The S.S. Sultana

Because the Sultana sank the day after John Wilkes Booth was captured and killed for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, it didn't make headline news. But it's considered the biggest maritime disaster in U.S. history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and it is time
for another maritime disaster installment, which, uh, I feel slightly

(00:22):
odd saying that makes listeners happy, But many people really
love maritime disaster stories, so it's a big draw for
some reason. It is. It's fascinating. People are drawn to
the sea, into sea going vessels, and you know, there's
a certain romance to all of that. And these are
always fascinating because you know, usually the wreckage sinks and
there's an ongoing mystery that kind of draws people in.
I think this one not so much mystery but a

(00:44):
little bit. We'll get to that towards the end. And
this particular disaster that we're talking about today is unique
in a number of ways. One is that it took
place on a river rather than out at open sea.
Another is that it was likely caused by corruption more
than in anything else. Uh. The really sad part of
it was that it caused the death of many, many

(01:04):
soldiers even though it was not part of a battle. UH.
And it actually, even though it was horrific really got
lost in the shuffle of a very busy news cycle
and a certain degree of numbness that had taken place
because the public had at this point developed over exposure
two stories of death and high numbers of deceased, and

(01:26):
so this really wasn't talked about very much at all,
even though it ranks as the worst maritime disaster in
US history. And so to give you context for why
this this horrific event may have gotten lost in the
shuffle in terms of public knowledge, it took place in
April of eighteen sixty five, which was an incredibly important
month in US history. On the ninth of April, General

(01:46):
Robert Elie surrendered at Appomatox Court House, and on April fourteenth,
President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated as he watched a staging
of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theater. On April twenty six,
John Wilkes Booth, who had assassinated the President, was captured
and killed. So it in that context is maybe not
so surprising that a steamboat sinking on April, which is

(02:10):
the day after all of the John Wilkes Booth stuff happened,
uh didn't make headline news, but it was nonetheless a
huge tragedy. The Sultana was built at the John Lithaberry
Shipyard in Cincinnati, Ohio. It's a side wheel steamboat and
it was about two hundred and sixty ft long and
forty two ft wide. The ship was legally cleared to
carry up to three hundred and seventy six passengers with

(02:32):
a crew of eight five, and the Sultana was built
as a really impressive ship for the time. Her safety equipment,
in particular was cutting edge, including a full complement of
the latest and greatest technology available at the time. The
boilers had safety gauges, uh, there were multiple pumps to
fight fire, and there were more than three hundred feet
of fire hose on board, as well as dedicated buckets

(02:55):
and axes for fire fighting. On February third, the Sultana
was launched from Cincinnati, Ohio to begin her career along
the Lower Mississippi. She primarily ran from St. Louis to
New Orleans and back. And while the Sultana was intended
to be used in the cotton trade, for the years
from eighteen sixty three to eighteen sixty five, the U. S.

(03:17):
War Department often commissioned the steamer as a cargo and
troop transport for civil war needs. As the war came
to an end, many Union soldiers who had been prisoners
of war were released. Soldiers coming from prison camps at
Cahaba and Alabama and Andersonville and Georgia were sent to Vicksburg,
Mississippi to await transport to go north. And because the

(03:40):
government was flooded with all of these soldiers that were
trying to get back home as the war was wrapping up,
uh the government actually offered steamships five dollars ahead if
they would carry troops back home, and for most of
them they went up to Cairo, Illinois and then routed
to wherever their personal home was from there. And for
a comparison, that amount five dollars per head is estimated

(04:03):
in one estimate I saw at around sixty five per
person today. On April one, eight sixty five, the Sultana
departed from New Orleans. Captain James cass Mason was at
the helm and the ship carried more than a hundred
passengers and a cargo of livestock. So the Sultana made
a stop at Vicksburg, Mississippi to take on recently released

(04:25):
Union POWs and to perform repairs, and this stop was
basically riddled with bad decisions that would seal the fate
of the Sultana and its passengers. The ship's engineers had
identified a problem with one of its boilers, but to
replace the boiler was going to take several days, and
those were days during which all these Union soldiers, which

(04:46):
were so lucrative to have on board, would instead go
home on other vessels. So instead of losing potential cash,
the decision was made that they would patch the boiler quickly,
which would only take about a day, instead of installing
a whole new replacement boiler. Then there was the matter
of loading all the troops on board. At five dollars

(05:08):
a man, it was really lucrative to take as many
POWs as possible, and kickbacks of as much as the
dollar and fifteen cents of person were being paid to
military officers in charge of troop loading. This was so
they would sort of look the other way while the
boats were loaded way beyond capacity. And when it comes
to ignoring capacity limits, this particular uh voyage comes with

(05:33):
some downright shocking numbers like I am not keeping brace yourselves,
So we talked about earlier how the Sultana was legally
um certified to carry a little less than four people,
fewer than four hundred people. More than two thousand, yes,
two thousand soldiers were loaded on board, while the captain
and army officials lined their pockets with all of this money,

(05:56):
so in the end the ship was at more than
six times normal capacity. Many of the men could barely
find a place to stand, let alone sit or lie down.
The top deck, which was known as the hurricane deck,
as well as the second deck and the bottom main deck,
were all completely packed with men who crushed onto the ship.
They were all eager to get home after the time

(06:17):
they had spent in battle and some of them in
prison camps. Yeah, at this point many people will ask.
You'll see sometimes in the in the literature, and it
sometimes comes up of like, why would all of these
men agree to get on this ship if it's clearly
so dangerous and horrible. They were POWs. They just wanted
to get home and end the horrible things that they
had been through, And so there were so many of

(06:39):
them that the hurricane deck began to sag really badly
from the weight of all of the men. Uh, and
it actually had to be buttressed with stanchions to prevent
a cave in. After assuring one of the army officers
that the ship had carried similar loads before, Captain Mason
left Vicksburg at nine pm on April, but it had

(06:59):
one more stopped to make before it moved on towards Cairo, Illinois.
So in April, the Sultana docked at Memphis to pick
up coal for the rest of its journey, and some
accounts uh kind of hint that there may have been
additional repairs to the damage boiler, like they may have
put another metal plate over problematic areas, but just the

(07:20):
same they loaded with coal. They may or may not
have done those repairs, and sometime between midnight and one
am on the Sultana left port at Memphis and continued north.
It did not get very far. In addition to the
heavy load that the Sultana carried, the journey was slowed
by rushing downstream waters of the Mississippi because melting snow
had actually led to the river flooding in certain areas.

(07:43):
Around two am, the boiler that had been repaired, instead
of being replaced, gave out and exploded and Shortly afterward,
two of the remaining three boilers also blew, so a
really aggressive fire broke out. Within minutes of the explosions.
The two smoke stacks were completely compromised and they fell
onto the hurricane deck. Many men were killed immediately in

(08:05):
the collapse, and those that survived jumped from the ship
in panic. There have been some interesting writeups that I've
seen in my research that kind of suggests that people
should have tried to fight the fire rather than jumping.
But one, it's hard to know if that would have
done any good, because this is pretty catastrophic at that point,
and to uh, you have to take into consideration the
fact that the people that were not crushed by the

(08:27):
smokestacks or catapulted from the vessel in the explosion, we're
often suffering from severe burns and scalding from the steam
and fire. Well. On on top of the whole question
of whether they should have fought the fire, there's the
fact where if people are crushed onto the deck so
hard that they can't even move, how could they reasonably

(08:48):
try to fight a fire? Right Well, most of the
people are alluding to the people that were not crushed
that jumped Oh, I see, I can't say that I
would behave any differently in a situation like that. I mean,
I think your survival instinct just kicks in and you're like,
I gotta get out of here. This is not a
safe place, right. So the fire spread really rapidly towards
the stern, which forced more people to jump overboard, and

(09:10):
the river was quickly filled with bodies and with jumpers
who were barely clinging to life. A lot of these
men had just been released from prison camp, and so
they were incredibly weak to begin with. Some of them
were sick. They were swimming in the current and trying
to tread water and trying to hang on too debris
just to float, and all of these things quickly depleted

(09:32):
their energy. This is also a time when people didn't
generally just learn how to swim when they were children,
So a lot of people in the water were, you know,
imperil just for not knowing how to keep themselves afloat. Yeah,
it's not like today when you grow up and you
go to the pool in the summer and you take
swimming lessons, Like it was not uncommon for people to
have no idea how to swim at this point. Uh

(09:53):
And in addition to these people that were in the
water being physically taxed by the exertion, the water was
extreme cold. We mentioned earlier that you know, a lot
of the heavy water was due to the fact that
snow was melting, snow one ice was melting, and water
was coming down stream, and that water was super cold.
So hypothermia claimed many lives as well. Some survivors clung

(10:14):
to some of the livestock animals that have been killed
in the blast. There's one survival story that involves a
man who allegedly floated for ten miles down the Mississippi
on a deceased mule. Official reports list one thousand, five
hundred forty seven deaths, although most historians estimate now that
it's closer to eight hundred men who were killed. We

(10:36):
don't know the exact number of lives claimed by the
tragedy because so many men were herded onto the ship
at Vicksburg. In the end, the explosion of the Sultana's
boilers and the ensuing panic killed close to the same
number of Union troops as were lost at the Battle
of Shiloh. The remnants of the Sultana drifted down river
before sinking to the bottom of the Mississippi River near Memphis.

(10:59):
Bodies washed up four days and some even as late
as a month later along the banks of the Mississippi.
News of the tragedy first broke when a young man
drifted onto the banks of the river in Memphis and
told centuries what had happened. This information was quickly relayed
and officials scrambled to try to mount a rescue effort.

(11:20):
The s S Bostonia two was the first rescue vessel
on the scene, and it arrived really quite quickly, So
remember this happening at two am. The Bostonia arrived there
at three am. The S S Arkansas, the S S.
Jerry Lynde, the SS Essex, and the Navy gunboat USS
Tyler also joined in the rescue effort. The USS Tyler

(11:40):
was manned almost exclusively by volunteer crew that had to
be mobilized really rapidly from Memphis because the regular crew
that would normally man the ship had already been discharged. Again,
we're coming to the end of the war and everybody's
kind of shuffling home. More than a week after the tragedy,
on May four, the Tiffan Ohio paper reported the incident

(12:02):
as follows. The scene following the explosion was terrible and
heartrending in the extreme. Hundreds of people were blown into
the air and descending into the water, some dead, some
with broken limbs, some scalded, were borne under by the
restless current of the Great River, never to rise again.
The survivors represent the screams as agonizing beyond precedent. Some

(12:27):
clung to frail pieces of the wreck as drowning men
cling to straws, and sustained themselves for a few moments,
but finally became exhausted and sunk. Only the best of swimmers,
aided by fragments of the wreck, were enabled to reach
the woods and take refuge until rescued by boats sent
from the landing to their assistance. There were about fifteen

(12:48):
women and children aboard, and as near as can be ascertained,
not more than two or three had been found at
the hour when this account was written. So, Tracy, before
we talk a little bit about the investigation and that
followed this tragedy, do you want to just take a
quick word from our sponsor. So General C. Washburn, who
was commanding officer at Memphis, opened an investigation in the

(13:11):
Sultana's explosion and sinking. Almost immediately after being informed of
what had taken place, Special Order one O nine, which
was issued by Washburn, established a military commission to investigate
the incident, and they moved really quickly. They did not
drag their feet. They began taking testimony at eleven thirty
am on April so, just nine and a half hours

(13:31):
after this had all happened. Several days later, Secretary of
War Edwin M. Stanton issued Special Order one to start
a separate investigation, and there was a rumor that a
Confederate bomb had been aboard the ship, but in the
end these military investigations determined that the mismanagement of the

(13:52):
boilers and the overcrowding of the ship were the real causes.
Even so, the alternate possibility that sabotage was involved continues
to be examined and debated. Due to a quote, secret
revealed how this information came to light as a little nebulous,
as it's reported in two different ways. In one, Confederate

(14:13):
messenger Robert Lowden claimed on his deathbed that he had
in fact sunk the Sultana with a cult torpedo. Other
accounts say that an acquaintance of his revealed the information
shortly after he died. Yeah, and Louden is also often
referenced as a basically a spy for the Confederates. Uh,

(14:33):
and I would say that more accounts seemed to document
that his friend William Streeter was actually the one that
revealed this information. But just so you understand how this
could have worked, a cold torpedo was basically a metal
casing that would be filled with gunpowder and then it
would be rolled in wax and cold dust, so it

(14:54):
could basically masquerade as a lump of coal and be
tossed into a regular coal bin and nobody would notice it. Uh.
The incendiary would then be shoveled into a boiler with
the rest of the coal in the course of regular
travel for a steamship, and this would cause the boiler
to explode once it was heated. Of course, naturally, there's
no definitive evidence on this alternate version, so it's really

(15:15):
unlikely we'll ever know for certain whether sabotage was involved.
And as for the follow up to the official investigation,
the ship's captain was killed in the incident, and the
only charges that were filed were against a Federal Army officer,
Captain Frederick Speed, and he had basically been one of
the people that took the dollar fifteen in kickbacks to

(15:36):
allow the overloading of troops onto the Sultana at Vicksburg.
On January ninth, eighteen sixty six, his court martial began
in Vicksburg, and in the January thirty, first night, eighteen
sixty six edition of the Daily Empire, which was a
newspaper out of Dayton, Ohio, an article ran entitled heavy
Charge one thousand murders. In this article detailed Captain's Speeds

(16:00):
court martial trial. Uh The article states, quote, it is
alleged that in April last he chartered the steamer Sultana
for private speculative purposes, placing one thousand, eight hundred eighty
six pear old prisoners on board, and thus did overload
the said steamer Sultana, whose legal carrying capacity was three
hundred seventy six passengers. The article goes on to describe

(16:23):
the accident quote, about seven miles above Memphis, Tennessee, was
destroyed by an explosion of her boiler or boilers and
by fire, and thereupon a large number to with one thousand,
one hundred ten or thereabouts of the paroled prisoners on board,
whose names are unknown, lost their lives by drowning, scalding,
and burning, and that the one thousand, one ten pear

(16:46):
old prisoners would not have so lost their lives but
for the misconduct of the said Captain Speed and the
overloading said steamer Sultana. And on June nine, eighteen sixty six,
so this was more than a year after the tragedy
took place, Captain Speed was indeed found guilty of neglect
and he was dismissed from the army. However, aside from

(17:08):
being disgraced and being booted from the service, there wasn't
a whole lot in the way of punishment. When Brigadier
General Joseph Holt, who was Judge Advocate General of the U. S. Army,
when he received the case file and the court martial findings,
he actually dismissed the charges against Speed and the case
was closed on September one, eighteen sixty six. And there's

(17:30):
some speculation that really it was a case where he
came to understand that this was not an uncommon thing,
that many other officers did similar things, and let ships
be overloaded, and he didn't want this one man to
become sort of the the example to be made of
of the situation, even though clearly there was a lot

(17:51):
of horrible aftermath of his poor decision making. While the
incident was reported in the Ohio newspapers because of large
number of Ohio residents on board and in the St.
Louis papers because that was the Sultana's home port, much
of the rest of the country was so engaged with
the news surrounding President Lincoln's assassination and the end of

(18:14):
the war that the event was barely noted, and a
lot of papers it was several pages in before the
incident was even mentioned. And the Mississippi River has actually
shifted course throughout the years, as most people know. If
you don't know, it is actually about two miles east
now of where it ran by Memphis in eighteen sixty five,

(18:34):
so it's really shifted quite a bit. And in NT
two an archaeological expedition located what is believed to be
deck planks and timbers from the Sultana uh And these
artifacts were actually found under a soybean field on the
Arkansas side of the river, so where it would have sunk,
but then the river has since shifted over quite a bit.

(18:55):
While the Titanic disaster was also incredibly tragic, unlike the Sultana,
it has a cemented place in history and its story
is really widely known. But for comparison, the Sultana was
less than half the size of the Titanic and it
lost between seventeen hundred and eighteen hundred passengers compared to
the Titanics one thousand, five hundred seventeen deceased. Both of

(19:18):
these are, of course terrible, but it's sad that the
Sultana tragedy was eclipsed by other news at the time
and largely forgotten. Yeah, it really did kind of not
get a fair shake in terms of being reported. There
are many theories about why that go beyond the sort
of heavy news cycle that was going on. Some people

(19:39):
have kind of hinted that perhaps because the Titanic had
a lot of rich and famous people on it, that
was a more sensational story to report and that kind
of seated it as a historical marker, whereas with this
it was unfortunate and it was a lot of Union troops,
but we didn't even know many of their names. Uh,
it's really sad, and I am very sad that it

(20:00):
kind of gets left out of the story a lot
of the time. Uh yeah, so that on Peppy Year News,
I have some listener mail. I have what is probably
my favorite listener mail of all time. And I mean
no disrespect to any of our other listener mails, because
we get so many seriously awesome ones, but this one
just hits all my sweet spots. Uh. Is from our

(20:22):
listener Hannah, and she says, Hey, ladies, I'm a longtime
listener and I love, love love the podcast. I've never
written in before, but after recently listening to the episode
on Rose Bertin, I felt inspired to Okay, just get
ready as my personal asside for your jealousy meter to
fly off the charts. So, Hannah says. I live in
Paris and I moved here to study art history. I

(20:43):
wrote my thesis on Elizabeth vig Lebron's portraits of Marie
Antoinette and how these portraits, along with rose Bertin's glorious
over the top gown she created for the queen often
depicted in these portraits, eventually led to berne An twine.
It's downfall during the Revolution by portraying herself as essentially
the queen of fashion rather than the Queen of France.
Marie Antoinette created many enemies and this marred the French

(21:05):
people's impression of their queen. Just after handing in my thesis,
my friends and I discovered that the Palace of Versailles
had started holding an annual masquerade ball. Oh my gosh,
I'm so jealous. I can't even deal with it. This
event started at sunset, and like the court of Louis
the fourteenth, it lasted until sunrise the next day. Period
costumes from the seventeenth and eighteenth century and masks were required.

(21:28):
The evening started in the gardens, where there was baroque
music playing. There were bubble machines viewing enormous bubbles as
far as you could see this probably didn't happen in
Louis time, and an elaborate firework show that lasted nearly
an hour. After this, we were escored it into Louis
the fourteenth's private gardens that are normally closed to the public.
At this point it was only people in period costumes

(21:48):
and there were five thousand participants total. It was absolutely incredible.
I won't go into all the details because it's simply
too much to write down. But in one area of
the party there was a full string orchestra playing only
my Chael Jackson music. There were topless women in fountains
reading poetry out loud and being fanned by very muscular
men wearing very little clothing. There was a cage full
of tigers. There was a wall made of rain, circus

(22:11):
sole performers danced every thirty minutes on stages set up
all around the garden, and at three am, they released
bald eagles into the crowd. It was absolutely outrageous and
one of the best nights of my life. The whole
shindig ended at sunrise, with breakfast served for five thousand
in the Orange groves just outside the gardens. The costumes
were incredible, and I felt so great wearing a dress

(22:32):
similar to those I had just spent months and months researching.
I even saw a woman with a bird cage built
into her wig, with a live bird in it, and
she she sent us pictures of this party, and they
are just they are beyond belief. They're so spectacular. I
am so envious. I feel bad for the animals involved,
because I have to say that anytime we talked about animals.

(22:54):
But oh my goodness, what a party like Who wouldn't
want to go to that uh spectacular Hannah? Like I said,
that is one of my absolute favorite emails of all
time because it just hits all of my my yummy
fangirl raby spots. If you would like to email us,
you can do so at history podcast at how stuff
works dot com in case you don't listen closely every

(23:14):
week that is a little bit of a change. We're
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visit us, check out archived episodes and check out the
newest stuff we have going on, as well as our
blog post at missed in history dot com. And if

(23:36):
you would like to research a little bit more of uh,
the story we talked about today, you can go to
our parent website, how stuffworks dot com and type in
the words Sultana in the search box and one of
the articles you will get is Taken by the Sea
eleven Real life shipwrecks and the sultana is mentioned in
the article. If you would like to learn about that,
or almost anything else you can think of, you can

(23:57):
do that at our parent website. And as I said,
that's how stuff works com for more on this and
thousands of other topics because it has stuff works dot com.
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