Daniel Immerwahr, professor of history at Northwestern University, framed contemporary climate concerns by tracing the connections between apocalypse and abundance of resources through the history of fire in 19th century America at this past week’s scholars’ convocation. 

Immerwahr’s research examines how wood abundance and fire destruction in the 18th and 19th centuries mirror the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change today. Author of “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States,” he is working on a new book, “This Too Shall Burn: America in the Age of Wood.” 

“Fossil fuels have been a source of shocking abundance,” Immerwahr said. “But they also forebode our apocalypse through climate change. That same relationship—abundance and apocalypse—is something that in the 18th and 19th century, Americans felt between wood and fire.”

Immerwahr displayed images of Chicago’s distinctive brick architecture, which he said resulted from the city burning down multiple times. The Great Chicago Fire of Oct. 8, 1871 is well known, but Immerwahr pointed out that it was preceded by another major fire the day before. It wasn’t even the worst fire on Lake Michigan that day — a fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin killed six times as many people.

The next day, Urbana burned down. Boston had its great fire in 1872, Portland in 1873, and Chicago burned again in 1874.

“This is a typical feature of the United States,” Immerwahr said, showing city flags from Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, Lawrence and Detroit that all feature phoenixes or flames.

North America’s abundant forests distinguished it from deforested Europe. Immerwahr called North America “the Saudi Arabia of timber.” When Alexis de Tocqueville visited New York in the 19th century, he admired what appeared to be stately marble homes, only to discover the next morning they were made of painted wood.

This wood abundance shaped American architecture and infrastructure. The exterior of Mount Vernon, George Washington’s residence and a plantation, appears to be brick, but is actually yellow pine that enslaved workers carved and treated to look like brick. The painting “American Gothic” depicts a style called Carpenter Gothic — European Gothic architecture translated into wood.

Even language reflected this wood abundance. The word “lumber” came to mean felled wood only in North America. The term “stump speech” emerged because politicians would stand on the trunks of recently felled trees to address crowds.

By 1900, the United States suffered eight times the per capita fire damage as European countries. Researchers found that by the 1880s and 1890s, the largest fires in England destroyed less than 10 houses, while American cities regularly burned down entirely.

“It was not really hard to figure out,” Immerwahr said. “The United States was the land of fire and it was also the land of wood.”

World traveler James Silk Buckingham documented fires everywhere he went in America in the mid-19th century. In Asheville, his inn caught fire. In Augusta, Georgia, he lost all his belongings when his hotel “burst into a vast pyramid of solid flame, 200 feet high.” He estimated the United States had more fires than any other 10 countries combined.

A significant portion of Immerwahr’s research examines the relationship between slavery and fire. White slaveholders frequently blamed fires on enslaved people, while enslaved people rarely confessed to arson in their narratives.

“There are two views,” Immerwahr said. “Is this slaves setting fires all the time, or is this slaveholders blaming slaves all the time? Both of which I find plausible.”

Because textual evidence proved unreliable due to power dynamics and document destruction, Immerwahr conducted quantitative analysis. He compared slave cities — Charleston and New Orleans — to free cities without large enslaved populations.

Slave cities suffered three to four times the fire damage per capita as free cities. Those elevated fire rates disappeared after emancipation.

“Emancipating slaves is the most effective fire prevention strategy that has ever been known in American history,” Immerwahr said.

The evidence suggests enslaved people weaponized their combustible environment. After George Washington willed that his slaves would be freed upon his wife Martha’s death, Mount Vernon experienced increased fires. Martha freed the slaves covered by the will immediately.

Thomas Jefferson spoke of the slavery question ringing “like a fire bell in the night” in 1820. Immerwahr pointed out that in 1819, a two-day rash of fires hit numerous plantations around Monticello, killing at least one person. Jefferson himself was injured in those fires.

In July 1860, fires hit nearly a dozen Texas towns, including one that nearly obliterated Dallas. These fires pushed white Southerners toward secession, fearing a Lincoln-led government would inspire more slave resistance through fire.

Abraham Lincoln’s description of the Civil War as “the fiery trial” carried literal weight.

During the Civil War, Jefferson Davis’s slaves attempted to burn down the Confederate White House in 1864 while he and his family were inside. As the Confederacy collapsed, Confederate agents set Richmond on fire to deny the city to Union forces.

Rather than focusing on nature’s beauty or humanity’s destruction of nature, Immerwahr examines moments “where the environment is something that feels like it might destroy us.”

“We are as attuned to nature’s severity as its serenity,” Immerwahr said. “We are starting to learn how to write about the environment not just as a stabilizing classic thing, but as something that can be quite chaotic and intrude on our lives in unexpected ways.”

He referenced the recent Los Angeles fires, allegedly started by someone who didn’t intend to burn down large portions of the city but set a fire that got out of control — much like Henry David Thoreau, who accidentally set a fire that nearly burned down Concord before retreating to Walden Pond.

During the Q&A portion, Immerwahr said that recent fires in Pasadena and Altadena burned far into urban grids, hitting Starbucks locations and fitness centers. “Climate change is going to supercharge this so we’re not just going to be able to say, ‘let’s not build in a fire zone,’” he said. “We’re starting to see the return of urban fires.”

Immerwahr also discussed competing visions of capitalism in the 19th century — wealthy industrialists who wanted order and fire prevention, versus middling entrepreneurs who welcomed disruption. “We want a society where things burn down and other things can be built up.” 

Immerwahr suggested that climate denial involves not just financial interests but psychology. “I’m wondering if what we’re seeing is not just interests, but psychology — a psychology of acceptance with climate change,” he said. “It’s like, we’re ready for it, it’s going to be a weird world, and somehow we welcome this.”