SS Sultana, 1865

The Context

April 1865 was the most dramatic month in American history. On 9 April, Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, effectively ending the Civil War. On 14 April, Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre; he died the next morning. On 26 April, John Wilkes Booth was cornered and killed in a Virginia barn.

And on 27 April, in the small hours of the morning, a Mississippi River steamboat called Sultana exploded and sank, killing approximately 1,800 people. It remains the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history — worse than the Titanic by American deaths. Almost nobody noticed at the time, and relatively few people know about it today.

376 Legal capacity

2,300+ Aboard

~1,800 Dead

6× Over capacity

The Ship

Sultana was a side-wheel steamboat built in 1863 at Cincinnati, Ohio. She was 260 feet long, fairly typical for a Mississippi packet steamer. Her legal capacity was 376 passengers plus crew. She was powered by four boilers — tubular boilers that were, in this era, prone to catastrophic failure. Boiler explosions were the leading cause of death on Mississippi steamboats; between 1816 and 1848, some 1,400 people died in over 230 documented boiler explosions on Western rivers.

Sultana was owned by Captain J. Cass Mason, who also commanded her. She made regular runs between St. Louis and New Orleans.

The Passengers

In late April 1865, thousands of Union soldiers recently released from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps were gathering at Vicksburg, Mississippi, waiting for transport north. Many had endured the horrors of Andersonville and Cahaba — camps notorious for starvation, disease, and appalling mortality rates. These men were emaciated, sick, and desperate to get home.

The U.S. Army was paying $5 per enlisted man and $8 per officer for their transport upriver. This was lucrative business, and several steamboat captains competed fiercely for the contracts. Captain Mason secured a massive allocation: over 2,000 soldiers were loaded onto Sultana at Vicksburg, along with around 100 paying civilian passengers, the crew, and a cargo that included over 100 hogsheads of sugar and a crate of live alligators.

            The boat was loaded with over six times her legal capacity. Men were packed on every deck, every passageway, every square foot of open space. There were allegations at the time — never fully proven — that army quartermasters had accepted bribes to concentrate the soldiers on a single vessel rather than distributing them across several boats.
        

The Boiler

Before departing Vicksburg, the ship's engineer discovered a serious leak in one of the four boilers. He recommended replacing the boiler entirely — a job that would take several days and, crucially, mean the soldiers would have to be transferred to another vessel.

Captain Mason refused. Instead, he ordered a local boilermaker to patch the leak with a thin plate of metal riveted over the damaged area. The repair was done in a few hours. Sultana departed Vicksburg on 24 April with her patched boiler and her impossible human cargo.

The Explosion

24 April

Sultana departs Vicksburg, massively overloaded, with a patched boiler. She heads north up the Mississippi, which is in spring flood — the current is strong and the river abnormally wide.

26 April, afternoon

Sultana stops at Helena, Arkansas. Photographer Thomas W. Bankes takes the famous photograph of the overcrowded boat. Soldiers wave from every deck. The image becomes the most enduring record of the disaster.

27 April, ~02:00

Seven miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, three of the four boilers explode simultaneously. The blast tears the centre of the boat apart, killing hundreds instantly. Scalding steam engulfs the decks. The remaining structure catches fire.

~02:00–04:00

The river is covered in burning wreckage and drowning men. Many of the soldiers cannot swim. Many are too weak from captivity to stay afloat. The Mississippi is in flood, over three miles wide at this point, and the water is barely above freezing. Survivors cling to debris, dead animals, anything that floats. The burning hull drifts downriver, breaking apart.

Dawn, 27 April

Rescue boats from Memphis begin pulling survivors from the water and from trees along the flooded banks. Many have been in the water for hours. Hundreds are found dead.

Why Nobody Heard

The Sultana disaster should have been the biggest news story in America. Instead, it was buried. Lincoln had been assassinated just 13 days earlier. John Wilkes Booth had been killed the day before. The nation's newspapers were consumed with the assassination, the hunt for conspirators, the end of the war, and the question of what would happen to the South. A steamboat explosion on the Mississippi, even a catastrophic one, simply could not compete.

The Army's investigation was cursory. A military commission found Captain Frederic Speed guilty of overloading the vessel but his conviction was later overturned on a technicality. No one else was held accountable. The dead soldiers — men who had survived the worst that Confederate prisons could inflict, who were finally going home — were largely forgotten.

The Destruction of SS Sultana