On April 27, 1865, a steamboat carrying just over 2,000 people, most of them Union soldiers headed home to the North, exploded and sank in the Mississippi River, killing nearly all aboard. The soldiers were mostly recently released Union POWs from Southern labor camps, who were weak and still recovering from various illnesses. To complicate matters, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, had been killed on April 26 and the entire focus of the media establishment at the time was on that breaking news, rather than the Sultana disaster.
This sinking was the deadliest maritime disaster in American history, and it couldn’t have happened at a tougher time. April meant that the waters of the Mississippi still had icy run-offs, and the port nearest where the Sultana exploded, Memphis, was technically an occupied city, being part of the Confederacy. It didn’t officially surrender until May 13. In addition to the temperature of the water and the city the Sultana was headed toward, annual spring flooding made the journey upriver that much more difficult.
To make matters worse, the Sultana was built with an official, legal capacity of 376 passengers in mind, and many steamboat captains suspected the captain of the Sultana (J. Cass Mason, who died in the explosion) of taking a bribe to take the POWs -- and overload the vessel.
At the time of the explosion, there were 70 paying passengers, 85 crew members, and 2,000 soldiers (some the recently freed Union POWs, some guards, and some Southern POWs placed on Union parole). Overworked and undermanned, the Sultana exploded around 2 a.m. local time. The explosion ripped through the decks just above the boiler room, immediately killing many of the just-released POWs. The explosion also incinerated the pilot’s room, and as the entire ship went up in flames, it drifted pilotless along the Mississippi.
The survivors of the initial blast awoke engulfed in flames, and began to bail into the icy cold waters of the Mississippi, where many met their fate floating downriver in the dark of night.
The steamboat itself, or what was left of it, ended up on the banks of the Mississippi near present-day Marion, Ark. Of the 760 survivors of the initial sinking, 40 died in hospital beds in Memphis, making the official number of survivors 720 of the 2,155 who were packed into the steamboat to begin with.
Due to the political chaos in the United States at the time, nobody was ever found officially responsible for the explosion, so the worst maritime disaster in American history has gone unresolved and unpunished. In addition to the unresolved responsibility of the sinking, there was, for many decades, an urban legend that attributed the disaster to an attack by a Confederate coal torpedo crew. In 1888, a former Confederate intelligence agent, Robert Louden, supposedly confessed on his deathbed to sinking the Sultana with a coal torpedo, a common practice at the time and place of the sinking of the Sultana. Subsequent archaeological and ethnographic investigations into this claim have debunked the myth.
There is also a numbers issue with the Sultana disaster -- the official death count has changed numerous times over the years. The number of deaths ranges from 1,192 to 1,547, the official count recorded by the United States Customs Service and 30 more than the Titanic disaster. The last survivor, a Confederate POW named Charles M. Eldridge, died in his home in 1943, in the midst of America’s World War II campaign.
Official numbers aside, the Sultana disaster was just that: a disaster where thousands of Americans perished and suffered. In an age where there were no deaths in air travel throughout the United States last year, the Sultana is worth remembering, mourning, and helping to ponder our society’s progress as a free people.
