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The SS Sultana

www.wabash.edu

Originally aired on May 01, 1998 - In part 192 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson tells us that the greatest disaster in maritime history was overshadowed by other events, including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

#192 – The SS Sultana

The sinking of the Titanic was a disaster to everyone but Hollywood. When the luxury British liner when down in 1912 it was a tragedy that shocked the world. Yet the loss of life on Titanic was less than another maritime catastrophe that has no equal in the history of American shipping. It took place not on the high seas, but in the flooded Mississippi River. Because it happened in the dark days following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln the incident was largely ignored by newspapers of the day. Only now, in the afterglow given to Titanic has the story of Sultana come to the forefront.

Sultana was a two-year old paddle-wheel steamer that regularly worked the Mississippi. It was of medium size with limited power. On April 21, 1865, it departed New Orleans with two hundred people plus animals and cargo. When it docked at Vicksburg, Mississippi, thousands of Union soldiers just released from prisoner of war compounds in Andersonville, Georgia, and Cahaba, Alabama, were waiting for passage to the north.

The U. S. Army was paying five dollars per private and ten dollars per officer for those accepted as boat passengers. That appealed to financially troubled Cass Mason, Captain of Sultana.  Oblivious even to common sense Captain Mason packed his boat with every soldier he could hold.

On April 26th, Sultana which had a capacity for three hundred and seventy passengers left Memphis, Tennessee with two thousand five hundred soldiers and eighty crew members. This was an overload six times beyond its legal limit. When an Indiana soldier wrote, “we were huddled together like beef for the slaughter”. He had no idea of the truth of his statement. Still the soldiers were happy. They were going home.

No safety regulations then existed for steamboats. Military necessity was the order of the day. That Sultana’s boilers had been having problems all the way up the river was overlooked. Seven miles above Memphis at 2am on April 27th, three of the four boilers exploded at one time with the force of a volcano. The blast almost cut Sultana in two at the water line.

Soldiers and wreckage were hurled into the air. Hundreds of men were killed by the explosion. Hundreds more were scalded to death by escaping steam. Still more hundreds, mostly sick and wounded soldiers found themselves caught between in raging through the boat. Men either jumped or were swept into the swift flood waters of the Mississippi. For days thereafter one observer noted, “the whole river was full of drowned men floating downstream”. Other bodies could be seen wedged amid boulders or hanging on low-lying tree limbs.

Titanic was the largest vessel afloat in her day. She carried two thousand two hundred passengers and lost one thousand eight hundred of them. Sultana barely the length of a football field had two thousand five hundred jammed on her sagging decks. Two thousand two hundred lost their lives. Among the dead was Captain Cass Mason.

The steamboat sank in a channel near what used to be Chicken Island. Today because of the ever-changing riverbed the site of the Sultana disaster is a soybean field near Mound City, Arkansas. The story of Sultana has long been little more than a footnote in better histories of the Civil War. That may be natural but it is hardly appropriate.

A Union soldier who lost many friends on Sultana commented after the tragedy, “there in the bosom of the Mississippi they found their last resting places, no stone nor monument marks the spot, there is no tablet with their names or even the word unknown for them, there is not even a hillock to which friends and survivors can go and drop a tear of remembrance of these noble defenders of the Union”. One hundred and thirty-five years later nothing has changed. So many young men are unnecessarily killed with only the indifferent Mississippi River as their headstone.