Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Sultana Steamboat Disaster

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

On April 27th, 1865, just weeks after the end of the American Civil War, a steamboat carrying former Union prisoners of war sailed up the Mississippi River from Vicksburg. At 2 am, the boilers on the steamship exploded, killing 1800 people in what is still the largest maritime disaster in US history. Learn more about the largest forgotten Sultana Steamboat Disaster on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 27, 1865, just weeks after the end of the American Civil War, a steamboat carrying former Union prisoners of war sailed up the Mississippi River from Vicksburg, Mississippi. At 2 a.m., the boilers on the steamship exploded, killing 1,800 people in what is still the largest maritime disaster in U.S. history. Learn more about the largely forgotten Saltax Steamboat disaster on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay.

The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. This episode is sponsored by Audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is Steamboats and the Rise of Cotton Kingdom by Robert Gunman Sade. The arrival of the first steamboat, the New Orleans, in early 1812, touched off an economic revolution in the South. Robert Gunman Sade examines the wide-ranging influence of steamboats on the southern economy,

from carrying cash crops to market to contributing to slave productivity, increasing the flexibility of labor, and connecting Southerners to overlapping orbits of regional, national, international markets, Steamboats not only benefited slaveholders in northern industries, but also affected cotton production. You can claim your one-month trial to Audible and your two free audiobooks by going to audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere or clicking on the link in the show notes. On April 23, 1865, the United States was in the middle of the most dramatic month in its history. Two weeks before, on April 9th, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army of Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. Eight days before, on April 15th, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

While there were still some Confederate troops in the field, for the most part, the country was transitioning from a wartime state to one of peace. Soldiers were returning back to their homes, and prisoners of war were being released. In the town of Vicksburg, in what was considered the Western Front of the Civil War, a large group of Union POWs who had been released were waiting for transportation to return home. Many of them had spent years in such notorious facilities as Andersonville in Georgia or Cahaba in Alabama. The conditions at Andersonville were so bad that the camp commander, Captain Henry Wirtz, was one of the few Confederates executed for war crimes at the end of the Civil War. The story will probably be its own episode in the future.

The federal government had issued contracts to steamboats on the Mississippi River for the transportation of Union soldiers up the river back to their homes. The officer in charge of transporting the troops in Vicksburg was Army Captain George Williams. He was concerned that many of the steamboat captains were bribing union officers to get the lucrative passengers. The U.S. government was paying $2.75 per enlisted man and $8 per officer to each steamboat, which was far above the normal passenger fares at that time. Williams made the snap decision that all of the troops waiting for transportation, over 2,000 of them would sail on a ship called the Sultana. The Sultana was a steamboat that was in Vicksburg to get repairs done on one of its boilers.

It had a capacity of 376 passengers, which is much, much less than the 2,000 people that were about to board it. In order to deliver the 2,000 passengers and all the money that came with it, the captain of the Sultana, J. Cass Mason, got its boiler patched rather than undergoing a more costly and lengthy repair, which wouldn't have allowed him to take the assignment. The patch was a thinner, inferior metal to what the boiler was made out of. Here I need to take a small detour and explain the dangers of boiler explosions. It isn't much of an issue anymore, but boiler explosions used to be a constant concern. Steam engines would take a substance, usually coal, and heat a mass of water into steam.

The pressure of this steam would be used to do work, like turn the paddle of a steamboat. However, it was possible to have too much pressure. When the pressure built up too much, the boiler could burst and result in a catastrophic explosion. It happened several times in the 19th century, both with steamships and with locomotives. It was in this environment that the Sultaness set out from Vicksburg with 2,137 souls on board, a full five and a half times more than what it was rated to carry. People were crammed everywhere in the ship. There were so many people on board that the decks of the ship started to creak.

The ship set out traveling upriver. As it was April, the waters on the river were high and the current was strong, which put even more stress on the steam engine. For two days, the ship managed to sail north. At 2 a.m. on the morning of April 27th, just a few miles north of Memphis, the damaged water boiler exploded. Within seconds, two other boilers on the ship exploded as well. A huge part of the ship instantly blew apart. The smokestacks collapsed. The upper decks of the ship collapsed.

What wasn't blown apart began burning in the middle of the river. Hundreds were killed instantly in the explosion. Others were killed when the upper decks of the ship collapsed upon them. More were flung into the cold spring waters of the river, and still more suffered from severe burns. Many of the survivors who found themselves in the water were prisoners of war who had spent years in Confederate camps and were in a highly weakened state. Locals heard the explosion and many came out to help.

The ship had exploded in an area which had been Confederate territory during most of the war. The rescue efforts for the Sultana were probably the first example of post-war cooperation in the country. Arkansas residents, who would have been shooting at the men on the ship just a few weeks before, were now fighting to save them. One man, John Fogelman, rescued 25 men off of the burning ship by lashing logs together and floating out several times to collect everyone. He had all 25 people stay with him at his farm for several days. Another man from the Tennessee side of the river, Franklin Hardin Barton, led rescue efforts from their side.

Just a few weeks earlier, he had been tasked with patrolling the river looking for union activity. He probably would have shot at the Sultanah just a few weeks before. All total, approximately 1,800 people died from the Sultanate explosion. That is a greater loss of life than what happened on the sinking of the Titanic, the Lusitania, the Androen. Adoria or the Edmund Fitzgerald. It was the largest marine disaster, by far, in U.S. history. The blame for the disaster was placed on multiple shoulders. The captain ignored safety procedures to get money. The union officers were taking bribes. There were no regulations in place to ensure the safety of the steamships. Couple all this with the overcrowding on the ship and the strong currents on the river, and it was a recipe for disaster.

Recent investigations into the event by engineers credited several other technical factors that were applied. The metal in the boilers were weak, they used muddy river water in the boiler which caused problems, and the fundamental design of the boilers was poor. One question that always arises about the disaster is, why isn't it better known? How is it that one of the worst disasters in American history doesn't even get so much as a mention in most history books? Much of it has to do with the timing of the disaster. It occurred less than two weeks after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the country was still in mourning. Moreover, after several years of war with battles that saw single-day death tolls in the tens of thousands,

the disaster just didn't register with the public as it would have several years before or later. Everyone was numb to death when it happened. For years after the explosion, the survivors held reunions. There was both a northern and southern reunion. The last survivor of the sultana was private Charles M. Eldridge of the 3rd Tennessee Calvary, who died at the age of 96 in 1941, 76 years after the disaster. The wreck of the sultana was discovered in 1982, 32 feet below ground in a soybean field in Arkansas. The river had changed course so much over that time that it was actually two miles from the river when it was found.

Today there are a few monuments and memorials scattered about the country in places where most of the victims were from. In 2015, on the 150th anniversary of the event, a museum was open in Marion, Arkansas, the closest city to where the wreck was found. One wall of the museum contains the names of the over 2,000 soldiers, passengers, and crew who were on the boat that day. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackala. Please remember to support the show over at patreon.com, where you can get exclusive merchandise and to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Leave a five-star review to have your review read online.