Booknotes: The Devil’s Own Purgatory

New Arrival:

• The Devil’s Own Purgatory: The United States Mississippi River Squadron in the Civil War by Robert Gudmestad (LSU Press, 2025).

A number of fairly recent books, among them Gary Joiner's single volume overview Mr. Lincoln's Brown Water Navy: The Mississippi Squadron (2007), Barbara Tomblin's leadership and personnel-focused study The Civil War on the Mississippi: Union Sailors, Gunboat Captains, and the Campaign to Control the River (2016), and Myron Smith's multitude of vessel and western waterway operations histories, have explored numerous facets of the U.S. Navy's equal partnership with the army in winning the Civil War in the West. Touted as "the first complete history, " the latest contribution to this expansive modern naval literature is Robert Gudmestad's The Devil’s Own Purgatory: The United States Mississippi River Squadron in the Civil War.

Gudmestad examines the full range of actions undertaken by the Mississippi River Squadron along the vast Mississippi River Valley, where it "battered Confederate forts, participated in combined operations with the army, obliterated the Confederate fleet, protected Union supply lines, fought a river-based counterinsurgency war, raided plantations, and facilitated the freedom of thousands of enslaved people."

Perhaps the most unique element of Gudmestad's study is its "blend of qualitative and quantitative evidence," particularly the latter. His team of researchers was able to compile "a dataset of information for over 15,000 sailors who toiled in the Mississippi River Squadron," a critical data pool that underpins his study's demographic analysis. The book's introduction also cites another unique dataset "tracking the irregular war" along the Mississippi River Valley's network of waterways (pg. 4).

Gudmestad's research leads him to characterize the squadron's war as unfolding in four phases, the first involving conventional direct naval attacks against Confederate vessels and forts, the second a shift toward logistical support for the army's deep advances, and the third a heightening of the riverine counterinsurgency fight, the war on civilians, the squadron's dependency on black recruitment, and participation in military emancipation. The fourth and last phase is interesting in that the author contends that the expired service of experienced crews weakened the squadron to such an extent that the Confederates were able to achieve "their greatest successes in knocking out Union boats" (pg. 5).