Hi I'm the History Guy, I have a degree in history,
I love history, if you love history too this is the channel for you.
If you're interested enough in history to be watching the History Guy then my guess
is you've probably heard of the sinking of the Titanic. What you might not know is that
the Titanic disaster was not the worst maritime disaster in American history,
that actually occurred on the Mississippi River. And while the story of the explosion aboard the
steamboat Sultana is interesting, what is maybe even more interesting is the reason that you
may never have heard of it, and so today we are going to remember the Sultana and her victims.
The Sultana was a 260 foot wooden side wheeled steam transport built by the John Luther Barry
shipyard in Cincinnati in 1862. Registering 1719 tons, she was intended for the Lower Mississippi
cotton trade, and for two years ran a regular route between St. Louis and New Orleans. With a
regular crew of 85 and room for 376 passengers in cargo, she was frequently commissioned to
transport Union troops during the war. In April of 1865 the Sultana was in Vicksburg
Mississippi when its captain Jake Cass Mason was approached by Lieutenant Colonel Reuben Hatch,
the chief quartermaster of Vicksburg. Hatch had a deal for Mason. Thousands of federal prisoners
who had been held at Confederate prisoner of war camps in Alabama and Georgia had been paroled and
had been brought to Vicksburg. The US government offered to pay $5.00 per enlisted man and $10 per
officer to any riverboat captain who was willing to take the paroled prisoners north. Hatch offered
to promise Mason a full load of 1400 prisoners if Mason would pay Hatch a kickback. Anxious for the
windfall, Mason agreed to the bribe. While the prisoners were brought to the town of Vicksburg,
the Sultana finished her run to New Orleans and then sped back to Vicksburg, but on the way one of
her boilers sprung a leak. Anxious that a lengthy repair could cost him this valuable commission,
Mason settled for a temporary repair. Although Hatch had promised fourteen hundred paroled
prisoners, a paperwork error led the Union officer in charge to load the entire group, twenty one
hundred paroled prisoners, on the Sultana, a ship built to accommodate three hundred and
seventy six passengers. Significantly overcrowded the Sultana left Vicksburg on April 24th 1865.
The Mississippi spring floods that year were the worst in history and Sultanas boilers struggled
to push the overcrowded boat up against the spring flood. Near 2:00 a.m. on April 27 1865,
seven miles north of Memphis Tennessee, three of Sultanas boilers exploded. The explosion tore
apart the boat, men were thrown into the river, the forward part of the upper decks collapsed into
the exposed furnace boxes and set the boat ablaze. Men jumped into the river to avoid the flames but
weakened from their time in the prison camps, they couldn't fight the current and drowned.
A southbound steamer, the Bostonian 2, arrived on scene about 3:00 a.m. an hour after the explosion
and rescued many survivors. Other survivors called for help as they floated by the docks in Memphis
and were pulled from the water by people there. Given the location of the tragedy, ironically many
of the survivors were actually saved by former Confederate soldiers. In the end about 700 people
were pulled alive from the water, but about 200 of those died later from burns and exposure. Captain
Mason and most of the officers of the Sultana also perished, in the end the death toll was over 1700,
nearly 200 more than Titanic. The explosion aboard Sultana killed nearly as many Union troops as the
Battle of Shiloh, and in addition, several women and children who were also on board also perished.
There is some controversy as to the cause of the explosion. The official
report blamed a combination of the boat being overcrowded, steaming against the swollen river,
poorly managed boilers and the temporary boiler repair. Water sloshing between the
boilers had created a surge pressure that exploded the boilers. It all could have
been avoided had the water level in the boilers been kept higher. A second theory is that the
Sultana was destroyed by an act of sabotage, the victim of something called a coal torpedo,
a special bomb desired to look like coal and go into the boilers. A known Confederate agent
was said to have made a deathbed confession to blowing up the Sultana. While the Confederates
were known to have destroyed several river boats using these sorts of coal torpedoes,
others argued that the dynamics of the explosion aboard the Sultana indicate a boiler accident.
What should be more controversial is that no one was ever held accountable for the disaster. The
union officer who sent the 2,100 prisoners from the parolee camp was originally court-martialed
for overloading the boat, but the court-martial was overturned when they found out that he had
been in the camp all day and didn't actually load anyone on the boat. The captain who did load the
men on the boat was a West Point graduate and a regular Army officer and the Army was
loath to try him. Captain Mason told him that the boat was overcrowded, but not overloaded,
and insisted that he had carried this many people on the boat before. Colonel Hatch,
who hatched the entire scheme to begin, with was politically connected. He avoided responsibility
by immediately resigning his commission and thus was no longer accountable to a military
review board. The Sultana was loaded with 2,100 prisoners, 7 times the number of people that she
was designed to carry, and not one person was ever held accountable for that mistake.
Sultana survivors held reunions all the way up until 1936 when the last survivor finally died,
71 years after the Sultana sunk. There's several memorials and markers throughout the country to
commemorate the deaths aboard the Sultana, but if you've never heard of it don't be surprised,
even people in 1865 barely heard of it. You have to understand what was going on
in April of 1865. On April 9th Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. Five
days later Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. On April 26, the day before the Sultana disaster,
John Wilkes Booth, the assassin, was caught and killed and that same day, General Joseph
Johnston surrendered the last large Confederate Army. In the horrors of the war the people of
America barely noticed another 1,700 deaths, it barely made the back page of the newspaper.
These were men who signed up to fight for their country. They underwent the horrors of war,
endured the unspeakable horrors of the prisoner of war camps and right as they had found freedom,
they died horribly, burned to death or frozen to death victims of greed and incompetence,
and they were barely even noticed in their time because they weren't even the biggest news of
the day. And that's why it's up to us to remember the victims of the explosion aboard the Sultana.
I'm the History Guy. I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series,
five minutes of history, short and snippets of forgotten history, five to ten minutes long.
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