Review - "Miserable Little Conglomeration: A Social History of the Port Hudson Campaign" by Christopher Thrasher

[Miserable Little Conglomeration: A Social History of the Port Hudson Campaign by Christopher Thrasher (University of Tennessee Press, 2023). Hardcover, maps, photos, illustrations, orders of battle appendix, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxxi,319/434. ISBN:978-1-62190-791-6. $45]

The fortified citadel of Port Hudson, Louisiana was arguably just as important as Vicksburg, Mississippi in its ability to impede Union control of the Mississippi and, in tandem, both places protected one of the great river's vital stretches (including the mouth of the Red River), yet the historiography of the combined 1862-63 efforts by Union forces to permanently open the Lower Mississippi Valley nevertheless is still strongly dominated by U.S. Grant's Vicksburg campaign. That's not to suggest that Port Hudson has been entirely neglected in the popular and scholarly literature, however, as a small handful of published studies do exist. The campaign's seminal modern work, Edward Cunningham's The Port Hudson Campaign, 1862–1863, was first published way back in 1963 during the Centennial. That was followed nearly two and half decades later by Lawrence Lee Hewitt's Port Hudson, Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi (1987), a study of the siege phase of the 1863 campaign. The only work that addresses in great detail the entire military operation from start to finish is David C. Edmonds's two-volume set The Guns of Port Hudson (1983-1984), now long out of print. Most recently, Hewitt, the first manager of the Port Hudson State Historic Site, returned to the subject with 2021's Port Hudson: The Most Significant Battlefield Photographs of the Civil War, a fascinating visual feast also filled with expert analysis. Contributing mightily to this mini-resurgence in Port Hudson interest is Christopher Thrasher's new ground-level examination of the campaign and siege titled Miserable Little Conglomeration: A Social History of the Port Hudson Campaign.

In terms of scale, Thrasher's project addresses the entire breadth of the contest for control of Port Hudson, from initial Confederate defensive preparations prompted by the fall of New Orleans to the fortified post's July 9, 1863 surrender to Union general Nathaniel Banks's Army of the Gulf. In between are vivid descriptions of a great number of episodes both great and small. The dramatic attempt by Rear Admiral David Farragut to pass the Port Hudson batteries with his deepwater squadron, the initial probing attacks against the Confederate earthworks, the failed grand assaults of May 27 and June 14, and, finally, the 48-day siege are all covered. In order to recreate for his readers what it was like to experience the campaign up close, Thrasher consulted a wide variety of primary source materials. The result is an expansive collection of stories and perspectives, including those of the common soldiers and lower-ranking officers of both sides, the many civilians caught up in the fighting, and the impressed slave labor that helped dig Port Hudson's extensive network of earthwork fortifications. The author presents those findings through a narrative construct similar to that found in his previous book Suffering in the Army of Tennessee: A Social History of the Confederate Army of the Heartland from the Battles for Atlanta to the Retreat from Nashville, though without another singular overarching theme. Obviously, misery was a shared experience among all involved with the Port Hudson Campaign, but it is not a theme that is directly explored in the explicit manner that "suffering" was in the 1864 Tennessee Campaign book.

Thrasher skillfully incorporates into his narrative letter/diary/journal excerpts adeptly chosen for the interest level and value of their insights. Together, they convey to the reader what it was like to serve on a ship during the campaign, come under heavy bombardment, live in the trenches, be thrown into hopeless front assaults, roast under the hot southern sun, and suffer from disease and hunger. But it isn't all horror and mayhem as the book also frequent cites instances of those taking advantage of small pleasures and moments of comradery with friend and foe alike. These personal thoughts and perspectives often appear in the text as standalone episodes, but the author also follows through much of the book a select number of individuals who recorded their observations over the entire length of the campaign. Thus, one gets both longitudinal and snapshot-in-time viewpoints of the sequence of events comprising the Port Hudson Campaign. In a much more consistent and skillful manner than what is often found in other social history-focused works of this type, Thrasher never allows his large collection of narrow individual perspectives to accumulate in ways that leave the reader without the benefit of understanding the larger tactical, operational, and strategic contexts involved (for an example of a recent work on the other end of the spectrum, see British oral historian Peter Hart's The Somme). Thrasher modestly asserts that his book is not, and is not meant to be, another traditional-style military history of the campaign, but his narrative does possess a great many of those elements and characteristics.

Clearly, in addition to being fought concurrently, there were a number of parallels between the Port Hudson and Vicksburg campaigns and sieges, but some noteworthy differences do emerge from Thrasher's study. Scholars of both campaigns have pointed out that those in charge of each post did a poor job of warehousing accumulated supplies, disastrous oversights that led to vast quantities of wastage and rot. Nevertheless, in citing reports on remaining food stocks, recent scholarship has questioned the role actual starvation played in forcing the surrender of the Vicksburg garrison. By comparison, Port Hudson's defenders seem to have been truly on their last legs when it came to food reserves and medicine. Thrasher's study also seems to suggest that rates of debilitating disease affecting both sides were higher at Port Hudson than at Vicksburg (which was bad enough). According to Thrasher's research into rank and file opinion, Banks's army, distinct from Grant's command, became more and more disenchanted with its previously popular commander over the course of the campaign and by siege's end was approaching critical deficits in both general health and morale. Another clearly notable difference between the two campaigns was that Confederate cavalry operated outside Port Hudson's siege lines in enough strength to occasionally disrupt Union resupply and lines of communication. Though the damage they were able to do was substantial in places, it was never significant enough to actually endanger the siege.

With the small Confederate garrison at Port Hudson inflicting on Banks's army deaths at a rate the author estimates at ten to one and at the same time enduring the war's longest true siege, Thrasher ponders how much more difficult things might have been for Union forces had every Confederate garrison and fighting force been so steadfast. On the other hand, in maintaining that "Port Hudson demonstrated the insignificance of Confederate resistance" (pg. 317), Thrasher closely approaches the inevitability camp in arguing that Port Hudson, and the war itself on a collective basis, proved that Union fighting forces and home front supporters alike possessed bottomless wells of willing sacrifice in pursuit of victory. That minimization of the role of contingency in the war's progress and outcome certainly goes against the grain of recent scholarship. Aside from that, Thrasher strongly and persuasively argues that the stupendous determination and human sacrifice displayed by both sides during the fighting at Port Hudson and the strategic implications of the Union capture of Port Hudson itself are factors that render the military operation more than deserving of its own consideration as one of the war's momentous campaigns, decoupled from Vicksburg. That's a conclusion that will likely draw scant disagreement from readers of Miserable Little Conglomeration.