The Sultana, docked at Helena Arkansas, the day before the explosion

On April 23, 1865, only a few weeks after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrender his troops to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, the steamship Sultana docked in Vicksburg. The Sultana was a 260-foot-long wooden steamboat—about two-thirds of the length of a football field and half as wide.* Built in 1863, it was intended to carry cotton, but instead transported passengers and freight on the Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans, which the Union had captured in May, 1862.

The average life of wooden steamboat was only four to five years. The Mississippi River was treacherous and the ships were often badly maintained.  The Sultana’s life span was even shorter.

The ship’s captain, J. Cass Mason, stopped in Vicksburg because it had developed a leak in one of its steam boilers. The mechanic who examined the boiler told Mason he needed to cut out and replace the leaking seam—a repair that would take several days.

While in port, Mason received a tempting offer: a lucrative contract to carry former Union prisoners-of-war north to Cairo, Illinois, where they would be transferred to trains. The army’s quartermaster in Vicksburg guaranteed him at least 1000 men, at a rate of $2.75/man and $8.00/officer, if Mason would give him a kickback. Times were tough in the steamboat trade, due to the war, and the contract was big money at the time.  Even though boiler explosions were one of the most common causes of steamboat accidents, Mason decided to patch the leaky boiler instead of waiting for the time-consuming repair he needed. Mistake number one.

Mistake number two: Union Army Captain George Williams, the officer in charge of returning the former POWs to their homes, decided to send all the former prisoners then at Vicksburg north on the Sultana rather than dividing them between several ships. The Sultana was designed to hold 376 passengers. Williams loaded more than 1900 union troops and 22 guards on the ship, despite concerns expressed by some of his fellow officers. In addition to the soldiers, the ship carried 70 paying passengers and 85 crew members for a total of 2,128 passengers.

The  ship was overloaded and top-heavy. The extra weight and an unusually fast river current caused by the spring thaw put increased pressure on the patched boiler. Early on the morning of April 27, soon after leaving Memphis, the patched boiler exploded, setting off two more.  The explosion blew out the center of the ship and setting the rest on fire. Many of the passengers were killed immediately. Others, in poor condition after their time in Confederate prison camps, drowned as they tried to swim to shore in the icy, fast-moving river.. Two hundred died later from their burns.  Bodies drifting downriver before they finally came to shore weeks after the explosion,

The wreck of the Sultana was the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. History, with a conservative estimated death toll of more than 1100. (Some estimates are as high as 1800.) More soldiers died in the wreck than perished in most of the war’s battles.

The sinking of the Sultana never got the attention it deserved, either at the time or in the years since. News of the wreck was overshadowed by the death of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, Johnson’s surrender to Sherman in North Carolina, and the fact that Jefferson Davis was on the run.

*One of these days I’m going to find a different size comparison.  All suggestions welcome.

**To put this in context, official estimates of the death toll on the Titanic come in 1571 or 1503, depending on whether you are looking at the American report or its British counterpart.