In April 1865 the Civil War was ending and the South’s prison camps were emptying. At Vicksburg, thousands of released Union prisoners — survivors of Andersonville and Cahaba, many little more than skeletons — waited for transport north. The government paid steamboat operators per soldier carried: about $5 per enlisted man. That bounty, and the kickbacks it spawned, killed more of them than the camps had.
The sidewheeler Sultana, captained and part-owned by J. Cass Mason, reached Vicksburg with a leaking boiler. A proper repair meant days — and losing the human cargo to a rival boat. Mason had a mechanic hammer a patch over the bulge instead. Army officers at Vicksburg, steered by a quartermaster deal, loaded virtually every waiting prisoner onto the one vessel.
The Sultana was certified for 376 people including crew. She left carrying more than 2,100 — men packed so densely on every deck that the decks sagged and had to be shored with timbers.
27 April 1865
The Mississippi was in spring flood, running miles wide over its banks. Fighting the current with overstrained boilers, the Sultana passed Memphis, took on coal, and pushed upriver. At about 02:00, seven miles above the city, three of her four boilers exploded.
The blast tore the centre of the boat away and hurled sleeping men into the river. Fire took the wreckage within minutes. Men who had survived Andersonville — starved, weakened, most unable to swim — died in the icy floodwater in their hundreds, clinging to debris, drowned horses, and each other. Survivors were pulled from trees along the flooded banks through the morning; around 760 were rescued, many terribly scalded, and some 200 of those later died.
The commonly cited toll is about 1,200 dead — some estimates run towards 1,800. Either figure exceeds the Titanic.
The forgotten disaster
The timing erased it. Lincoln had been assassinated twelve days earlier; John Wilkes Booth had been killed the day before; the war filled every column. The worst maritime disaster in American history ran as a modest item in most Eastern papers.
No one was ever punished. Mason died in the explosion; the officers behind the loading escaped with reprimands or nothing; a belated conviction of one quartermaster captain was overturned. The survivors held reunions into the 1930s, campaigning without success for a national memorial. The wreck itself lies under a soybean field in Arkansas — the river long ago moved away from it.