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The steamboat Sultana was a Mississippi River paddlewheeler which was destroyed in an explosion on 27 April 1865, the greatest maritime disaster in United States history. An estimated 1,700 of the Sultana's 2,400 passengers were killed when the overcrowded ship's steam drum exploded and the Sultana sank. This disaster did not receive the press attention one would expect, due to the recent assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the end of the Civil War.
The Tragedy
Most of the passengers on the Sultana were Union soldiers just released from Confederate prison camps such as Cahawba and Andersonville. Sultana had been contracted by the United States government to transport these former prisoners of war back to their homes in the north. With a legal capacity of only 376, the Sultana was severely overcrowded, and many of her passengers had been weakened by their incarceration and associated illnesses. Passengers were packed into every available berth and the overflow was so severe that the decks were completely packed.
The official cause of the tragedy was a leaky and poorly repaired steam boiler. The boiler gave way several miles north of Memphis, Tennessee at about 3:00 A.M. in a terrific explosion that sent some of those passengers on deck into the water and destroyed a good portion of the ship. Hot coals scattered by the explosion soon turned the remaining superstructure into an inferno.
Passengers not killed by the explosion or trapped in the burning wreckage had to choose between burning to death or risking their lives in the overflooded Mississippi River, where many died of drowning or hypothermia. Bodies of the victims continued to be found for months downriver. Many bodies were never recovered.
About 500 survivors were transported to hospitals in Memphis, many with horrible burns. Up to 200 of these victims died later from their wounds. Newspaper accounts indicate that the people of Memphis took the victims of the disaster to heart despite the fact that they had until recently been enemies.
Monuments and historical markers to the Sultana and its victims have been erected at Memphis, Muncie, Indiana; Marion, Arkansas; Vicksburg, Mississippi; Cincinnati, Ohio; Knoxville, Tennessee; Hillsdale, Michigan; and Mansfield, Ohio.
Casualties
No exact death toll is known, and estimates range from 1,300 to 1,900. An official count by the United States Customs Service at the time was 1,547. Modern historians tend to concur on a figure of "up to 1,700".
Cause
The official cause of the Sultana disaster was determined to be mismanagement of water levels in the boiler, exacerbated by "careening." The Sultana was severely overcrowded and top heavy. As she made her way North following the twists and turns of the river, she listed severely to one side then the other. However, the Sultana's 4 boilers were interconnected and mounted side-by-side, so that if the ship tipped sideways, water would tend to run out of the highest boiler. With the fires still going against the empty boiler, this created hot spots. When the ship tipped the other way, water rushing back into the empty boiler would hit the hot spots and flash instantly to steam, creating a sudden surge in pressure. This effect of careening could be minimized by maintaining high water levels in the boilers. The official inquiry found that Sultana's boilers exploded due to the combined effects of careening, low water level in the boilers, and a faulty repair to a leaky boiler made a few days previously.
However, in 1888, a St. Louis, Missouri resident named William Streetor claimed that his former business parter, Robert Louden, had made a deathbed confession to have sabotaged the Sultana by means of a coal torpedo. Louden was a former Confederate agent and saboteur who operated in and around St. Louis. Louden had the opportunity and motive to attack the Sultana, and he may have had access to the means (Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay, the inventor of the coal torpedo, was a former resident of St. Louis and was involved in similar acts of sabotage against Union shipping interests.) Supporting Louden's claim are eyewitness reports that a piece of artillery shell was observed in the wreckage. Louden's claim is controversial and most scholars are sticking with the official explanation.
Further reading
- Stephen Ambrose: Remembering Sultana, National Geographic News, May 1, 2001
- Chester D. Berry: Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors (University of Tennessee Press, 2005) ISBN 1572333723 (First published 1892)
- William O. Bryant: Cahaba Prison and the "Sultana" Disaster (University of Alabama Press, 1990) ISBN 0817304681
- Jerry O. Potter: The Sultana Tragedy: America’s Greatest Maritime Disaster (Pelican Publishing, 1992) ISBN 0882898612
- Gene Eric Salecker: Disaster on the Mississippi: the Sultana Explosion, April 27, 1865. Naval Institute Press, 1996. ISBN 1557507392
- Gene Eric Salecker: "A Tremendous Tumult and Uproar." America's Civil War, May 2002, Vol. 15 Issue 2
- G.E. and Deb Rule: "The Sultana: A case for sabotage." North and South Magazine, vol 5, issue 1.
External links
- Sultana Disaster Online Museum & Archives
- "Sultana: A Tragic Postscript" by Jerry O. Potter from American History Magazine
- The Sultana Disaster (Coal Torpedo theory)
"Sultana (steamboat)"