ECW Honors Gudmestad’s The Devil’s Own Purgatory with 2026 Book Award

Emerging Civil War has selected Robert Gudmestad’s The Devil’s Own Purgatory: The United States Mississippi River Squadron in the Civil War as the recipient of its 2026 Book Award. The Devil’s Own Purgatory was published by Louisiana State University Press.

The Emerging Civil War Book Award is presented to the best Civil War book published during the previous calendar year.

The Devil’s Own Purgatory is a standout monograph by linking the naval history of the Mississippi River Squadron with a social history of the squadron’s sailors. It is a story of the battles fought to split the Confederacy, but also of the men who did the fighting. To realize this, Robert Gudmestad, and many of his students, spent years organizing and interpreting a massive data set of over 10,000 sailors. All surviving muster rolls of ships were catalogued with information abut each sailor, allowing a truly original examination of the sailors serving in the naval squadron. While other books have previously sought this military history and social history approach in other areas of the conflict before, no one had yet done so on such a grand scale of data collection. Instead of a statistical sampling of sailors, Gudmestad and his team decided to analyze every single sailor known to have been on these riverine warships. In The Devil’s Own Purgatory, Robert Gudmestad shows readers the sailors who really served in the U.S. Navy’s Mississippi River Squadron by using a more complete statistical analysis than any other Civil War era writer has before.

ECW President Neil Chatelain, in his original review of the book published on the Emerging Civil War blog, said, “The Devil’s Own Purgatory adds significant value to Civil War riverine historiography. The book puts readers on the decks of ironclads and tinclads alike and provides real looks at who served on these ships, their motivations, their strengths, and their shortcomings.” He added that the book’s quantitative analysis adds great value to the story and demonstrates what macro statistical analysis can bring to Civil War studies. “I look forward to seeing future scholars replicate this in other naval squadrons or other areas of the conflict.”

Gudmestad is a professor of history at Colorado State University. In addition to The Devil’s Own Purgatory, he is author of Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Louisiana State University Press, 2011) and A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Louisiana State University Press, 2004).

In making its book award selection, the committee also chose a runner-up: Robert Krick’s The Battle of Gaines’s Mill (American Battlefield Trust, 2025).

Krick’s The Battle of Gaines’s Mill is the culmination of decades of research and on-scene experience. Its two volumes span over 900 pages of analysis, tactical decision-making, strategic insight, and keen geographic understanding. Descriptions of battle conditions, leaders, and common soldiers are excellently woven together. The bibliographies are the most comprehensive ever seen for this engagement, further marking Krick’s books as the definitive examination of the battle of Gaines’s Mill.

Historian John B. Sinclair, in his original review of the book published on the Emerging Civil War blog, admitted that “it is difficult to identify a historian better suited” to writing a comprehensive analysis of Gaines’s Mill that Krick, before adding his “narrative is sure-footed, eminently readable, easily digestible, and leavened by the dry humor for which he and his father are known,” It is an perhaps the best example in recent years of a single-battle case study examination.

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Previous winners of the Emerging Civil War Book Award include Digging All Night and Fighting All Day: The Civil War Siege of Spanish Fort and the Mobile Campaign by Paul Brueske; I Dread the Thought of that Place: The Battle of Antietam and the End of the Maryland Campaign by D. Scott Hartwig; Gettysburg’s Southern Front: Opportunities and Failures at Richmond by Hampton Newsome; Meade at Gettysburg: A Study in Command by Kent Masterson Brown; The Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson; The Fight for the Old North State: The Civil War in North Carolina, January-May 1864 by Hampton Newsome; A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg by A. Wilson Greene; On to Petersburg: Grant and Lee, June 4-15, 1864 by Gordon Rhea; and Grant Invades Tennessee: The 1862 Battles for Forts Henry and Donelson by Timothy B. Smith.

About Emerging Civil War

Emerging Civil War is the collaborative effort of more than thirty five historians committed to sharing the story of the Civil War in an accessible way to the general public. Founded in 2011 by Chris Mackowski, Jake Struhelka, and Kristopher D. White, Emerging Civil War features public and academic historians of diverse backgrounds and interests, while also providing a platform for emerging voices in the field. Initiatives include the award-winning Emerging Civil War Series of books published by Savas Beatie, LLC; an annual symposium; a speakers’ bureau; and a daily blog: www.emergingcivilwar.com.

Emerging Civil War is recognized by the I.R.S. as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation.