The greatest marine disaster in the history of the United States was not the Titanic. Many people automatically make that assumption because it is embedded in popular culture but as one of the commenters rightfully pointed out and I should have the Titanic was a British ship, it just happened to have some prominent American passengers. I heard the story of the Sultana while taking Dad on a Memphis riverboat cruise and was struck by it as a piece of forgotten American history. It is also a story of horrid decision making,and possible greed for profit during war. I have included a you tube montage and if you can simply gracefully exclude the annoying new age music, it is set to, there are some interesting sketches and pictures.
http://www.youtube.com/...
The Sultana was a private steamboat that had a regular New Orleans to St.Louis run and was on its unintended final voyage was carrying Union soldiers and citizens. Many of the Union soldiers were former residents in the notorious Andersonville prison. The Sultana was supposed to carry 356 souls but may have had more than 2,000 aboard. Most of the former Union prisoners were picked up in Vicksburg. Money was to be made in this venture since the government was paying per head to the steamboat captains. Private contracting during war is not a new invention. In turn,the steam boat captains gave kickbacks to army officers to procure passengers. I am not a southerner by birth, so I don't see the conflict as the War of Northerner Aggression, the way some southerners do. It is my unschooled view that it was the Civil War finally made the United States a country, and had the south won, we might not have been the United States of America. For a satirical look at how it might have been this movie has an interesting take. However, it is clear, in this instance that it was Union army officers who were more than happy to make a few bucks off men who had already suffered, so the idea that the Union army was full of nobility and altruism is a bit of a crock as well.
Much of the information I found was by history buffs trying to keep the story alive, and descendants of those aboard the Sultana. According to our tour guide that day, there was no room to stand, and there were layers of men almost packed like sardines and in order to move around you and to step on somebody.
Before disembarking it was discovered that one of the boilers had a leak. According to this National Geographic article, a quickie repair job was done in one day when it should have taken a couple of days. Remember, money was at stake here. The boilermaker who did the repair initially refused to do a temporary repair but was assured the proper ones would be made once the ship reached St.Louis. I should stop at this point and mention that many articles did not stress the kickbacks as being a factor in the decision to have more men than carrying capacity was designed for. While at Vicksburg, many men got on unaccounted for because the man responsible for keeping track was not present when an additional 400 men got on after they were 600 men over capacity. Both the Captain and a local medical director expressed the view that there were too many men on board, and that health and safety were major concerns. They were ignored by the army officials in charge of the transport. Ironically enough, the local medical director saved some lives when he ordered a small number of men off. The article doesn't explicitly state this, but I assume he invented some kind of medical reason. I think there are many parallels today with regards to recent mine disasters, and intelligence gathering stories in which dissenting opinions were presented and simply ignored because they did not fit the plan. I imagine at this point during the Civil War anybody who dissented from the prevailing opinion of local Union officers in charge were not viewed kindly. Again, this is simply my opinion and any of the inaccuracies presented in this story are due to my lack of historical training. The highest ranking Union prison of war aboard the boat also lodged a protest and was ignored. So, we have a steamboat in which a temporary repair was done, and the numbers of men were not accurately counted. Another article suggests that the reason an accurate count was not done was because the men themselves were so eager to get on that a decision was made to do a roll call once on the boat. One does not require much imagination to predict disaster.
The Sultana sailed for two days with no apparent problems and a second repair on the original leak was done in Memphis. Not a few miles out of Memphis, the boiler exploded and men were horribly burned and drowned. Many of the men either could not swim or were already so weakened by their POW experience that they succumbed.
Steamboats under what might be considered "normal" conditions lasted about five years owing to river conditions, boiler explosions, and poor construction.
As I mentioned earlier, the actual number of men aboard is difficult to assess, two survivors thought there were about 2200 on the Sultana and the estimates are that 1600 perished.
Investigations afterward were inconclusiveone investigator claimed the number of men aboard was not a factor another, one argued the exact opposite. Ultimately, a steamboat inspector place the blame on the original shoddy repair done at Vicksburg. Despite investigation, and a military tribunal focusing on the men who actually made the decisions, nobody was ultimately held accountable. Doesn't that sound familiar? I was under the naive assumption that there was a time long ago and far away in which bad decisions by officials in charge when human tragedy occurs were called to judgment. I was wrong. I can easily imagine testimony or opinion in which a "nobody could have anticipated X" was rendered. There were the inevitable conspiracy theories offered about sabotage that were discounted by the investigations. There was a purported death bed claim about sabotage made by a former confederate agent.There are conflicting views on this, in the end it did not matter because the result was the same and it may not have received any more priority in the aftermath with proof. Sometimes, we prefer conspiracies when we simply do not want to believe in the simple human failings of greed, stupidity, failed communication, and unusual circumstances.
Sadly, the Sultana tragedy slipped from he public mind. The war was on the edge of concluding, Lincoln had been assassinated a few weeks earlier and the graphic horrors of the experience left Americans numb. The Titanic has captured the imagination of the public for ironically enough similar reasons, human stupidity, an added class dimension, and poor decisions. Nobody has made a romantic movie about the Sultana, it might be hard to graft a "love story" even though there were civilians present in order to make the story more palatable for public consumption. There were ultimately few heroes in the story except the lucky survivors and those uncredited citizens and soldiers who made rescue attempts. We tend to like our history and our historical movies to have clearly definable villains and heroes which might be another reason this story has slipped into obscurity. The Civil War itself is full of so many incomprehensible events that the Sultana tends to pale in impact compared to the well known battles. It seems so unjust and random that men who had already suffered so much, and given so much, and survived a terrible conflict would perish before long awaited reunions with family members.
I have always been intrigued by hidden history, and tales not often told because they often reveal more about humanity than the official great leaders approach often does. For Civil War buffs, and generalists like myself, who are looking for an interesting read that strays from this paradigm, I highly recommend A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom by David Williams. Howard Zinn served as editor, and I don't recall if it mentions the Sultana because I passed it on to a friend, but it debunked several typical myths and theories about both sides.
I hesitate to encourage anybody to "enjoy" this diary due to the unpleasant nature of it, and I make apologies to those of you who are historians by trade or training who might take umbrage with details I did include or failed to include. The story just grabbed my attention