The Wreck of the Sultana — 1865, the Mississippi’s Forgotten Disaster

Summary

In the small hours of April 27, 1865, the side-wheel steamboat Sultana was laboring up a flooded Mississippi River about seven miles above Memphis, near a cluster of islands called the Hen and Chickens, jammed with somewhere near 2,100 people — the great majority of them gaunt Union soldiers just released from the Confederate prison camps at Andersonville and Cahaba, going home at last. The boat had been built to carry 376 passengers and a crew of 85. It was carrying more than five times that. At roughly two o'clock in the morning, three of her four boilers exploded with a roar heard for miles, blowing the center of the vessel apart, scalding men in their sleep, and turning the splintered superstructure into a torch.

The explosion and the fire and the cold spring river together killed an estimated 1,100 to 1,200 people — the most recent careful tally puts the dead at about 1,168, though official counts of the era ranged higher. It remains the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history, with a death toll greater than the Titanic's. And yet almost no one remembers it. The country was reeling: Robert E. Lee had surrendered eighteen days before, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated on April 14, and John Wilkes Booth had been cornered and killed only the day before the Sultana burned. The news of a thousand homecoming soldiers drowned in the Mississippi was swallowed whole by larger headlines.

The horror was compounded by its cause, which was not bad luck but human greed and negligence. The men aboard had been loaded in their hundreds because the steamboat's officers stood to collect a government bounty for every prisoner ferried north — and a corrupt army quartermaster at Vicksburg helped funnel a crushing, profitable load onto one vessel. The fatal boiler had been patched, not repaired, days earlier so the boat would not lose time. A river running high with spring melt made the overloaded, top-heavy steamer roll from side to side, sloshing water away from hot boiler plates until they failed.

This entry follows the survivors — the men who came through the blast and then faced the river itself. Roughly 700 to 800 of those aboard lived, many of them already weakened by months of starvation in prison, now thrown into a black, frigid, flood-swollen current in the middle of the night. What saved them was a mix of luck, debris to cling to, the warmth of bodies pressed together, and the boats and people of Memphis who came out into the dark to pull them from the water.

Timeline

The Setup

The Sultana was a sound enough boat — a 260-foot wooden side-wheeler launched at Cincinnati in 1863, rated to carry 376 passengers and 85 crew. In the last weeks of the Civil War she was running the lower Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans, captained and part-owned by James Cass Mason. The opportunity that doomed her was the end of the war itself. Tens of thousands of Union prisoners were being released from Southern camps and gathered at parole centers, and the U.S. government paid steamboat operators a per-head bounty to carry them north — about $5 for an enlisted man and more for officers. Every body aboard was money.

At Vicksburg, the chief quartermaster, Lieutenant Colonel Reuben Hatch — a man with a long record of corruption who had escaped accountability before through powerful patrons — arranged for a vast number of paroled men to be funneled onto a single vessel, the Sultana, in what survivors and historians later understood to be a kickback scheme. Hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers, many skeletal survivors of Andersonville and Cahaba, were marched aboard until the decks groaned. By the time she pulled away from Vicksburg she held somewhere around 2,100 people on a boat legally built for 461.

There was a second, fatal problem. On the trip downriver one of the Sultana's four boilers had developed a bulge and a leak. At Vicksburg a boilermaker recommended a proper, time-consuming repair. Instead, to keep the boat on schedule and the lucrative cargo moving, the engineer had a thin patch riveted over the weak seam — a hurried fix that left the boiler dangerously compromised. The overloaded boat, riding high and top-heavy, then started north against a Mississippi swollen far over its banks by spring floods.

The Disaster

The men were packed so tightly that they could barely lie down; they slept on every deck, on the stairs, on the roof of the cabins. About seven miles above the city, near the islands known as the Hen and Chickens, the river had spread for miles into the flooded bottomlands and the current ran strong and cold. As the heavy, top-heavy boat rolled through the bends, water in the interconnected boilers surged from side to side, periodically uncovering the hot iron and then flashing back into steam — exactly the kind of pressure surge the patched plate could not withstand.

At about two o'clock in the morning on April 27, with most of the men asleep, three of the four boilers exploded. The blast tore upward and outward through the middle of the boat, demolishing the pilothouse, collapsing the upper decks down onto the men below, and hurling hundreds into the river or into the wreckage. Scalding steam and boiling water killed and maimed men where they lay. One of the tall smokestacks toppled onto the crowded forward deck. Then the shattered, broken wood caught fire, and the flames raced through what was left of the superstructure, driving the living toward the rails.

Now came the second ordeal, worse for many than the first. Hundreds of men — a great number of them already wasted by prison starvation, many unable to swim — were forced to choose between the burning hulk and the black, freezing flood. They jumped, or were pushed by the crush, or fell as the decks gave way. Survivors described the water as a churning mass of struggling, drowning men, some clinging to each other and pulling one another under in panic. The cold was lethal in its own right; in the flooded current, with no land in reach, men succumbed to hypothermia within an hour or two. The burning Sultana drifted downstream, lighting the river, before sinking near the Arkansas shore. Bodies would continue to surface for months, some carried all the way down past Memphis.

The Ordeal

For those in the water, survival came down to flotation, warmth, and endurance through the few hours until dawn or rescue. Men seized anything that floated — cabin doors, planks, broken decking, a dead mule, bales and barrels of the cargo, even a wooden cage that had held the boat's pet alligator (which a soldier reportedly bayoneted and dumped out to use as a float). Those who found a piece of wreckage large enough clung to it; many drifted miles downstream in the dark before being picked up.

The flooded river offered a cruel paradox — it was full of half-submerged trees in the inundated bottomlands. Some men managed to reach a treetop standing out of the water and lashed themselves into the branches, shivering above the current until daylight. Others kept themselves and weaker comrades afloat by sheer effort. Survivor accounts repeatedly describe men helping men: the stronger holding up the failing, soldiers who could swim towing those who could not, knots of bodies bunched together against the cold. The spring water was so frigid that holding on was as much a fight against numbness and creeping sleep as against drowning.

The great enemies were cold and exhaustion, and they took men steadily through the night — including some who had survived the blast and the fire only to slip silently off their float before help arrived. Many of the dead were never identified. The men who lived were, by and large, those who got onto something buoyant quickly, who kept moving or kept warm against others, and who happened to be in the river's path when the rescue boats and the people of Memphis finally reached them.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

Roughly 700 to 800 of the people aboard survived; the rest, perhaps 1,168, were dead — the worst maritime disaster in American history. The survivors were carried to Memphis, where hospitals treated about 760 of them through the spring and into June; though many were terribly burned and scalded, only a few dozen died of their injuries there. For a great number, the cruelty of the timing was overwhelming: they had endured Andersonville or Cahaba, been declared free, and then been killed or maimed within sight of home. Bodies surfaced from the river for months afterward, some never identified, and were buried in scattered graves and at the national cemetery near Memphis.

No one was ever meaningfully held to account. Captain Mason had died in the disaster. Reuben Hatch, the quartermaster at the center of the loading, resigned from the army to avoid court-martial, evaded justice with the help of powerful patrons, and died of drink in 1871. A few officers were charged with overcrowding the boat; the one conviction obtained, against Captain Frederic Speed, was overturned on review, and Captain George Williams, who had actually overseen the loading of the prisoners, was never prosecuted. The official inquiries blamed mismanagement of the boilers' water levels, worsened by the gross overloading and top-heaviness — a verdict that named the mechanism without ever punishing the men responsible for the conditions.

The disaster faded almost immediately from public memory, buried under the surrender, the Lincoln assassination, and the hunt for Booth, and it has never recovered the attention its scale deserves. The survivors kept it alive themselves: in the 1880s they organized survivors' associations in Ohio and Tennessee and met for decades to remember their dead. The last of them, Private Charles M. Eldridge of the 3rd Tennessee Cavalry, died in 1941 at the age of 96 — more than seventy-six years after the night the Sultana burned. Today the Sultana Disaster Museum in Marion, Arkansas, works to recover the story and honor the men who never reached the homes they had survived a war to see.

Lessons

References

• Sultana (steamboat) Wikipedia
• The Sultana Disaster (Memphis National Cemetery) National Park Service
• Sultana Disaster Museum Sultana Disaster Museum (Marion, Arkansas)
• The Wreck of the Sultana American Battlefield Trust