In the early hours of April 27, 1865, a steamboat packed with nearly two thousand exhausted Union soldiers drifted northward on the Mississippi River. The American Civil War had ended and these soldiers who had survived battlefields, diseases, and some of the Confederacy’s most notorious prison camps were finally going home.
Shortly after 2 a.m., the vessel's boilers exploded with tremendous force throwing men into the river and trapping hundreds beneath collapsing decks. Flames engulfed the wooden steamboat. By the time the disaster was over, more than a thousand people had perished, making the Sultana tragedy the deadliest maritime disaster in American history. Yet unlike the sinking of the Titanic, it remains largely unknown today.
Sultana at Helena, Arkansas, on April 26, 1865, the day before her destruction. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The Sultana was a side-wheel steamboat built in Cincinnati in 1863. She stood three decks tall and measured 260 feet long and approximately 70 feet wide. She was designed to carry about 376 passengers and crew, and typically operated on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans. Aside from cotton, she frequently carried troops up and down the Mississippi River for the Union Army during the American Civil War.
On 9 April 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant marking the beginning to the end of the Civil War. On the morning of April 15, while the Sultana was sitting at Cairo, Illinois, word reached the city that President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated while watching a play. Knowing that telegraph communication with the South had been cut off because of the war, Captain Mason of the Sultana grabbed an armload of Cairo newspapers and headed south towards New Orleans hoping for fame as the first to boat to spread the news of Lincoln’s death.
When Captain Mason reached Vicksburg, he was approached by Captain Reuben Benton Hatch, the chief quartermaster at Vicksburg, with a proposal. Thousands of Union prisoners of war had recently been released from Confederate prison camps such as Andersonville and Cahaba. The federal government needed transportation to carry these men northward, and was willing to pay US$2.75 per enlisted man and US$8 per officer to any steamboat captain who would take a group north. Hatch proposed to Mason that he could guarantee that the Sultana got at least 1,000 men if Captain Mason would give him a kickback. Even though both men knew that the legal carrying capacity of the Sultana was just 376 passengers and 80-85 crew, Mason quickly agreed to Hatch's offer, hoping to gain much money through this deal.
Because Mason had a few more days before he could pick up the prisoners, he travelled downriver to New Orleans, continuing to spread the news of Lincoln's assassination. While returning to Vicksburg, one of Sultana's four boilers sprang a leak. Upon inspection the mechanic suggested extensive repairs, but the chief engineer, Nathan Wintringer, knew that such a job would take a few days and cost the Sultana its precious load of prisoners. Instead, Wintringer convinced the mechanic to make temporary repairs, hammering back the bulged boiler plate and riveting a patch of lesser thickness over the seam. The job which would have taken two or three days, was now over in one.
While the work was being done to fix the boiler, the recently released soldiers began showing up. Instead of 1,000 soldiers, as Captain Hatch had suggested, the Sultana got almost 2,000 men. They were crowded together in every nook and cranny of the steamboat, as Captains Mason and Hatch knew more men meant more money. The crowding was so severe that in some places, the decks began to creak and sag and had to be supported with heavy wooden beams.
Very late in the evening of April 24, 1865, the Sultana finally departed Vicksburg and started upriver on her final journey. She carried on board a total of 2,137 people, including 1,960 ex-prisoners, 22 guards, 85 crew members, and 70 paying passengers.
For the next two days the overcrowded Sultana pushed against the strong spring current of the Mississippi. Fearful that his boat would capsize from the sudden shift in weight, Captain Mason implored the men to not move around too much.
In the evening of April 26, Sultana arrived at Memphis, Tennessee, and unloaded 120 tons of sugar from the hold. Near midnight, Sultana left Memphis, and after a short distance upriver took a new load of coal from some coal barges and then, at about 1:00 a.m., started north again.
An illustration from Harpweek depicting the destruction of the Sultana. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Around 2:00 a.m., when the Sultana was about seven miles north of Memphis, three of the four boilers suddenly exploded. The blast tore through the crowded upper decks, destroyed the pilothouse, and turned the vessel into a flaming wreck. Many passengers were killed instantly by the explosion. Others were scalded by escaping steam. Hundreds leapt into the river to escape the flames, only to encounter cold water, strong currents, and darkness. Many of the former prisoners were weakened by months of starvation and illness and lacked the strength to swim.
Rescue boats eventually arrived from Memphis, but for many it was too late. Bodies of victims continued to be found downriver for months, some as far as Vicksburg. Many bodies were never recovered.
The exact death toll has never been established with certainty. Contemporary reports varied widely, and record-keeping was chaotic in the final days of the Civil War. Modern historians generally estimate that between 1,100 and 1,800 people died. The most recent research places the death toll at roughly 1,164, though some scholars argue it may have been considerably higher. Regardless of the precise number, it remains the worst maritime disaster in United States history.
One might expect such a catastrophe to occupy a prominent place in American memory. Instead, the disaster faded into obscurity almost immediately.
The primary reason was timing. The explosion occurred less than two weeks after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Newspapers were consumed by coverage of national mourning, the search for John Wilkes Booth, and the final surrender of Confederate forces. And then, Booth was killed only one day before the Sultana exploded. The country's attention was focused elsewhere.
The nation was also exhausted by four years of war. Americans had become accustomed to reading casualty lists numbering in the hundreds or thousands. Against the backdrop of a conflict that had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, another mass death event struggled to command attention.
An investigation into the disaster was launched and initially blame was put on Captain Frederic Speed, a Union officer who was charged with grossly overcrowding Sultana. But after reviewing the case, the judge advocate general of the army overturned the conviction stating that Speed had been at the parole camp all day and had not personally placed soldiers on board Sultana. Captain Mason of Sultana, who was ultimately responsible for dangerously overloading his vessel and concurring on the faulty repairs to her leaky boiler, had died in the disaster. Captain Hatch, his co-conspirator, had quickly quit the service to avoid a court-martial and gone into hiding. He died in 1871 due to alcoholism, and in the end, no one was ever held accountable for what remains the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history.
A century passed and the Mississippi changed course, moving to the east and leaving the buried Sultana under an Arkansas soybean field, approximately two miles from the river. It was eventually found in 1982 about 10 meters underground.
Today, memorials to the disaster stand in several locations. There is a beautiful monument erected in Mount Olive Cemetery by the Tennessee survivors in 1916, and monuments at the Cincinnati waterfront, where the Sultana was built, at the Vicksburg waterfront, where the Sultana was overcrowded, and at the Memphis wharf, the last place the Sultana stopped.
References:
# The Sultana Association
# Sultana (Steamboat). Wikipedia
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