellscape of environmental and military turmoil” (p. 62). Troops feared animals, especially the rattlesnake, as well as alligators, crocodiles, and insects. American plants were equally horrific in foreign eyes. Sometimes, redcoats and Hessians made matters worse themselves, such as when they deforested New York during the city’s long British occupation. Although this provided firewood, it also destroyed the hunting ground of predatory felines, forcing them into the city in search of food, “further demonstrating how environmental alterations disrupted the fragile urban-rural balance that colonists so proudly boasted” (p. 75).

Climate, weather, and disease also distressed the invading armies. “European philosophers had long argued that moving to new climates could change—and permanently damage—people’s health,” and the British and German soldiers took this lesson to heart (p. 84). Scribner explains how the invaders divided America into climatological regions, dreading most the Torrid South that stretched from Virginia to Florida. When Lord Howe’s secretary Ambrose Serle found out that he would be shipped to the Chesapeake—“the worst Climate in America”—he could “write no more” as “my heart is full” (p. 89). Yet the Frigid North was not much better, especially for those soldiers who froze in New York City. Ultimately, Scribner links the weather and opinions about it to British military decisions and failures. Heat and exhaustion made the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse feel like a failure, while trepidation about the onset of the sickly summer led Gen. Augustine Prevost to delay the siege of Charleston by a year.

As Scribner notes repeatedly, it was not so much the environment as British and German perceptions of it that produced such misery. War can exact a high toll on anyone, but the Revolution was worse for its combatants because the “soldiers believed that the American environment broke their mental well-being” (p. 113). Depression was rampant, leading to desertion, which the troops “often blamed on fighting a horrible war in an extraordinary environment” (p. 120). Homesickness was prevalent as well, as was suicide, although it is difficult to quantify the number of men who took their own lives for environmental or other reasons. Only the war’s end brought relief to the long suffering soldiers. Unlike the voyage over, they did not fret over the voyage back but celebrated returning to their homelands.

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Scribner concludes by asking if the British army learned anything during its eight years in the wilds of America. Although many leading British advisers like Gen. David Dundas and Prince Frederick, the Duke of York, asserted that “the American campaign was a ‘one-off,’ namely because of its unique environmental challenges,” others like Lord Cornwallis and Maj. Gen. John Money used the lessons of the Revolution to their nation’s advantage (p. 149). “This American-minded about-face helped Britain defeat the First French Empire during the Napoleonic War (1807-14) and, in turn, expand its own empire into a newly minted global powerhouse after its seemingly disastrous defeat in the Americas” (p. 151).

Under Alien Skies is an effective and efficient look at both the role that the natural world played in the American Revolution and the psychological state of British and German soldiers who fought in the war. Both topics are underexamined by historians, such that Scriber’s book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the war that created the United States. The prose is lucid, the stories entertaining, and the book refreshingly concise. For these reasons, it will appeal to a broader audience than just academic historians.

Scribner is to be applauded for squeezing so much information out of his documents. He admits that he has a limited database of diaries and letters, and he notes at times that there were some things that his subjects simply did not write about such as the voyage home. Indeed, this is why Under Alien Skies considers not only British soldiers, but German ones as well. The scarcity of evidence leads Scribner to include the opinions of men who were not part of the invading armies, like naturalist William Bartram, or to return to the same voices again and again, like Baron and Baroness von Riedesel.

The brevity of Under Alien Skies also takes away from its historiographical significance. Repeatedly throughout the book, Scribner comments on how the Americans thought differently about the natural environment and how this provided a tactical advantage to them. Yet he does not provide sufficient evidence to flesh out this point. A fuller account of the relationship between the natural world of North America, the mental world of the participants, and the resulting course of the war could provide a major reinterpretation of the American Revolution.

[1] David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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