The reverberating boom and yellow flash of flame pierced the quiet darkness of the early morning hours on April 27, 1865. The blast launched hundreds of former Union prisoners of war into the cool waters of the Mississippi River, where they desperately grabbed onto each other and drowned in groups. It was the deadliest maritime disaster in history.
The sinking of the SS Sultana 150 years ago resulted in the loss of 1,800 men, many of whom spent years suffering in Southern POW camps. Many of the men were from the 18th Michigan Volunteer Infantry, which mustered into service in Hillsdale, Michigan, in 1862. Of the 1,800 dead, at least 27 were from Hillsdale County.
“The Sultana disaster is significant in terms of social and maritime history, but it’s also important to understand the limits of technology and government,” Visiting Assistant Professor of History Miles Smith said. “It’s not surprising, because the government botches things up. Look at Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. This is another example of that.”
College historian Arlan Gilbert had an additional take on the tragedy.
“The Sultana disaster tells us something about human nature,” Gilbert said. “All of these men were former prisoners who had suffered through the worst prisons of the war. Then, in a couple of weeks, they’re freed and killed in this disaster. It’s ironic.”
The Sultana, constructed in Cincinnati in 1863, was a steam-powered riverboat intended for cotton trade in the Deep South. At the end of the war, the Union army needed to move men and materiel up the river, and because the U.S. Navy had too few ships to accomplish the task, civilian-owned riverboats like the Sultana were contracted for the job.
The Union offered riverboat captains a bounty to transport discharged Union troops north at a rate of $5 per enlisted man and $10 per officer. According to the Bureau of Economic Research, the average wage for an urban worker in 1865 was about $1.50 per day.
Sultana’s captain, James Cass Mason, met with Lt. Col. Reuben Hatch, a quartermaster in Vicksburg who was charged with arranging transportation for recently released Union POWs. Hatch made a deal with Mason: if Mason agreed to take 1,400 soldiers, Hatch would take a kickback and Mason would pocket the rest of the money, which amounted to at least $7,000. Mason accepted.
Two things went wrong, however. When Sultana approached Vicksburg, one of the ship’s four boilers sprung a leak. Mason, not about to lose out on the most lucrative deal of his career, ordered his mechanic to make a hasty repair.
The second mistake came when the Sultana began to take on passengers. An apparent clerical error led to the loading of every Union parolee in Vicksburg onto the ship, totaling more than 2,100 men, far exceeding the Sultana’s legal capacity of 376 passengers. Rather than off-load troops, Mason ordered his crew to place heavy wooden beams under the decks of the ship, which groaned and sagged with the weight of thousands of troops and 120 tons of sugar.
“The owners of these boats were just trying to line their pockets,” Gilbert said. “Not only did he have all these people and cargo, he had horses, pigs, etc.”
The Sultana began her ill-fated trip north on April 24, 1865, where it entered the Mississippi River current, strengthened by spring floods. Mason ordered his crew to build pressure in the boilers beyond safe limits in an attempt to increase speed.
In the early morning hours of April 27, the Mississippi River rapids bobbed the boat from side to side. The water in Sultana’s four boilers, which were interconnected by a series of pipes, sloshed from one side of the ship to the other. Finally, the ever-increasing heat of the metal boiler casings met one of the rushing torrents of water created by the rocking of the ship, causing a massive increase in pressure.
The weakened boilers exploded, ripping the ship apart and throwing crowds of prisoners into the Mississippi, where they drowned en masse.
“The Civil War, at the end, was entirely chaotic on a macro-social scale, and this is a consequence of that chaos,” Smith said.
It is unknown exactly how many men died in the sinking, since the ship was overloaded. Official records place the death toll at 1,800. The Sultana explosion killed 300 more than the Titanic tragedy and 200 more than the torpedoing of the USS Lusitania, making it the deadliest maritime disaster in human history.
“These men just wanted to go home,” Gilbert said. “They had boiler problems earlier, and the ship wasn’t well-maintained, but they wanted to be home. Probably, that hurry-up mentality at the end of the war contributed to this disaster.”