In the early hours of April 27, 1865, a steamboat packed with nearly two thousand exhausted Union soldiers drifted northward on the Mississippi River. The American Civil War had ended and these soldiers who had survived battlefields, diseases, and some of the Confederacy’s most notorious prison camps were finally going home.
Shortly after 2 a.m., the vessel’s boilers exploded with tremendous force throwing men into the river and trapping hundreds beneath collapsing decks. Flames engulfed the wooden steamboat. By the time the disaster was over, more than a thousand people had perished, making the Sultana tragedy the deadliest maritime disaster in American history. Yet unlike the sinking of the Titanic, it remains largely unknown today.
The Sultana was a side-wheel steamboat built in Cincinnati in 1863. She stood three decks tall and measured 260 feet long and approximately 70 feet wide. She was designed to carry about 376 passengers and crew, and typically operated on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans. Aside from cotton, she frequently carried troops up and down the Mississippi River for the Union Army during the American Civil War.
On 9 April 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant marking the beginning to the end of the Civil War. On the morning of April 15, while the Sultana was sitting at Cairo, Illinois, word reached the city that President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated while watching a play. Knowing that telegraph communication with the South had been cut off because of the war, Captain Mason of the Sultana grabbed an armload of Cairo newspapers and headed south towards New Orleans hoping for fame as the first to boat to spread the news of Lincoln’s death…