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The tragic tale of the Sultana

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What happened aboard the ill- fated steamboat?

news@theeveningtimes.com It happened around 2 a.m.

on April 27, 1865, when melting winter snow in the north had flooded the Mississippi River, making it three miles wide in parts. The Civil War was over and both sides were releasing POWs. Riverboat captains were scrambling to make money carrying them back to their homes.

Highways were non-existent and roads were few and miserable. The rivers were the best travel routes in those days.

One of those riverboats was the SS Sultana, a steam-powered side paddle- wheeler built in Cincinnati in 1863 for use in the cotton trade. The captain was James Cass Mason, who made a deal with Vicksburg, Miss.’s corrupt Union quartermaster, Lieutenant Colonel Reuben Hatch.

An Annapolis publication explains: “The U.S. government would pay $2.75 per enlisted man and $8 per officer to any steamboat captain who would take a group north. Knowing that Mason was in need of money, Hatch suggested that he could guarantee Mason a full load of about 1,400 prisoners if Mason would agree to give him a kickback. Hoping to gain much money through this deal, Mason quickly agreed to the offered bribe.”

When Union POWs were released from the Confederate prisons, they were told that steamboat transportation would be available at Memphis, which was already in Union hands.

The war had devastated the railroad system, so it became a long walk for most of them, heading first to Jackson, Miss. — still held by the Confederates — and then another 50 miles to Vicksburg on the Mississippi River, where steamboats including the Sultana would take them on their journey home.

The Sultana would carry them to Cairo, Ill. — a journey of 252 miles. From there, they’d be transported by rail to Camp Chase near Columbus, Ohio, to be mustered out. Most of the war-weary soldiers — some as young as 14 — were from Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky and West Virginia.

A camp was set up outside of Vicksburg where they waited for the boarding call. Conditions were grim — no tents or blankets, and many became sick.

Traveling across the South from the prisons to Vicksburg, was a horrendous ordeal for the freed soldiers, weak from the imprisonment, exhausted from the journey, and hungry. Many never made it.

Most had been incarcerated at the notoriously cruel and unsanitary Confederate camps at Andersonville, Georgia and Cahaba, Alabama,” according to the Hoosier State Chronical.

Union POWs regularly suffered and died from diarrhea, exposure, scurvy, frostbite, dysentery, hookworm, and had to contend with abuse by prison guards and even dog attacks. Union prisons weren’t much better.

By the time they made it west to Vicksburg and onto the Sultana, many ex-POWs were still recovering from hunger, disease and physical exhaustion. Before they boarded, the Sultana had to have one of its boilers fixed after it ruptured a seam. The whole boiler should have been replaced, but Captain Mason figured that would take too much

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File photo

time, and had the mechanic simply pound the rupture flat and cover it with a thin metal plate.

Meanwhile, at the holding camp, the men could hardly wait for the boarding call and journey home to loved ones, a clean bed and good food.

When the call came, they scrambled down the bluff to the riverfront “shouting, singing, and jesting as they came aboard, as lighthearted a crowd as ever came up a gangplank,” filling every available space inside and the deck outside.

The load was so heavy the decks sagged and had to be propped up with underlying beams. Horses and mules occupied the ship’s bow section.

Soon, the ship that was built to carry 376 passengers that included 85 crewmembers, had 2,137 on board — plus the animals. Adding to the weight were 100 hogsheads of sugar stored in the hold and serving as ballast.

The overcrowded Sultana then sailed north and made a short stop at Helena, Ark., where an intrepid photographer took a picture of the overcrowded ship.

After arriving at Memphis around 7 p.m., the sugar was unloaded — with the help of some of the freed soldiers, who were paid for their assistance.

Some of the men went ashore and toured the town before reboarding. About midnight on April 26, the steamboat pulled up the gangplank, released the mooring lines and steamed out into the dark night. The ship’s two huge side paddle- wheels were straining against the strong downstream current.

Around 2 a.m., some two hours after leaving Memphis, the Sultana was paddle-wheeling through a group of islands called “Old Hen and Chickens,” north of Marion, one boiler exploded — probably the repaired one — followed by the other three.

“The explosion sent an orange-colored flame boiling up into the black sky,” one report said. “A sudden stabbing pillar of fire that lit up the black, swirling river and was visible for miles. The sound could be heard all the way back to Memphis.”

A U.S. Naval Academy article said, “The enormous explosion of steam came from the top rear of the boilers and went upward at a 45-degree angle, tearing through the crowded decks above, and completely demolishing the pilothouse. Without a pilot to steer the boat, Sultana became a drifting, burning hulk. The terrific explosion flung some of the deck passengers into the water and destroyed a large section of the boat. The twin smokestacks toppled over; the starboard one backwards into the blasted hole, and the port one forward onto the crowded forward section of the upper deck.”

That explosion and flying shrapnel instantly killed or wounded scores of the sleeping passengers.

Then flames engulfed the midsection of the ship burning many to death, as others rushed to undamaged parts of the ship or jumped into the icy waters, grabbing hold of anything that would help them stay afloat.

Others drowned, and eventually hypothermia also took its toll.

It was so dark that night, and the river so swollen, that they couldn’t see where the riverbanks were.

It was a half-hour before the first rescue boat arrived — as the burning ship and bodies floated downstream. As the flames began engulfing the boat, one woman watching it all from an unburnt part of the deck, refused calls to jump into the water and perished.

The Mississippi Historical Society describes the disaster: “Fires built in enclosed chambers heated water to the point that it turned to steam, and the pressure of the steam turned turbines that propelled water wheels, which in turn propelled the boat. A leak in the tubes that carried the super-heated water caused the explosion.”

All of that happened in the month of April 1865, and few Americans knew about it. There was hardly any publicity of that horrific event because it was overshadowed by other big events that month — including the end of the Civil War with Lee and Grant meeting at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, Lee’s Farewell Address to his Army of Northern Virginia, and President Lincoln’s assassination

Wilkes Booth.

The river has changed course several times since 1865 and now flows two miles further east. The tragedy of the SS Sultana on the Mississippi River took the lives of an estimated 1,700 people, and remains the biggest maritime disaster in American history.

Today, at 10 a.m., the Sultana Historical Preservation Society is holding a special event to announce and unveil the new Sultana Disaster Museum on the 156th anniversary of the steamboat’s

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