Hi I'm the History Guy, I
have a degree in history, I love history, if you love history
too this is the channel for you. If you're interested enough in history to
be watching the History Guy then my guess is you've probably heard of the sinking of
the Titanic. What you might not know is that the Titanic disaster was not the worst
maritime disaster in American history, that actually occurred on the Mississippi River.
And while the story of the explosion aboard the steamboat Sultana is interesting, what is maybe
even more interesting is the reason that you may never have heard of it, and so today we are
going to remember the Sultana and her victims. The Sultana was a 260 foot wooden side wheeled
steam transport built by the John Luther Barry shipyard in Cincinnati in 1862. Registering 1719
tons, she was intended for the Lower Mississippi cotton trade, and for two years ran a regular
route between St. Louis and New Orleans. With a regular crew of 85 and room for 376 passengers
in cargo, she was frequently commissioned to transport Union troops during the war. In
April of 1865 the Sultana was in Vicksburg Mississippi when its captain Jake Cass Mason was
approached by Lieutenant Colonel Reuben Hatch, the chief quartermaster of Vicksburg. Hatch had
a deal for Mason. Thousands of federal prisoners who had been held at Confederate prisoner of war
camps in Alabama and Georgia had been paroled and had been brought to Vicksburg. The US government
offered to pay $5.00 per enlisted man and $10 per officer to any riverboat captain who was willing
to take the paroled prisoners north. Hatch offered to promise Mason a full load of 1400 prisoners if
Mason would pay Hatch a kickback. Anxious for the windfall, Mason agreed to the bribe. While the
prisoners were brought to the town of Vicksburg, the Sultana finished her run to New Orleans and
then sped back to Vicksburg, but on the way one of her boilers sprung a leak. Anxious that a lengthy
repair could cost him this valuable commission, Mason settled for a temporary repair. Although
Hatch had promised fourteen hundred paroled prisoners, a paperwork error led the Union officer
in charge to load the entire group, twenty one hundred paroled prisoners, on the Sultana, a
ship built to accommodate three hundred and seventy six passengers. Significantly overcrowded
the Sultana left Vicksburg on April 24th 1865. The Mississippi spring floods that year were the
worst in history and Sultanas boilers struggled to push the overcrowded boat up against the
spring flood. Near 2:00 a.m. on April 27 1865, seven miles north of Memphis Tennessee, three
of Sultanas boilers exploded. The explosion tore apart the boat, men were thrown into the river,
the forward part of the upper decks collapsed into the exposed furnace boxes and set the boat ablaze.
Men jumped into the river to avoid the flames but weakened from their time in the prison camps,
they couldn't fight the current and drowned. A southbound steamer, the Bostonian 2, arrived on
scene about 3:00 a.m. an hour after the explosion and rescued many survivors. Other survivors called
for help as they floated by the docks in Memphis and were pulled from the water by people there.
Given the location of the tragedy, ironically many of the survivors were actually saved by former
Confederate soldiers. In the end about 700 people were pulled alive from the water, but about 200 of
those died later from burns and exposure. Captain Mason and most of the officers of the Sultana also
perished, in the end the death toll was over 1700, nearly 200 more than Titanic. The explosion aboard
Sultana killed nearly as many Union troops as the Battle of Shiloh, and in addition, several women
and children who were also on board also perished. There is some controversy as to the
cause of the explosion. The official report blamed a combination of the boat being
overcrowded, steaming against the swollen river, poorly managed boilers and the temporary
boiler repair. Water sloshing between the boilers had created a surge pressure that
exploded the boilers. It all could have been avoided had the water level in the boilers
been kept higher. A second theory is that the Sultana was destroyed by an act of sabotage,
the victim of something called a coal torpedo, a special bomb desired to look like coal and
go into the boilers. A known Confederate agent was said to have made a deathbed confession to
blowing up the Sultana. While the Confederates were known to have destroyed several river
boats using these sorts of coal torpedoes, others argued that the dynamics of the explosion
aboard the Sultana indicate a boiler accident. What should be more controversial is that no one
was ever held accountable for the disaster. The union officer who sent the 2,100 prisoners from
the parolee camp was originally court-martialed for overloading the boat, but the court-martial
was overturned when they found out that he had been in the camp all day and didn't actually load
anyone on the boat. The captain who did load the men on the boat was a West Point graduate
and a regular Army officer and the Army was loath to try him. Captain Mason told him that
the boat was overcrowded, but not overloaded, and insisted that he had carried this many
people on the boat before. Colonel Hatch, who hatched the entire scheme to begin, with was
politically connected. He avoided responsibility by immediately resigning his commission and
thus was no longer accountable to a military review board. The Sultana was loaded with 2,100
prisoners, 7 times the number of people that she was designed to carry, and not one person
was ever held accountable for that mistake. Sultana survivors held reunions all the way up
until 1936 when the last survivor finally died, 71 years after the Sultana sunk. There's several
memorials and markers throughout the country to commemorate the deaths aboard the Sultana, but
if you've never heard of it don't be surprised, even people in 1865 barely heard of it.
You have to understand what was going on in April of 1865. On April 9th Robert E. Lee
surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. Five days later Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. On
April 26, the day before the Sultana disaster, John Wilkes Booth, the assassin, was caught
and killed and that same day, General Joseph Johnston surrendered the last large Confederate
Army. In the horrors of the war the people of America barely noticed another 1,700 deaths,
it barely made the back page of the newspaper. These were men who signed up to fight for their
country. They underwent the horrors of war, endured the unspeakable horrors of the prisoner
of war camps and right as they had found freedom, they died horribly, burned to death or frozen
to death victims of greed and incompetence, and they were barely even noticed in their time
because they weren't even the biggest news of the day. And that's why it's up to us to remember
the victims of the explosion aboard the Sultana. I'm the History Guy. I hope you
enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history, short and snippets of
forgotten history, five to ten minutes long. If you did enjoy it then go ahead and click
that like button on the left. If you have any questions or comments write them in the comment
section and I would be happy to respond and if you want five minutes more then click
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