Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. On April twenty seventh, eighteen sixty five, the
Speaker 1: Sultana exploded and sank on the Mississippi River. So that
Speaker 1: was one hundred and fifty nine years ago today, and
Speaker 1: it was the deadliest maritime disaster in US history. This
Speaker 1: episode originally came out on June eleventh, twenty fourteen. And
Speaker 1: please excuse how we said, kro Illinois, Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: you missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Speaker 1: Tracy V. Wilson, and it is time for another maritime
Speaker 1: disaster installment, which I feel slightly odd saying that makes
Speaker 1: listeners happy, But many people really love maritime disaster stories,
Speaker 1: so it's a big draw for some reason. It is.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating. People are drawn to the sea, into seagoing vessels,
Speaker 1: and you know there's a certain romance to all of that,
Speaker 1: and these are always fascinating because you know, usually the
Speaker 1: wreckage sinks and there's an ongoing mystery that kind of
Speaker 1: draws people in. I think this one not so much mystery,
Speaker 1: but a little bit. We'll get to that towards the end.
Speaker 1: And this particular disaster that we're talking about today is
Speaker 1: unique in a number of ways. One is that it
Speaker 1: took place on a river rather than out at open sea.
Speaker 1: Another is that it was likely caused by corruption more
Speaker 1: than anything else. The really sad part of it was
Speaker 1: that it caused the death of many, many soldiers, even
Speaker 1: though it was not part of a battle. And it actually,
Speaker 1: even though it was horrific, really got lost in the
Speaker 1: shuffle of a very busy news cycle and a certain
Speaker 1: degree of numbness that had taken place because the public
Speaker 1: had at this point developed over exposure to stories of
Speaker 1: death and high numbers of deceased, and so this really
Speaker 1: wasn't talked about very much at all, even though it
Speaker 1: ranks as the worst maritime disaster in US history. And
Speaker 1: so to give you context for why this horrific event
Speaker 1: may have gotten lost in the shuffle in terms of
Speaker 1: public knowledge, it took place in April of eighteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: which was an incredibly important month in US history. On
Speaker 1: the ninth of April, General Robert E. Lee surrendered at
Speaker 1: Appomatox Courthouse, and on April fourteenth, President Abraham Lincoln was
Speaker 1: assassinated as he watched a staging of our American cousin
Speaker 1: at Ford's Theater. On April twenty sixth, John Wilkes Booth,
Speaker 1: who had assassinated the president, was captured and killed. So
Speaker 1: in that context is maybe not so surprising that a
Speaker 1: steamboat sinking on April twenty seventh, which is the day
Speaker 1: after all of the John Wilkes Booth stuff happened, didn't
Speaker 1: make headline news, but it was nonetheless a huge tragedy.
Speaker 1: The Sultana was built at the John Lithebury Shipyard in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Speaker 1: It's a side wheel steamboat and it was about two
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty feet long and forty two feet wide.
Speaker 1: The ship was legally cleared to carry up to three
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy six passengers with a crew of eighty five,
Speaker 1: and the Sultana was built as a really impressive ship
Speaker 1: for the time. Her safety equipment, in particular was cutting edge,
Speaker 1: including a full complement of the latest and greatest technology
Speaker 1: available at the time. The boilers had safety gauges, there
Speaker 1: were multiple pumps to fight fire, and there were more
Speaker 1: than three hundred feet of fire hose on board, as
Speaker 1: well as dedicated buckets and axes for fire fighting. On
Speaker 1: February third, eighteen sixty three, the Sultana was launched from Cincinnati,
Speaker 1: Ohio to begin her career along the Lower Mississippi. She
Speaker 1: primarily ran from Saint Louis to New Orleans and back.
Speaker 1: And while the Sultana was intended to be used in
Speaker 1: the cotton trade, for the years from eighteen sixty three
Speaker 1: to eighteen sixty five, the US War Department often commissioned
Speaker 1: the steamer as a cargo and troop transport for Civil
Speaker 1: War needs. As the war came to an end, many
Speaker 1: Union soldiers who had been prisoners of war were released.
Speaker 1: Soldiers coming from prison camps at Cahaba and Alabama and
Speaker 1: Andersonville and Georgia were sent to Vicksburg, Mississippi to await
Speaker 1: transport to go north. And because the government was flooded
Speaker 1: with all of these soldiers that were trying to get
Speaker 1: back home as the war was wrapping up, the government
Speaker 1: actually offered steamships five dollars ahead if they would carry
Speaker 1: troops back home, and for most of them, they went
Speaker 1: up to Cairo, Illinois and then routed to wherever their
Speaker 1: personal home was from there and for a comparison, that
Speaker 1: amount five dollars per head is estimated. In one estimate,
Speaker 1: I saw at around sixty five dollars per person today.
Speaker 1: On April twenty first, eighteen sixty five, the Sultana departed
Speaker 1: from New Orleans. Captain James cass Mason was at the
Speaker 1: helm and the ship carried more than one hundred passengers
Speaker 1: in a cargo of livestock. So the Sultana made a
Speaker 1: stop at Vicksburg, Mississippi, to take on recently released Union
Speaker 1: POWs and to perform repairs. And this stop was basically
Speaker 1: riddled with bad decisions that would seal the fate of
Speaker 1: the Sultan and its passengers. The ship's engineers had identified
Speaker 1: a problem with one of its boilers, but to replace
Speaker 1: the boiler was going to take several days, and those
Speaker 1: were days during which all these Union soldiers, which were
Speaker 1: so lucrative to have on board, would instead go home
Speaker 1: on other vessels. So, instead of losing potential cash, the
Speaker 1: decision was made that they would patch the boiler quickly,
Speaker 1: which would only take about a day, instead of installing
Speaker 1: a whole new replacement boiler. Then there was the matter
Speaker 1: of loading all the troops on board. At five dollars
Speaker 1: a man, it was really lucrative to take as many
Speaker 1: POW's as possible, and kickbacks of as much as a
Speaker 1: dollar and fifteen cents a person were being paid to
Speaker 1: military officers in charge of troop loading. This was so
Speaker 1: they would sort of look the other way while the
Speaker 1: boats were loaded way beyond capacity. And when it comes
Speaker 1: to ignoring capacity limits, this particular voyage comes with some
Speaker 1: downright shot numbers like I am not kidding, brace yourselves.
Speaker 1: So we talked about earlier how the Sultana was legally
Speaker 1: certified to carry a little less than four hundred people,
Speaker 1: fewer than four hundred people. More than two thousand, yes,
Speaker 1: two thousand soldiers were loaded on board while the captain
Speaker 1: and army officials lined their pockets with all of this money.
Speaker 1: So in the end the ship was at more than
Speaker 1: six times normal capacity. Many of the men could barely
Speaker 1: find a place to stand, let alone sit or lie down.
Speaker 1: The top deck, which was known as the hurricane deck,
Speaker 1: as well as the second deck and the bottom main deck,
Speaker 1: were all completely packed with men who crushed onto the ship.
Speaker 1: They were all eager to get home after the time
Speaker 1: they had spent in battle and some of them in
Speaker 1: prison camps. Yeah, at this point many people will ask.
Speaker 1: You'll see sometimes in the literature, and it sometimes comes
Speaker 1: up of like, why would all of these men agree
Speaker 1: to get on this ship if it's clearly so dangerous
Speaker 1: and horrible. They were POW's. They just wanted to get
Speaker 1: home and end the horrible things that they had been through,
Speaker 1: and so there were so many of them that the
Speaker 1: hurricane deck began to sag really badly from the weight
Speaker 1: of all of the men, and it actually had to
Speaker 1: be buttressed with stanchions to prevent a cave in. After
Speaker 1: assuring one of the army officers that the ship had
Speaker 1: carried similar loads before, Captain Mason left Vicksburg at nine
Speaker 1: pm on April twenty fourth, but it had one more
Speaker 1: stop to make before it moved on toward Cairo, Illinois.
Speaker 1: So on April twenty six, the Sultana docked at Memphis
Speaker 1: to pick up coal for the rest of its journey,
Speaker 1: and some accounts kind of hint that there may have
Speaker 1: been additional repairs to the damage boiler, like they may
Speaker 1: have put another metal plate over problematic areas, but just
Speaker 1: the same they loaded with coal. They may or may
Speaker 1: not have done those repairs, and sometime between midnight and
Speaker 1: one am on the twenty twenty seventh, the Sultana left
Speaker 1: port at Memphis and continued north. It did not get
Speaker 1: very far. In addition to the heavy load that the
Speaker 1: Sultana carried, the journey was slowed by rushing downstream waters
Speaker 1: of the Mississippi because melting snow had actually led to
Speaker 1: the river flooding in certain areas. Around two am, the
Speaker 1: boiler that had been repaired instead of being replaced, gave
Speaker 1: out and exploded, and shortly afterward two of the remaining
Speaker 1: three boilers also blew, so a really aggressive fire broke out.
Speaker 1: Within minutes of the explosions, the two smokestacks were completely
Speaker 1: compromised and they fell onto the hurricane deck. Many men
Speaker 1: were killed immediately in the collapse, and those that survived
Speaker 1: jumped from the ship and panic. There have been some
Speaker 1: interesting writeups that I've seen in my research that kind
Speaker 1: of suggests that people should have tried to fight the
Speaker 1: fire rather than jumping, But one, it's hard to know
Speaker 1: if that would have done any good because this is
Speaker 1: pretty catastrophic at that point. And two, you had to
Speaker 1: take into consideration the fact that the people that were
Speaker 1: not crushed by the smokestacks or catapulted from the vessel
Speaker 1: in the explosion, were often suffering from severe burns and
Speaker 1: scalding from the steam and fire. Well, on top of
Speaker 1: the whole question of whether they should have fought the fire,
Speaker 1: there's the fact where if people are crushed onto the
Speaker 1: decks so hard that they can't even move, how could
Speaker 1: they reasonably try to fight a fire? Right? Well, most
Speaker 1: of the people are alluding to the people that were
Speaker 1: not crushed that jumped. Oh, I see, I can't say
Speaker 1: that I would behave any differently in a situation like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think your survival instinct just kicks in
Speaker 1: and you're like, I got to get out of here.
Speaker 1: This is not a safe place. Right. So the fire
Speaker 1: spread really rapidly toward the stern, which forced more people
Speaker 1: to jump overboard, and the river was quickly filled with
Speaker 1: bodies and with jumpers who were barely clinging to life.
Speaker 1: A lot of these men had just been released from
Speaker 1: prison camp, and so they were incredibly weak to begin with.
Speaker 1: Some of them were sick. They were swimming in the
Speaker 1: current and trying to t water and trying to hang
Speaker 1: on to debris just to float, and all of these
Speaker 1: things quickly depleted their energy. This is also a time
Speaker 1: when people didn't generally just learn how to swim when
Speaker 1: they were children. So a lot of people in the
Speaker 1: water were, you know, in periled just for not knowing
Speaker 1: how to keep themselves afloat. Yeah, it's not like today
Speaker 1: when you grow up and you go to the pool
Speaker 1: in the summer and you take swimming lessons, like it
Speaker 1: was not uncommon for people have no idea how to
Speaker 1: swim at this point. Uh. And in addition to these
Speaker 1: people that were in the water being physically taxed by
Speaker 1: the exertion, the water was extremely cold. We mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: that you know, a lot of the heavy water was
Speaker 1: due to the fact that snow was melting, snow and
Speaker 1: ice was melting, and water was coming outstream, and that
Speaker 1: water was super cold. So hypothermia claimed many lives as well.
Speaker 1: Some survivors clung to some of the livestock animals that
Speaker 1: had been killed in the blast. There's one survival story
Speaker 1: that involves a man who allegedly floated for ten miles
Speaker 1: down the Mississippi on a deceased mule. Official reports list
Speaker 1: one thousand, five hundred and forty seven deaths, although most
Speaker 1: historians estimate now that it's closer to eighteen hundred men
Speaker 1: who were killed. We don't know the exact number of
Speaker 1: lives claimed by the tragedy because so many men were
Speaker 1: herded onto the ship at Vicksburg. In the end, the
Speaker 1: explosion of the Sultana's boilers and the ensuing panic killed
Speaker 1: close to the same number of Union troops as were
Speaker 1: lost at the Battle of Shiloh. The remnants of the
Speaker 1: Sultana drifted downriver before sinking to the bottom of the
Speaker 1: Mississippi River near Memphis. Bodies washed up for days, and
Speaker 1: some even as late as a month later along the
Speaker 1: banks of the Mississippi. News of the tragedy first broke
Speaker 1: when a young man drifted onto the banks of the
Speaker 1: river in Memphis and told centuries what had happened. This
Speaker 1: information was quickly relayed and officials scrambled to try to
Speaker 1: mount a rescue effort. The SS Bostonia two was the
Speaker 1: first rescue vessel on the scene, and it arrived really
Speaker 1: quite quickly. So remember this happened at two am. The
Speaker 1: Bostonia arrived there at three am. The SS Arkansas, the
Speaker 1: SS jerry Lynde, the SS Essex, and the Navy gunboat
Speaker 1: USS Tyler also joined in the rescue effort. The USS
Speaker 1: Tyler was manned almost exclusively by volunteer crew that had
Speaker 1: to be mobilized really rapidly from Memphis because the regular
Speaker 1: crew that would normally man the ship had already been discharged. Again,
Speaker 1: we're coming to the end of the war, and everybody's
Speaker 1: kind of shuffling home. More than a week after the tragedy,
Speaker 1: on May fourth, the Tiffan, Ohio paper reported the incident
Speaker 1: as follows. The scene following the explosion was terrible and
Speaker 1: heartrending in the extreme. Hundreds of people were blown into
Speaker 1: the air and descending into the water, some dead, some
Speaker 1: with broken limbs, some scalded. Were born under by the
Speaker 1: restless current of the Great River, never to rise again.
Speaker 1: The survivors represent the screams as agonizing beyond precedent. Some
Speaker 1: clung to frail pieces of the wreck, as drowning men
Speaker 1: cling to straws, and sustained themselves for a few moments,
Speaker 1: but finally became exhausted and sunk. Only the best of swimmers,
Speaker 1: aided by fragments of the wreck, were enabled to reach
Speaker 1: the woods and take refuge until rescued. By boats sent
Speaker 1: from the landing to their assistance. There were about fifteen
Speaker 1: women and children aboard, and as near as can be ascertained,
Speaker 1: not more than two or three had been found at
Speaker 1: the hour when this account was written. So, Tracy, before
Speaker 1: we talk a little bit about the investigation that followed
Speaker 1: this tragedy, do you want to just take a quick
Speaker 1: word from our sponsor. Let's do okay, and now we
Speaker 1: will get back to civil war discussion or post civil
Speaker 1: war discussion, and cover kind of what happened in the
Speaker 1: aftermath of all of this. So General C. Washburn, who
Speaker 1: was officer at Memphis, opened an investigation into the Sultana's
Speaker 1: explosion and sinking almost immediately after being informed of what
Speaker 1: had taken place. Special Order one nine, which was issued
Speaker 1: by Washburn, established a military commission to investigate the incident,
Speaker 1: and they moved really quickly. They did not drag their feet.
Speaker 1: They began taking testimony at eleven thirty am on April
Speaker 1: twenty seventh, so just nine and a half hours after
Speaker 1: this had all happened. Several days later, Secretary of War
Speaker 1: Edwin M. Stanton issued Special Order one ninety five to
Speaker 1: start a separate investigation, and there was a rumor that
Speaker 1: a Confederate bomb had been aboard the ship, but in
Speaker 1: the end, these military investigations determined that the mismanagement of
Speaker 1: the boilers and the overcrowding of the ship were the
Speaker 1: real causes. Even so, the alternate possibility that sabotage was
Speaker 1: involved continues to be examined and debated due to a
Speaker 1: quote secret revealed in eighteen eighty eight. How this information
Speaker 1: came to light as a little nebulous, as it's reported
Speaker 1: in two different ways, and one Confederate messenger, Robert Louden,
Speaker 1: claimed on his deathbed that he had in fact sunk
Speaker 1: the Sultana with a coal torpedo. Other accounts say that
Speaker 1: an acquaintance of his revealed the information shortly after he died. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Louden is also often referenced as a basically a
Speaker 1: spy for the Confederates, And I would say that more
Speaker 1: accounts seemed to document that his friend William Streeter was
Speaker 1: actually the one that revealed this information. But just so
Speaker 1: you understand how this could have worked, a coal torpedo
Speaker 1: was basically a metal casing that would be filled with
Speaker 1: gunpowder and then it would be rolled in wax and
Speaker 1: coal dust, so it could basically masquerade as a lump
Speaker 1: of coal and be tossed into a regular coal bin
Speaker 1: and nobody would notice it. The incendiary would then be
Speaker 1: shoveled into a boiler with the rest of the coal
Speaker 1: in the course of regular travel for a steamship, and
Speaker 1: this would cause the boiler to explode once it was heated.
Speaker 1: Of course, naturally, there's no definitive evidence on this alternate version,
Speaker 1: so it's really unlikely we'll ever know for certain whether
Speaker 1: sabotage was involved. And as for the follow up to
Speaker 1: the official investigation, the ship's captain was killed in the incident,
Speaker 1: and the only charges that were filed were against a
Speaker 1: Federal Army officer, Captain Frederick Speed, and he had basically
Speaker 1: been one of the people that took the dollar fifteen
Speaker 1: in kickbacks to allow the overloading of troops onto the
Speaker 1: Sultana at Vicksburg. On January ninth, eighteen sixty six. His
Speaker 1: court martial began in Vicksburg, and in the January thirty,
Speaker 1: first night, eighteen sixty six edition of The Daily Empire,
Speaker 1: which was a newspaper out of Dayton, Ohio, an article
Speaker 1: ran entitled heavy charge Oney one hundred and ten murders.
Speaker 1: In this article detailed Captain Speed's court martial trial. The
Speaker 1: article states, quote, it is alleged that in April last
Speaker 1: he chartered the steamer Sultana for private speculative purposes, placing
Speaker 1: one thousand, eight hundred eighty six paroled prisoners on board,
Speaker 1: and thus did overload the said steamer Sultana, whose legal
Speaker 1: carrying capacity was three hundred seventy six passengers. The article
Speaker 1: goes on to describe the accident, quote, about seven miles
Speaker 1: above Memphis, Tennessee, was destroyed by an explosion of her
Speaker 1: boiler or boilers, and by fire, and thereupon a large
Speaker 1: number to it one thousand, one hundred ten or thereabouts
Speaker 1: of the paroled prisoners on board, whose names are unknown,
Speaker 1: lost their lives by drowning, scalding, and burning. And that
Speaker 1: the one thousand, one hundred ten paroled prisoners would not
Speaker 1: have so lost their lives but for the misconduct of
Speaker 1: the said Captain Speed and the overloading said steamer Sultana.
Speaker 1: And on June ninth of eighteen sixty six, so this
Speaker 1: was more than a year after the tragedy took place,
Speaker 1: Captain Speed was indeed found guilty of neglect and he
Speaker 1: was dismissed from the army. However, aside from being disgraced
Speaker 1: and being booted from the service, there wasn't a whole
Speaker 1: lot in the way of punishment. When Brigadier General Joseph Holt,
Speaker 1: who was Judge Advocate General of the US Army, when
Speaker 1: he received the case file and the court martial findings,
Speaker 1: he actually dismissed the charges against Speed and the case
Speaker 1: was closed on September first of eighteen sixty six. And
Speaker 1: there's some speculation that really it was a case where
Speaker 1: he came to understand that this was not an uncommon thing,
Speaker 1: that many other officers did similar things and let ships
Speaker 1: be overloaded, and he didn't want this one man to
Speaker 1: become sort of the example to be made of the situation,
Speaker 1: even though clearly there was a lot of horrible aftermath
Speaker 1: of his poor decision making. While the incident was reported
Speaker 1: in the Ohio newspapers because of the large number of
Speaker 1: Ohio residents on board, and in the Saint Louis papers
Speaker 1: because that was the sultana's home port, of the rest
Speaker 1: of the country was so engaged with the news surrounding
Speaker 1: President Lincoln's assassination in the end of the war that
Speaker 1: the event was barely noted in a lot of papers.
Speaker 1: It was several pages in before the incident was even mentioned.
Speaker 1: And the Mississippi River has actually shifted course throughout the years,
Speaker 1: as most people know. If you don't know, it is
Speaker 1: actually about two miles east now of where it ran
Speaker 1: by Memphis in eighteen sixty five, so it's really shifted
Speaker 1: quite a bit. And in nineteen eighty two an archaeological
Speaker 1: expedition located what is believed to be deck planks and
Speaker 1: timbers from the Sultana, and these artifacts were actually found
Speaker 1: under a soybean field on the Arkansas side of the river,
Speaker 1: so where it would have sunk. But then the river
Speaker 1: has since shifted over quite a bit. While the Titanic
Speaker 1: disaster was also incredibly tragic, unlike the Sultana, it has
Speaker 1: a cemented place in history and its story is really
Speaker 1: widely known. But for comparison, the Sultana was left than
Speaker 1: half the size of the Titanic and it lost between
Speaker 1: seventeen hundred and eighteen hundred passengers compared to the Titanic's
Speaker 1: oney five hundred and seventeen deceased. Both of these are,
Speaker 1: of course terrible, but it's sad that the Sultana tragedy
Speaker 1: was eclipsed by other news at the time and largely forgotten. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really did kind of not get a fair shake
Speaker 1: in terms of being reported. There are many theories about
Speaker 1: why that go beyond the sort of heavy news cycle
Speaker 1: that was going on. Some people have kind of hinted
Speaker 1: that perhaps because the Titanic had a lot of rich
Speaker 1: and famous people on it, that was a more sensational
Speaker 1: story to report and that kind of seated it as
Speaker 1: a historical marker, whereas with this it was unfortunate and
Speaker 1: it was a lot of Union troops, but we didn't
Speaker 1: even know many of their names. Truly sad, and I
Speaker 1: am very sad that it kind of gets left out
Speaker 1: of the story a lot of the time. Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
Speaker 1: is out of the archive, if you heard an email
Speaker 1: address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the
Speaker 1: course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
Speaker 1: current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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