Tennessee Veterans were going home in April of 1865. Most of these Union troops had been prisoner’s of war in Andersonville, Georgia and Cahaba, Alabama. These veterans gathered at Vicksburg to embark on a steamboat, for the journey to Cairo, Illinois to muster out. The war was over, the carnage and the misery of confinement was in the past. Families and loved ones were anxiously awaiting whether the returning veterans included their relations.
Thousands of walking wounded Union troops milled around the wharf at Vicksburg. They were awaiting the arrival of a side-wheeler steamboat. She had been built in 1863 and had plied the Mississippi River for two years, transporting supplies and troops on a regular basis. Her name was the Sultana.
The Sultana was manned by a crew of 85 and left New Orleans on April 21, 1865 with 100 passengers and a cargo that included sugar and livestock. By law, the Sultana could safely carry 376 passengers including crew.
On April 24, she reached Vicksburg and the crew discovered that the boilers were leaking horribly. The boilers were repaired and the anxious veterans crowded aboard. Documenting the manifest was postponed until after the Sultana debarked. Army records can only estimate that between 1800 and 2000 released prisoners boarded at Vicksburg, along with two companies of armed troops. Minimally, 2300 passengers crammed every available space on the Sultana.
On April 26, 1865, after several stops, the side-wheeler docked at Memphis, Tennessee. The sugar and several passengers were off loaded and many of the stronger men decided to see the sights of Memphis, the lucky ones didn’t return in time to board the Sultana, bound for Cairo. Boiler problems were again discovered and the crew immediately repaired the defects. It was around midnight when she cast off and coaled across the river and began the three-day journey to Illinois. She carried many times the number of passengers that the side-wheeler was designed to carry.
Shortly after 2:00 a.m., on April 27, 1865, about 2 miles north of Memphis, the Sultana’s boilers exploded, creating a blast that could be seen and heard down river in Memphis. All available craft cut loose and attempted to help at the scene of the disaster. Most were too late to assist in the rescue. The Sultana had been blown in half, much had just disintegrated and the rest was ablaze, sinking rapidly.
The survivors, some whom had been blown free of the doomed vessel, floated to safety on debris, some were carried by the current back to Memphis and were rescued. Many of the veterans simply drowned, burned or were scalded to death.
Two of the survivors recalled the nightmarish scene;
“When I got about three hundred yards away from the boat clinging to a heavy plank, the whole heavens seemed to be lighted up by the conflagration. Hundreds of my comrades were fastened down by the timbers of the decks and had to burn while the water seemed to be one solid mass of human beings struggling with the waves.”
“On looking down and out into the river, I would see men jumping from all parts of the boat into the water until it seemed black with men, their heads bobbing up and down like corks, and then disappearing beneath the turbulent waters, never to appear again.”
Rescues and the recovery of bodies continued for days up and down the Mississippi river from Memphis. An unofficial mortality record of the disaster relates at least 1700 deaths.
No official Army account exists, since no muster rolls were taken after the boarding of the veterans at Vicksburg. An Army investigation of the Sultana’s demise relates;
“It is the common opinion among engineers that an explosion of steam boilers is impossible when they have the proper quantity of water in them, but boilers may burst from an over-pressure of steam when they are full of water, owing to some defective part of the iron, in which there is generally no harm done than giving way of the defective part and the consequent escape of steam. One engineer who is said to be the most reliable on the river, says that even in such a case the great power of the steam, having once found a yielding place, tears everything before it, producing the effect of an explosion, and his view seems to be reasonable. What is usually understood as the explosion of the boiler is caused by the sudden development of an intense steam by the water coming in contact with red-hot iron, which produces an effect like the firing of gunpowder in a mine, and the destruction of the boilers and the boat that carries them is the consequence.”
It was later discovered that the Federal Government was paying the steamship owners $5.00 per veteran for passage to Cairo, Illinois. The Army officers in command at Vicksburg, packed the Sultana beyond capacity in order to receive a kickback of $1.15 per man.
The media of the day were printing many headlines, Lincoln’s assassination, John Wilkes Booth’s apprehension and the glory of the Union victory. The military and political machines of the time suppressed a timely and thorough investigation of which still remains as the most horrendous maritime disaster in American history.
Union muster rolls of Eastern Tennessee, list several fatalities attributed to the Sultana disaster. Many of Bummer’s kin waited in vain for the return of their Union veterans.
Bummer
A 2009 book by Alan Huffman of Holly Grove MS discloses new source information on the tradegdy of the Sultana disaster [Title:”Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History”]. Of note, the book’s bibliography has a list of the passengers including soldiers who were recorded on the Sultana at the time of the explosion.
There is also an active association of “Sultana” survivor decentents who meet annually near Memphis, TN to pay tribute and rememberance of he ‘Sultana” event.