The Forgotten Sultana Riverboat Disaster

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More souls died on the Riverboat Sultana than the RMS Titanic.

The Sultana disaster is in fact, the worst maritime disaster in United States history, with 1,860 people lost. So why is it such a forgotten piece of American history, with just a few books written? Why no epic Hollywood films? Everyone remembers the Battle of Gettysburg, or the Fall of the Alamo, so why not the Sultana Disaster? A lot had to do with timing and how the U.S. Civil War ended. April 1865 was a very eventful month for both the United States and Confederate States of America.

General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in Virginia on April 9^th. After five bloody years, pitting brothers against brothers, the U.S. Civil War was finally over. Barely a week later, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14^th while attending a performance with his wife at Ford Theater in Washington D.C. The manhunt for his assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, ended on April 26th. He was fatally shot by Union troops in a remote Maryland barn.

The very next day, on April 27th, 1865 the riverboat Sultana exploded in the dead of night on the Mississippi River just north of Memphis, Tennessee. It sank with over 2,400 souls aboard. They were primarily haggard Union soldiers, prisoners of war, happily and finally returning home to the north. By comparison, 1,517 would die on the Titanic, decades later in 1912.

Regardless of the scope of the disaster, Americans were too wrapped up in the end of The War Between the States and the death of their beloved President Lincoln. They took little notice of a Mississippi riverboat sinking in the night, no matter how many Union soldiers were trapped on board. Few newspapers gave it more than a quick paragraph of mention, and not even on the front page.

The Riverboat Sultana more than just sank in the Mississippi River, it violently exploded first.

Its four steam boilers exploded in the dead of night, quickly engulfing the rest of the wooden boat in a wave of hungry flames. Survivors not killed instantly by the blast were faced with the terrible choice of burning to death, or risk drowning in the dark, cold Mississippi. And these travelers were no ordinary passengers. The ship was filled, far beyond its legal capacity, with over 2,400 people. Most were former Union Prisoners of War who after 4 long years, wanted nothing more than to return home to their loved ones up north.

Sultana’s legal capacity was only 376 passengers and crew! Union officers somehow squeezed 2,400 bodies into every square inch of the Sultana’s 4 decks. Worst still, these poor men had survived the worst POW camps in all the South, the infamous Andersonville and Cahaba Confederate prison camps. For the last two years of the war, these poor soldiers endured horrific conditions at the hands of the Confederates. They lived in rags, subsisting on scraps, wasting away of starvation, and dying of dreadful diseases like cholera and scurvy. Now, not only were the survivors released, they were going back to their homes up north.

Why on earth was the riverboat Sultana so overcrowded? It was because of a shady deal between the Sultana’s greedy Captain James Cass Mason and some equally greedy Union officers in Vicksburg, including chief quartermaster Captain Reuben Hatch. The officers purposely ignored other riverboats in favor of filling the Sultana. Captain Mason was also part owner of the riverboat. He would be paid $2.75 for each soldier and $8.00 for each officer, so do the math. The more soldiers he could transport, the richer he would get.

The newly released prisoners, weakened from disease and malnutrition, were all loaded and squeezed together onto the riverboat like hogs in a slaughterhouse. Every inch of deck space was used. But remarkably, they were still in good spirits! After all, the Civil War was finally over and they were finally headed home. Even being packed on an overcrowded riverboat was better than a Confederate POW camp.

The crammed Riverboat Sultana left Vicksburg, Mississippi on April 25th, 1865 and traveled north up the twisting, muddy river, already swollen with heavy Spring rains. The former POWs made the best of their tight situation. A newspaper photographer in Helena, Arkansas managed to take the only photo of the ridiculously crowded decks when it docked there the next day.

Unfortunately, just prior to leaving Vicksburg, Captain Mason had one of the Sultana’s cracked boilers quickly and cheaply patched with just a small plate. Mason wanted nothing to slow down his big pay-off of transporting thousands of troops back north. This poor repair job amounted to a ticking time bomb under the poor soldiers’ feet. Two days later, April 27th, 1865, while the tired men slept on deck, the Sultana‘s cracked boiler exploded. At 2 o’clock in the morning, at an isolated bend in the Mississippi River just north of Memphis, the Sultana burst into a ball of flames.

Only 600 of the 2,400 souls aboard managed to survive the hell that followed.

There were no modern lifeboats and few cork life preservers onboard. There was no wireless telegraph invented yet to send an SOS for help. The boiler explosions blew apart the center of the riverboat. The blast killed hundreds instantly, and the hungry fire spread rapidly fore and aft. Those that did not burn to death, jumped into the cold, dark river. The Mississippi was turned it into a frothing chaos of weak, drowning men grasping for any floating debris.

The burning hulk of the Sultana slowly drifted downriver, finally sinking in an angry cloud of steam. It was 2 hours before a southbound riverboat came upon and rescued the floundering survivors floating in the river.

Captain Mason died on board the Sultana. Shockingly, the army held no Vicksburg Union officers accountable for the terrible overcrowding. This included Captain Reuben Hatch, who resigned to avoid court-martial. The disaster was lost in the military bureaucracy surrounding the war’s end.

Countless Americans have never heard of the Sultana Disaster. These poor soldiers were all but forgotten in history. A few of their ancestors, members of the Sultana Descendants Association, faithfully meet in the Spring each year to keep the memory of their relatives alive. An excellent documentary of the tragedy, Remember the Sultana, was released in 2018 and is now available on Prime Video. The wreck of the Sultana was discovered in 1982 in an Arkansas soybean field of all place, two miles from the current river. The course of the Mississippi had long since changed course. A new Sultana Disaster Museum opened in nearby Marion, Arkansas in November, 2026. It contains a thorough retelling of the event and is most definitely worth a visit.

Thanks to the detailed nonfiction books by Jerry Potter and Gene Salecker, I was able to thoroughly research the Sultana disaster. I wrote a historical novel, SULTANA AWAITS, doing my part to make sure those brave men, who sacrificed so much, are never forgotten. The novel follows two young Indiana brothers who volunteer to fight for the Union army. They end up prisoners of war in the Andersonville and Cahaba camps. Upon the close of the Civil War, they end up in Vicksburg, Mississippi and board the doomed riverboat Sultana for home.

Read the historical novel SULTANA AWAITS by Paul Andrews.