CASTLE MORGAN, CAHABA, ALABAMA
Surviving a Confederate POW Camp
Survival in an Alabama Slammer: Inmates at the Confederacy’s Cahaba Federal Prison had little more food and a lot less space than prisoners at Andersonville, but their mortality rate was considerably lower—thanks to one man’s humanity.
by Peter Cozzens1/26/2011
Survival in an Alabama Slammer:
Inmates at the Confederacy’s Cahaba Federal Prison had little more food and a lot less space than prisoners at Andersonville, but their mortality rate was considerably lower—thanks to one man’s humanity.
On the afternoon of May 11, 1883, Hannah Simpson Grant died quietly in her home in Jersey City, N.J. Her son, Ulysses S. Grant, arrived later that day. To her pastor, the Rev. Dr. Howard A.M. Henderson, Grant entrusted arrangements for the funeral. Grant wanted no mention made of his own success. He asked Henderson simply to eulogize Hannah Grant as a “pure-minded, simple-hearted, earnest Methodist Christian.”
The man in whom General Grant placed so much trust had served honorably during the Civil War—but on the side of the Confederacy, and as the commandant of a prison camp.
Soldiers in both armies despised Civil War prisons as places of hunger, harsh treatment and deadly diseases, and for the most part they excoriated prison commanders as cruel and cold-hearted. But Henderson was an exception. Gentle and genuinely concerned with the welfare of inmates, Henderson achieved with resources nearly as limited as those at Andersonville, Ga., something the commandant of that prison, Henry Wirz, couldn’t: He kept his inmates alive.
Under Wirz’s regime, nearly a third of the 41,000 prisoners at Andersonville perished. At Cahaba, the mortality rate was 3 percent. According to Federal figures, only 147 of the 5,000 inmates died. The average mortality rate in Confederate prisons was 15.5 percent; in Union prisons, 12 percent.
There was little in the appearance of Cahaba, or in the conditions beyond Henderson’s capacity to control—overcrowding, rats, lice and sometimes meager food—to suggest to new inmates their fate would be any different than that of their less fortunate countrymen at Andersonville.
But Henderson’s humanity gave them hope.
Wisconsin cavalryman Melvin Grigsby entered Cahaba in the spring of 1864. His first stop was a room near the entrance. There Captain Henderson ordered him to surrender all his valuables, promising to keep a list and return everything “at the proper time.” Grigsby was skeptical; surrendered possessions had a way of disappearing in prisons. But when Grigsby and several hundred other prisoners were transferred to Andersonville, Henderson not only returned all the prisoners’ valuables, but also expressed his “sorrow and shame for the horrors of that shameful place.”
The Confederates established Cahaba Federal Prison in May or June 1863 in an unfinished red-brick warehouse on the west bank of the Alabama River in Cahaba, Ala., the seat of Dallas County. The town owed its name to the Cahaba River, which looped around the northern side of the town before emptying into the Alabama. The prison’s informal name was Castle Morgan, after famed Confederate cavalryman Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan. The brick walls of the warehouse stood 14 feet high and enclosed 15,000 square feet. An unfinished roof left 1,600 square feet in the center exposed to the elements.
Under the roofed portion of the warehouse, Confederate prison authorities built 250 bunks of rough timber, one atop the other. Around the warehouse they raised a 12-foot wooden stockade with a plank walkway at the top for the guards. At the southeast corner of the stockade they built a four-seat privy. Drinking water for the prisoners came from an artesian well emptied into an open gutter, which flowed 200 yards through town before entering the stockade.
In July 1863, Henderson became commandant of Cahaba. A month later he also was named an agent for the exchange of prisoners, a duty that often took him away from the prison.
HENDERSON
Henderson understood Northerners. He had graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University and studied law at the Cincinnati Law School. Preferring the church to law, he became a Methodist minister after graduation. Henderson was determined to run Cahaba with as much compassion as discipline and good order permitted, but the prison nonetheless had its share of problems.
Quarters were cramped. In March 1864, there were 660 prisoners at Cahaba, a third of whom had to sleep on the dirt floor of the warehouse for lack of bunks. The polluted water supply posed a grave health threat. Prison surgeon R.H. Whitfield told the Confederate medical department that, in its course from the artesian well to the warehouse, the water “has been subjected to the washings of the hands, feet, faces, and heads of soldiers, citizens, and negroes, buckets, tubs, and spittoons of groceries, offices, and hospital, hogs, dogs, cows, and filth of all kinds from the streets and other sources.”
In response to Whitfield’s complaint, the quartermasters installed pipes to replace the open ditch, which gave the prisoners clean water to drink. But in the summer of 1864, General Grant ordered a halt in prison exchanges, and the population of Cahaba grew to 2,151 in October. Conditions deteriorated sharply. Cahaba became the most overcrowded prison, North or South. Each prisoner had only 7.5 square feet to call his own; those at incarcerated Andersonville had 35 square feet of space per man.
Rations dropped severely both in quantity and quality. The average daily issue became 12 ounces of corn meal, ground together with cobs and husks, 8 ounces of often rancid beef or bacon, and occasionally some bug-infested peas. Prisoners were not starved at Cahaba, but they were hungry enough that a gnawing desire for food permeated their dreams. “The same experience was often repeated,” remembered Sergeant Jesse Hawes of the 9th Illinois Cavalry. “Go to the bed of sand at 9:00 p.m., dream of food till 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., awake, go to the water barrel, drink, and return to sleep again if the rats would permit sleep.”
The number of rats at Cahaba grew at about the same rate as the prison population until, Hawes said, they became a veritable plague. They burrowed into every corner of the warehouse and swarmed through the prison yard. “At first they made me nervous, lest they should do me serious injury before I should awake; but after several nights’ experience that feeling was supplanted by one of irritation—irritation that they should keep waking me up so many times during the night, an annoyance that at length became nearly unendurable.”
But rats were a minor annoyance when measured against the infestation of lice, from which no prisoner was free. Private Perry Summerfield said that after his first night at Cahaba he was so covered with lice that his clothes “looked more like pepper and salt than blue.” Lice “crawled upon our clothing by day, crawled over our bodies, into the ears, even into the nostrils and mouths by night,” Hawes said.
Hardest to bear were the human vermin that infested the prison. The most pernicious came from among the prisoners themselves. Called “muggers,” they were a well-organized group of robbers for whom newcomers were the targets of choice. The muggers would beat a man senseless or render him defenseless with a rag of chloroform (obtained from guards in exchange for part of the muggers’ profits), and then strip him bare of money, watch, jewelry and keepsakes that the prisoner had managed to secrete from prison authorities.
It took a giant of a man named Richard Pierce to bring order. Standing nearly 7 feet tall, with chest and shoulders “enormous for a man of his gigantic dimensions,” the young private from the 3rd Tennessee Union Cavalry was so mild-mannered that his fellow inmates regarded him as an overgrown boy—until four muggers robbed his best friend. “Big Tennessee,” as the prisoners called Pierce, tracked down the robbers and knocked all four of them senseless. Big Tennessee’s two-fisted justice rallied the prisoners and cowed the muggers, the worst of whom joined the Confederates to escape retribution from their former victims.
There ironically was less human vermin among the guard force of 179 poorly trained conscripts. Most of the Confederates were humane and well-intentioned, but at least two stood out as cold-blooded murderers. One named Hawkins shot three men in one week from the walkway atop the stockade wall, recalled several former prisoners, “without the least shadow of reason or excuse for the murders.”
Another assassin, a boy not more than 16 whom the prisoners dubbed “Little Charley,” killed three prisoners. He shot two men at close range and bayoneted a third in the cooking yard, again for no apparent reason. One day Little Charley failed to appear on duty as expected, and among the prisoners the rumor arose that he had been granted a furlough for his “zeal as a guard.” Hawes decided to find out for himself. “Was he given a furlough because he killed so many prisoners?” Hawes asked a friendly guard. “I guess so,” drawled the Southerner, “that’s what we ’uns allers heerd.”
That murder would be condoned, much less rewarded, under Henderson’s regime was unthinkable. But on July 28, 1864, a new officer had arrived to command the military post of Cahaba and the prison guards. He was Lt. Col. Samuel Jones, a cruel man who had been twice captured and paroled, and then passed over for command of his regiment. Jones came to Cahaba with the professed intention of seeing the “God-damned Yankees” suffer.
The commander of military prisons in Alabama and Georgia, Brig. Gen. John H. Winder, complained to Richmond that he had not requested, nor did he want, Jones at Cahaba. The inspector general’s office opposed divided authority at prison camps and sided with Winder. They looked into Jones’ records and found no orders assigning him to Cahaba, but he nonetheless remained at the prison. Henderson’s duty as exchange agent took him away from Cahaba frequently. In his absence, Jones was in charge.
Jones instituted a unique form of punishment and applied it for violations of serious prison regulations. On a ladder resting against the outer wall of the stockade, Jones forced prisoners to grasp a rung just high enough so that their feet barely touched the ground, and then sustain their weight by their hands for a prescribed number of minutes. There certainly were worse forms of punishment in Civil War prisons, many of which were inflicted with less cause, but to men accustomed to Henderson’s moderate discipline, Jones’ methods seemed barbaric.
Amanda Gardner, whose home stood just outside Cahaba Prison, also found Jones’ behavior reprehensible. Gardner was a “thorough Rebel” who already had lost a son in the war and believed in the righteousness of the Southern cause, said one prisoner, but she abhorred brutality. When she demanded Jones cease punishing prisoners near her doorstep, the colonel rebuked her. “Your sympathy for the damned Yankees is odious to me,” Jones told her. “Now bear yourself with the utmost care in the future or you shall be an exile.” But Henderson intervened and endorsed all Gardner had done. After that, Jones left her alone.
Gardner did far more for the prisoners than protest cruel punishment. Soon after the prison opened she began sending gifts of food, which her young daughter Belle slipped through cracks in the stockade wall with the connivance of friendly guards. When winter came, she took up every carpet in her house and cut them into blankets in order to “relieve the suffering of those poor prisoners.” Gardner lent the prisoners books from a large and varied collection that an uncle had left her. Prisoners had only to send a note by a guard to Amanda or Belle in order to borrow a book from the Gardner library.
The good effect Gardner’s books had in alleviating tedium, which could sap a man’s will to live, contributed to the low death rate at Cahaba. Relatively good sanitation also played a role. After Whitfield’s report, water entered the camp in pipes rather than an open gutter. The water closet at the southeast corner of the stockade prevented human waste from contaminating the water supply.
The final factor favoring survival was the prison hospital, located in a rambling, two-story hotel called Bell Tavern that the Confederacy commandeered to serve both guards and prisoners. There were never quite enough cots to go around, but chief surgeon Louis Profilet and prison surgeon Whitfield treated Confederates and Northerners with equal consideration. Medicine was seldom in short supply. Men died in the Bell Tavern hospital, but not for want of care.
Neither did they die for want of effort by Henderson. In September 1864, Henderson, now a colonel, proposed a special exchange of 350 of Cahaba’s inmates. The Union district commander, Maj. Gen. Cadwallader C. Washburn, forwarded the request to the commissary general of prisoners along with a favorable comment on Henderson’s management of Cahaba.
The proposal made its way to Grant, who denied it as part of his larger policy of prohibiting prisoner exchanges. As winter neared, Henderson suggested the Federals send a ship up the Alabama River under a flag of truce and deliver supplies to the prisoners. Henderson and Washburn overcame the reservations of their superior officers, and in December a Union steamboat offloaded at Cahaba 2,000 complete uniforms, 4,000 pairs of socks, 1,500 blankets, medicine, writing papers and envelopes, and a hundred mess tins.
Henderson had done his best. But the prisoners wanted food more than supplies, and most bartered their new clothing to guards for extra rations. When the food was gone, wrote Henderson sadly, the prisoners were left with the same “scanty clothing and ragged blankets in a climate particularly severe in winter.”
In December, Cahaba was cursed with the arrival of a prisoner who nearly cost several dozen innocent men their lives. He was Captain Hiram S. Hanchett of the 16th Illinois Cavalry. Moments before Confederate cavalrymen captured him near Nashville, Hanchett had shed his uniform and donned civilian clothing, on the mistaken assumption that the Rebels would let civilians go. Hanchett further incriminated himself by adopting an alias. As he marched into Cahaba, Hanchett knew that he had made himself subject to conviction and execution as a spy.
To save himself, Hanchett concocted an absurd escape plan. He told a handful of prisoners his true identity and offered to lead them to the Confederate arsenal at Selma to steal weapons, and then another 125 miles to Federal lines at Pensacola, Fla. In the early morning hours of January 20, 1865, Hanchett and his co-conspirators overpowered the nine guards on duty and shoved them into the water closet.
Hanchett’s band never made it beyond the gate. The corporal of the relief saw the scuffle and called for help. Hanchett yelled into the warehouse for 100 “men of courage” to join him in rushing the gate. No one responded. Jones entered the prison with cannons and 100 guards, threatening to blow Hanchett and his men “from hell to breakfast.”
One of his coterie let slip that Hanchett was a Union officer, and Henderson wrote to the War Department for permission to court-martial him as a spy. His letter got lost in the crumbling bureaucracy of the dying Confederacy.
Henderson left Cahaba permanently in January 1865 for Union-held Vicksburg, there to dedicate himself to duties as agent for prisoner exchanges.
No sooner had Henderson left than a natural disaster of the first order confronted Jones. Late February downpours pounded the prison and surrounding country, and on March 1 the Cahaba River roared over its banks. A torrent of water swept through town and into the stockade. The water closet backed up, and by nightfall the prisoners found themselves waist-deep in fetid water.
The next morning a delegation of ser
geants appealed to Jones to let the prisoners move to higher ground just outside the stockade. Jones refused for fear they might escape. As a dumbfounded Hawes recalled, “The possibility of an escape at that time was an absurdity. The whole country was flooded.” Sixty Confederate guards signed a petition on behalf of the prisoners. But Jones stood fast, and the prisoners stood shivering in the water for three days before Jones relented and allowed small details to go out and gather timber to build platforms for the men to stand on. Softening a bit more, he also sent 700 prisoners to Selma to ease the overcrowding.
Nine days later, as the last of the waters drained from the stockade grounds, Jones told the incredulous prisoners that he was going to parole them all.
It was no act of charity on Jones’ part; with the war winding down, Grant had relented on prisoner exchanges. For four weeks steamboats plied the Alabama River with prisoners from Cahaba. Most were taken to a neutral site outside Vicksburg called Camp Fisk to await formal exchange. On April 14, Union department commander Maj. Gen. Napoleon J.T. Dana telegraphed the War Department that 4,700 Federals were at Camp Fisk awaiting transportation home. Of that number, he said, 1,100 were sick, nearly all of whom were from Andersonville. “The rest of the prisoners,” Dana reported, “are in excellent health, the Cahaba prisoners particularly.”
Camp Fisk was the creation of Henderson and his Union counterpart, Colonel A.C. Fisk. When he learned exchanges were to be resumed, Henderson asked Fisk to send supplies to the prisoners at Cahaba. Fisk suggested instead that Henderson bring the men to neutral ground near Vicksburg, where they would be guaranteed ample rations and medical attention. Henderson agreed and enthusiastically hastened the transfers.
But the humane work of Henderson and Fisk ended in an unimaginable tragedy. On April 24, the paddle steamer SS Sultana left Vicksburg crammed with approximately 2,000 Union prisoners, more than half of them Cahaba men. The Sultana had bad boilers and a legal capacity of 376 passengers. Early on the morning of April 27, three of the four boilers exploded, and the Sultana sank near Memphis. Two-thirds of those on board died.
The notorious Captain Hanchett had perished several days earlier. With the war over and no one to convene a court-martial of the presumed spy, Colonel Jones took matters into his own hands and murdered Hanchett. Not long after, Jones vanished from history. Federal authorities tried for a year to find him. If they had, Jones might have been the only Confederate prison official besides Andersonville Commandant Henry Wirz executed for war crimes.
General Dana made certain no harm came to Colonel Henderson. For as long as he superintended exchanges at Camp Fisk, a battalion of Union cavalry was assigned as Henderson’s personal bodyguard. But after John Wilkes Booth killed President Lincoln, no Confederate, no matter how well-meaning, was safe within Union lines. So Dana spirited him across the Mississippi River into a camp of Texas Rangers.
Henderson died in Cincinnati in 1912. Obituaries incorrectly said Henderson had been a Confederate brigadier general and omitted any mention of his duty as commandant of Cahaba prison. No matter. Few readers would have recognized the name Cahaba, and none could have found the place had they wanted. After the flood of 1865, the county seat moved to Selma.
Within a decade white residents had dismantled their homes and churches and moved away. At the turn of the century a former slave bought the abandoned warehouse and demolished it for the bricks. Cahaba prison remained only in memoirs and fading memories.
The Sultana Disaster
Ill-fated "Sultana", Helena, Arkansas, just prior to its explosion on April 27, 1865.
Sultana was a commercial side-wheel steamboat which exploded and sank on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865, killing 1,164 people in what remains the worst maritime disaster in United States history.
Constructed of wood in 1863 by the John Litherbury Boatyard in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sultana was intended for the lower Mississippi cotton trade. The steamer registered 1,719 tons and normally carried a crew of 85. For two years, she ran a regular route between St. Louis and New Orleans and was frequently commissioned to carry troops during the American Civil War. Although designed with a capacity of only 376 passengers, she was carrying 2,127 when three of the boat's four boilers exploded and caused it to sink near Memphis, Tennessee. The disaster was overshadowed in the press by events surrounding the end of the Civil War, including the killing of President Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth just the day before. No one was ever held accountable for the disaster.
Sultana was launched on January 3, 1863, the fifth steamboat to bear the name. The vessel measured 260 feet (79 m) long, with a 42 feet (13 m) width at the beam, displaced 1,719 short tons (1,559 t), and had a 7-foot (2.1 m) draft.
Her two side-mounted paddle wheels were driven by four fire-tube boilers. Introduced in 1848, they could generate twice as much steam per fuel load as conventional boilers. Each fire-tube boiler was 18 feet (5.5 m) long and 46 inches (120 cm) in diameter and contained 24 five-inch (13 cm) flues which ran from the firebox to the chimney.
The power of the boilers came with risk – the water levels in the fire tubes had to be carefully maintained at all times. The areas between the many flues clogged easily, especially since dirty river water carried much sediment, and were difficult to clean. Low water levels could cause hot spots leading to metal fatigue, significantly increasing the risk of an explosion. Since most steamboats of the time were constructed of light-weight wood covered with oil-based paint and varnish, fires were a significant concern.
Under the command of Captain James Cass Mason of St. Louis, Sultana left St. Louis on April 13, 1865, bound for New Orleans.[4]: 12 On the morning of April 15, she was tied up at Cairo, Illinois, when word reached the city that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had been shot in Washington, D.C. Immediately, Captain Mason grabbed an armload of Cairo newspapers and headed south to spread the news, knowing that telegraphic communication with the southern states had been almost totally cut off because of the recently-ended American Civil War.
Upon reaching Vicksburg, Mississippi, Mason was approached by Captain Reuben Hatch, the chief quartermaster at Vicks-burg, with a proposal. Thousands of recently released Union prisoners of war who had been held in the Confederate prison camps at Cahaba near Selma, Alabama and Andersonville below Atlanta, Georgia, had been brought to a small parole camp outside of Vicksburg to await release to the northern states. The U.S. government would pay US $2.75 per enlisted man and US$8 per officer to any steamboat captain who would take a group north. Knowing that Mason needed money, Hatch suggested that he could guarantee Mason a full load of about 1,000 prisoners if Mason would agree to give him a kickback. Mason quickly agreed to Hatch's offer, hoping to gain much money through this deal:
Leaving Vicksburg, Sultana traveled downriver to New Orleans, continuing to spread the news of Lincoln's assassination. On April 21, Sultana left New Orleans with about seventy cabin and deck passengers and a small amount of livestock. She also carried a crew of 85. About ten hours south of Vicksburg, one of Sultana's four boilers sprang a leak. Under reduced pressure, the steamboat limped into Vicksburg to get the boiler repaired and to pick up her promised load of prisoners.
While the paroled prisoners, primarily from the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, were brought from the parole camp to Sultana, a mechanic was brought down to work on the leaky boiler. Although the mechanic wanted to cut out and replace a ruptured seam, Mason knew such a job would take a few days and cost him his precious load of prisoners. By the time the repairs would have been completed, the prisoners would have been sent home on other boats. Instead, Mason and his chief engineer, Nathan Wintringer, convinced the mechanic to make temporary repairs, hammering back the bulged boiler plate and riveting a patch of lesser thickness over the seam. Instead of taking two or three days, the temporary repair took only one. During her time in port, and while the repairs were being made, Sultana took on the paroled prisoners.
Although Hatch had suggested that Mason might get as many as 1,000 released Union prisoners, a mix-up with the parole camp books and suspicion of bribery from other steamboat captains caused the Union officer in charge of the loading, Captain George Augustus Williams, to place every man at the parole camp on board Sultana, believing the number to be less than 1,500. Although Sultana had a legal capacity of only 376 passengers, by the time she backed away from Vicksburg on the night of April 24, she was severely overcrowded with 1,950 paroled prisoners, 22 guards from the 58th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, 70 fare-paying cabin passengers, and 85 crew members, for a total of 2,127 people. Many of the paroled prisoners had been weakened by their incarceration and associated illnesses but had managed to gain some strength while waiting at the parole camp to be officially released. The men were packed into every available space as all cabin spaces were already filled with civilian passengers; the overflow was so severe that in some places, the decks began to creak and sag and had to be supported with heavy wooden beams.
Sultana spent two days traveling upriver, fighting against one of the worst spring floods in the river's history. At some places, the river overflowed the banks and spread out 3 miles (4.8 km) wide. Trees along the river bank were almost completely covered until only the very tops of the trees were visible above the swirling, powerful water. On April 26, Sultana stopped at Helena, Arkansas, where photographer Thomas W. Bankes took a picture of the grossly overcrowded vessel. Sultana subsequently arrived at Memphis, Tennessee, around 7:00 PM, and the crew began unloading 120 tons (109 tonnes) of sugar from the hold. Near midnight, Sultana left Memphis, leaving behind about 200 men. She then went a short distance upriver to take on a new load of coal from some coal barges and then, at about 1:00 AM, started north again.
At around 2 a.m. on April 27, 1865, when Sultana was about seven miles (11 km) north of Memphis, its boilers suddenly and violently exploded, killing many people instantly: First one boiler exploded, followed a split-second later by two more.
The massive steam explosion came from the top rear of the boilers. It went upward at a 45-degree angle, tearing through the crowded decks above and completely destroying the pilothouse. Without a pilot to steer the boat, Sultana became a drifting, burning hulk. The violent explosion flung some deck passengers into the water and blew a gaping 25-foot (7.6 m)-30-foot (9.1 m) hole in the steamer. With the boilers blown to pieces, the twin smokestacks fell; the starboard smokestack fell backward into the blasted hole, and the port smokestack fell forward onto the crowded forward section of the upper deck, hitting the steamboat's bell as it fell. The forward part of the upper deck collapsed onto the middle deck, killing and trapping many in the wreckage. Fortunately, the sturdy railings around the twin openings of the main stairway prevented the upper deck from crushing down completely onto the middle deck. The men located around the twin openings quickly crawled under the wreckage and down the main stairs. Further back, the collapsing decks formed a slope that led down into the exposed furnace boxes. The broken wood caught fire and turned the remaining superstructure into a raging inferno. Survivors panicked and raced for the safety of the water, but in their weakened condition, they soon ran out of strength and began together cling to each other. Whole groups went down together.
While the Sultana burned, and the men on the steamboat were either already dead or fighting for their lives, the southbound steamer Bostona (No. 2), built in 1860 but coming downriver on her maiden voyage after being refurbished, arrived at about 2:30 AM, a half hour after the explosion, and rescued scores of survivors. At the same time, dozens of people had floated 7 miles (11 km) down river and began to float past the Memphis waterfront, calling for help until they were noticed by the crews of docked steamboats and U.S. warships, who immediately set about rescuing the survivors. Eventually, the hulk of Sultana drifted about six miles (10 km) to the west bank of the river, burned to the waterline and sank at around 7:00 AM near Mound City and present-day Marion, Arkansas, about five hours after the explosion. Other vessels joined the rescue, including the steamers Silver Spray, Jenny Lind, and Pocahontas, the navy ironclad USS Essex and the sidewheel gunboat USS Tyler
Passengers who survived the initial explosion had to risk their lives in the icy spring runoff of the Mississippi or burn with the boat. Many died of drowning or hypothermia. Some survivors were plucked from the tops of semi-submerged trees along the Arkansas shore. Bodies of victims continued to be found downriver for months, some as far as Vicksburg. Many bodies were never recovered. Most of Sultana's officers, including Captain Mason, were among those who perished.
The exact death toll is unknown, although the most recent [when?] evidence indicates that 1,164 died.[citation needed] On May 19, 1865, less than a month after the disaster, Brigadier general William Hoffman, Commissary General of Prisoners who investigated the disaster, reported an overall loss of soldiers, passengers, and crew of 1,238.[In February 1867, the Bureau of Military Justice placed the death toll at 1,100.In 1880, the United States Congress, in conjunction with the War Department, reported the loss of life as 1,259.The official count by the United States Customs Service was 1,547.[In 1880, the War Department placed the number of survivors at 931, but the most recent research[when?] places the number at 961.[The dead soldiers were interred at the Fort Pickering cemetery, located on the south shore of Memphis. A year later, when the U.S. government established the Memphis National Cemetery on the northeast side of the city, 206 the bodies were moved there. Three civilian victims of the wreck of Sultana are interred at Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.
Because Union forces had captured Memphis in 1862 and turned it into a supply and recuperation city, numerous local hospitals treated the roughly 760 survivors with the latest medical equipment and trained personnel. Of this group, there were only 31 deaths between April 28 and June 28. Newspaper accounts indicate that the residents of Memphis had sympathy for the victims despite the ongoing Union occupation. The Chicago Opera Troupe, a minstrel group that had traveled upriver on Sultana before getting off at Memphis, staged a benefit performance, while the crew of the gunboat Essex raised US$1,000 (equivalent to $19,904 in 2023).
In December 1885, the survivors living in the northern states of Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio began attending annual reunions, forming the National Sultana Survivors' Association. Eventually, the group settled on meeting in the Toledo, Ohio area. Perhaps inspired by their northern comrades, a southern group of survivors, men from Tennessee and Kentucky, began meeting in 1889 around Knoxville, Tennessee. Both groups met as close to the April 27 anniversary date as possible, corresponded with each other, and shared the title National Sultana Survivors' Association.[citation needed]
By the mid-1920s, only a handful of survivors could attend the reunions. In 1929, only two men attended the Southern reunion.[citation needed] The next year, only one man showed up. The last northern survivor, Private Jordan Barr of the 15th Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment, died on May 16, 1938, at age 93. The last of the southern survivors, and last overall survivor, was Private Charles M. Eldridge of the 3rd Tennessee Cavalry Regiment, who died at his home at age 96 on September 8, 1941, more than 76 years after the disaster.
The official cause of the Sultana disaster was determined to be the mismanagement of water levels in the boilers, exacerbated by the fact that the vessel was severely overcrowded and top-heavy. As the steamboat made her way north following the twists and turns of the river, she listed severely from side to side. Her four boilers were interconnected and mounted side-by-side so that if the boat tipped sideways, water would tend to run out of the highest boiler. The fires still going against the empty boiler created hot spots. When the boat tipped the other way, water rushing back into the empty boiler would hit the hot spots and flash instantly to steam, creating a sudden surge in pressure. This effect of careening could have been minimized by maintaining high water levels in the boilers. The official inquiry found that the boilers exploded because of the combined effects of careening, low water levels, and the faulty repair made a few days earlier. A 2015 investigation into the cause of the disaster by Pat Jennings, principal engineer of Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, which came into existence in 1866 because of the Sultana explosion, determined that three main factors led to the disaster:
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The type of metal used in the construction of the boilers – Charcoal Hammered No. 1, which tends to become brittle with prolonged heating and cooling. Charcoal Hammered No. 1 was no longer used to manufacture boilers after 1879.
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The use of the sediment-laden Mississippi River water to feed the boilers. The sediment tended to settle on the bottom of the boilers or clog between the flues and leave hotspots.
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The design of the boilers. Sultana had tubular boilers filled with 24 horizontal five-inch flues. Being so closely packed within the 48-inch (120 cm) diameter boilers tended to cause the muddy sediment to form hot pockets and were extremely difficult to clean. Tubular boilers were discontinued from use on steamboats plying the Lower Mississippi after two more steamboats with tubular boilers exploded shortly after the Sultana explosion.
In 1888, a St. Louis resident named William Streetor claimed that his former business partner, Robert Louden, made a confession of having sabotaged Sultana by the use of a coal torpedo while they were drinking in a saloon.[ Louden, a former Confederate agent and saboteur who operated in and around St. Louis, had been responsible for the burning of the steamboat Ruth. In support of Louden's claim, what appeared to be a piece of an artillery shell was said to be recovered from the sunken wreck. However, Louden's claim is controversial, and most scholars support the official explanation. The location of the explosion, from the top rear of the boilers and far away from the fireboxes, tends to indicate that Louden's claim of sabotage of an exploding coal torpedo in the firebox, below the front part of the boilers, was pure bravado. Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay, the inventor of the coal torpedo, was a former resident of St. Louis and was involved in similar acts of sabotage against Union shipping interests. However, Courtenay's great-great-grandson, Joseph Thatcher, who wrote a book on Courtenay and the coal torpedo, denies that a coal torpedo was used in the Sultana disaster.[
Two years earlier, in May 1886, came a claim that 2nd Lt. James Worthington Barrett, an ex-prisoner and passenger on the steamboat, had caused the explosion. Barrett was a veteran of the Mexican–American War and had been captured at the Battle of Franklin. He was injured on Sultana and was honorably discharged in May 1865. There is no apparent motive for him to have blown up the boat, especially while on board.
In 1903, another person reported that Sultana had been sabotaged by a Tennessee farmer who lived along the river and cut wood for passing steamboats. After a few Union gunboats filled up their bunkers but refused to pay, the farmer supposedly hollowed out a log, filled it with gunpowder, and then left the lethal log on his woodpile. As stated in the 1903 newspaper article, the log was mistakenly taken by Sultana. However, Sultana was a coal-burning boat and not a wood-burner. An episode of the PBS series History Detectives that aired on July 2, 2014, reviewed the known evidence, thoroughly disputed a theory of sabotage, and then focused on the question of why Sultana was allowed to be crowded to several times its normal capacity before departure. The report blamed quartermaster Capt. Reuben Benton Hatch, an individual with a long history of corruption and incompetence, who kept his job through political connections: he was the younger brother of Illinois politician Ozias M. Hatch, an advisor and close friend of President Lincoln. Throughout the war, Captain Hatch had shown incompetence as a quartermaster and competence as a thief, bilking the government out of thousands of dollars. Although brought up on courts-martial charges, Hatch managed to get letters of recommendation from no less reputable personages than President Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant. The letters reside in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. After the disaster, Reuben Benton Hatch refused three separate subpoenas to appear before Captain Speed's trial and give testimony. He died in 1871, having escaped justice because of his numerous highly placed patrons—including two presidents.
Despite the magnitude of the disaster, no one was ever formally held accountable. Captain Frederic Speed, a Union officer who sent the 1,950 paroled prisoners into Vicksburg from the parole camp, was charged with grossly overcrowding Sultana and found guilty. However, the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army overturned the guilty verdict because Speed had been at the parole camp all day and had not personally placed a single soldier on board Sultana. Captain George Augustus Williams, who had placed the men on board, was a regular Army officer, and the military refused to go after one of their own. 202 Captain Hatch, who had concocted a bribe with Captain Mason to crowd as many men onto Sultana as possible, had quickly quit the service to avoid a court-martial and then had gone into hiding. Captain Mason of Sultana, who was ultimately responsible for dangerously overloading his vessel and ordering the faulty repairs to her leaky boiler, had died in the disaster. In the end, no one was ever held accountable for what remains the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history.
Monuments and historical markers to Sultana and her victims have been erected at Memphis, Tennessee; Muncie, Indiana; Marion, Arkansas; Vicksburg, Mississippi; Cincinnati, Ohio;[29] Knoxville, Tennessee; Hillsdale, Michigan and Mansfield, Ohio.
In 1982, a local archaeological expedition, led by Memphis attorney Jerry O. Potter, uncovered what was believed to be the wreckage of Sultana. Blackened wooden deck planks and timbers were found about 32 feet (10 m) under a soybean field on the Arkansas side, about 4 miles (6 km) from Memphis. The Mississippi River has changed course several times since the disaster, leaving the wreck under dry land and far from today's river. The main channel now flows about 2 miles (3 km) east of its 1865 position.
In 2015, on the 150th anniversary of the disaster, an interim Sultana Disaster Museum was opened in Marion, Arkansas, the closest town to the buried remains of the steamboat,[citation needed] across the Mississippi River from Memphis.[33] The museum is only a temporary museum featuring a number of relics from Sultana such as shaker plates from the boat's furnace, furnace bricks, a few pieces of wood, and some small metal pieces. The museum also features many artifacts from the Sultana Survivors' Association, as well as a 14-foot (4.3 m) model replica of the boat. One wall is decorated with the names of every soldier, crewmember, and passenger on the boat on April 27, 1865.[citation needed] A new state-of-the-art permanent museum, which will be housed in a renovated auditorium/gymnasium is expected to open in September/October 2025.
