Sultana Explodes: 1,700 Die in America's Deadliest Maritime Disaster

The steamboat Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River near Memphis at 2 AM on April 27, 1865, killing an estimated 1,168 of the 2,427 people aboard in the deadliest maritime disaster in American history. Most of the passengers were Union soldiers recently released from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps at Cahaba, Alabama, and Andersonville, Georgia, men who had survived starvation, disease, and brutal captivity only to die on the river that was carrying them home. The Sultana was dangerously overloaded. Its legal capacity was 376 passengers plus crew. Federal officers at Vicksburg, responsible for transporting released prisoners north, had crammed more than 2,000 soldiers onto the vessel, driven by a combination of bureaucratic pressure to move men quickly and a corrupt kickback scheme in which officers received payments for each soldier they directed to specific boats. Captain J. Cass Mason of the Sultana had requested that the load be distributed among several vessels but was overruled. He sailed north with his boat listing visibly under the weight. Three of the Sultana's four boilers exploded simultaneously, sending a column of flame and debris into the night sky. The explosion tore the boat apart amidships, collapsing the upper decks onto the passengers below. Survivors were thrown into the frigid Mississippi, swollen by spring flooding to a width of three miles. Many soldiers, weakened by months of imprisonment and unable to swim, drowned within minutes. Others clung to wreckage and drifted downstream for hours before being rescued. The scene along the river at dawn resembled a battlefield. The disaster received almost no public attention. It occurred the same day that John Wilkes Booth was cornered and killed in Virginia, and the nation was consumed by the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination and the final collapse of the Confederacy. No one was ever held accountable for the overloading. A military commission investigated but produced no convictions. The Sultana became one of American history's great forgotten catastrophes, its victims counted among the last casualties of a war that was already over.