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

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.