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Re: The Sultana Tragedy
From: POW-MIA InterNetwork
Date: April 29, 2003
"The Sultana tragedy
Maritime disaster killed Civil War soldiers on way home
By Mark J. Price Beacon Journal staff writer
Library of Congress - Overloaded with Union soldiers, the Sultana docks at Helena, Ark., on the Mississippi River. This image was taken April 26, 1865, the day before the disaster.
All they wanted to do was go home. The weary soldiers had survived the ravages of war and the horrors of prison camp, and looked forward to nothing more than reuniting with loved ones.
But, sadly and terribly, most didn't make it home alive.
They died in the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history, a tragedy that rivals the Titanic in calamity but not in infamy.
To most Americans, the Sultana disaster is forgotten. Even in Summit County, where many of the soldiers lived, the Sultana has lost its meaning.
As many as 1,800 people were killed April 27, 1865, when the steamboat exploded in flames on the Mississippi River near Memphis. The Cincinnati-made vessel, built to carry 376 people, was packed with 2,300 passengers, including 2,134 Union soldiers traveling north after being released from Confederate prisons.
The doomed boat's passengers included Companies C and G of the 115th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, recruited from Cuyahoga Falls, Stow and Northampton.
``There were many, many area men on the Sultana,'' said Mike Elliott, reference assistant at Akron-Summit County Public Library, who has done extensive research on the 115th OVI and the Sultana. ``Even stranger was the fact that so many of the survivors lived in this area.''
More than 700 of the soldiers were from Ohio, the most of any state. Yet, it took a month for the scope of the tragedy to register. News of ``the dreadful affair'' didn't reach the Summit County Beacon until May 4. Names of local casualties weren't published until May 18.
Sultana isn't as well known as other disasters because it was a victim of its time. ``It was overshadowed by the other events then unfolding,'' Elliott said.
April 1865 was quite historic. On April 9, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. On April 14, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. On April 26, John Wilkes Booth was shot to death.
``So the Sultana became little more than a postscript to the war -- which nearly everyone considered essentially done and over with at Lee's surrender,'' he said.
Paul Huff, a Civil War history buff from Cuyahoga Falls, said society was distracted by other events and eager to look beyond the Sultana tragedy.
``You have to take into mind this was the fourth year of a war where in a single day they would lose thousands of men,'' he said. ``Thousands of men would be killed, thousands of men would be wounded. I sometimes wonder if the public was just numb.''
It seemed, at first, that the 115th OVI had a charmed life. The regiment was ordered to guard railroad bridges from saboteurs, certainly not the worst assignment in the war. But in 1864, Confederates in Tennessee captured 200 men from the regiment and sent them to the infamous prison camps of Cahaba, Meridian and Andersonville.
``The minute you walked through the gates of Andersonville, your chances of coming out alive were less than if you marched into battle,'' Huff said.
The regiment's luck held out.
``Thousands of men died while prisoners of the Confederacy,'' Elliott said. ``Bad food or no food, no shelter, disease But of the many men from the 115th OVI later on the Sultana, I think there was just one -- a man named John Fitzwater -- who died while in captivity.''
As the war began to wane in 1865, Union soldiers were released in exchange for Confederate inmates. The soldiers were sick and weak, but in good spirits because they were going home.
More than 2,000 Union soldiers hitched a ride on the Sultana when it docked April 24 at Vicksburg, Miss. The boat was woefully overloaded and soldiers filled every inch of the deck. The Sultana traveled up the swollen Mississippi, stopping in Memphis on April 26, before continuing north that evening.
Most soldiers were asleep, sprawled on the open deck, when the nightmare was unleashed about 2 a.m.
A boiler blew with a roar. The boat exploded in a ball of flames, steam and shrapnel.
``What a crash! My God!'' survivor Arthur A. Jones, a Stow native, later wrote. ``My blood curdles while I write, and words are inadequate; no tongue or writer's pen can describe it.
``Such hissing of steam, the crash of the different decks as they came together with the tons of living freight, the falling of the massive smokestacks, the death cry of strong-hearted men caught in every conceivable manner ''
Some victims were blown into the water. Many couldn't swim or were too weak to try. Some were trapped beneath debris and couldn't escape the fire.
``Men were rushing to and fro, trampling over each other in their endeavors to escape,'' wrote Northampton native William H. Norton. ``All was confusion.''
Passengers jumped overboard to escape the flames but found little refuge in the water.
``The river was full of men struggling with each other and grasping at every thing that offered any means of support. As I arose to the surface, several men from the boat jumped upon me and we all went down together,'' Norton recounted.
Men battled for their lives. Bodies filled the river.
The fire raged for 20 minutes until the boat sank. Some men made it to land. Others floated on debris before being rescued.
Of the more than 30 Summit County men who perished on the Sultana, only three bodies were identified: James W. Eadie, John C. Ely and William Price.
``So these men survived combat and nearly six months privation in Andersonville, Cahaba or Meridian prisons -- only to die a horrible death on the Sultana less than a day or two from home and safety,'' Elliott said.
Although the disaster is largely forgotten, it did leave a legacy.
Elliott has sifted through pension forms, cemetery records and other documents to track the lives of Sultana passengers. He hopes his project will be added to the library's collection to be used as a research tool by anyone with an interest in local history.
Survivors of the Sultana disaster formed a national association in the 1880s and held an annual reunion on the date of the tragedy. The national gathering was held in Akron in 1898, Cleveland in 1899 and Kent in 1903.
Survivors went on to be farmers, cabinet makers, painters, constables and laborers. But some local men were haunted by the tragedy and never shook it.
Charles H. Heberth suffered nervous attacks for years before shooting himself to death in 1887 at age 42. Horace Tifft, 65, committed suicide in 1910 by jumping into the Gorge.
The Cuyahoga Falls post of the Grand Army of the Republic was named Eadie Post No. 37 in honor of Sultana victims James W. Eadie and John W. Eadie Jr., and their brother Henry, who died of disease in the war.
An 1866 memorial at Oakwood Cemetery in Cuyahoga Falls pays tribute to Union soldiers, including those who lost their lives on the Sultana.
Many of the engraved names have worn with time, just like public awareness of the Sultana.
Still legible, however, is a Latin phrase carved in stone: ``Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.''
``It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.''
Mark J. Price is a Beacon Journal copy editor. He can be reached at 330-996-3769 or send e-mail to mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.
©Beacon Journal
Descendants try to keep memory of Sultana sinking alive
By BILL DRIES The Associated Press
The Commercial Appeal
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) -- As a child in East Tennessee, Glenna Jenkins Green thought her father could spin a fine yarn.
"Dad would get us on the front porch a lot of times. All the kids in the neighborhood would come around. He was a big storyteller and I didn't know if half of it was lies or the truth," Green said.
Samuel W. Jenkins would have been approaching his 80s when Green first remembered hearing the story of him escaping from a flaming boat on the Mississippi River. Green was born when her father was 72.
Jenkins, a Union soldier in the Civil War, was a survivor of the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history -- the April 27, 1865, explosion and fire aboard the steamboat Sultana on the Mississippi River north of Memphis.
"I used to talk to my Dad and he'd tell us stories about different things about the Sultana. I wish I had been older so I would have remembered more of it," Green, 83, said at a downtown hotel where about 70 members of the Association of Sultana Descendants and Friends held their 16th annual meeting over the weekend.
"He was blown out in the water and he got hold of some logs or something and floated around out there. He was burned pretty bad on his shoulders."
An estimated 1,800 people died when the Sultana's boilers exploded. By comparison, 1,517 people died in 1912 when the much larger Titanic ocean liner struck an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic Ocean.
Most of the estimated 2,300 people on the Sultana, whose normal capacity was 376, were Union soldiers returning home to Northern states after being released from Confederate prison camps in the South.
The disaster was overshadowed by the end of the Civil War and the April 14 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
Norman Shaw of Knoxville, the founder of the Sultana association, said the annual gathering is a way of making sure the disaster is not completely obscured.
"After the last survivor from Knoxville died in 1931 there was no gathering at all until our organization got started in 1988," Shaw said.
The dead and injured filled Memphis hospitals and morgues for months. Bodies floated to the banks of the city for weeks.
Green, who now lives near Chattanooga, said her father became a doctor partly because of what happened on the Sultana. He died in 1933.
"He'd think of all of the soldiers that drowned that day and how bad they were burned and things he couldn't do to help them," Green said.
Jenkins had been released from Cahaba, a Confederate-run POW camp near Selma, Ala., before boarding the Sultana in Vicksburg, Miss.
Like Jenkins, Pvt. William Carter Warner was a teenager who had lied about his age to enlist in the Union army, was captured and taken to Cahaba.
His son, Bob Warner, 85, of San Angelo, Texas, toured the Memphis cemeteries Saturday, where some of the Sultana's dead were buried. He and the group also stopped at a historical marker in Marion, Ark., near the field where the charred remains of the Sultana are believed to be buried under 30 feet of dirt and silt. It was his second visit to the area.
Warner's father didn't talk about the war, Cahaba or the Sultana until very late in his life -- in 1933, shortly before he and the last few surviving Civil War veterans in Wellington, Kan., marked their last Decoration Day, the predecessor to Memorial Day.
"He said he woke up out in the middle of the Mississippi River," Warner said.
The elder Warner told his son that when he regained consciousness in a river lit by the flames of the Sultana, he took off the bottom part of his long johns and used them to tie together two boards. He then saw a hat float by, put it on and held onto the boards.
"When he was rescued all he had on was the top part of his long johns," Warner said.
Warner pieced together other parts of his father's story by reading accounts from other veterans.
"He never really did tell how bad things were," Warner told the Sultana group.
Warner, Green and descendants of 22 other people on the Sultana sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic and lit candles at the end of the two-day session. After giving the names of their relatives, the descendants of those who died in the disaster blew out their candles followed by those whose relatives lived to tell the story.
Copyright 2003 Associated Press.
FAMILIES MEET IN MEMPHIS TO RECALL RIVERBOAT DISASTER
Descendants of soldiers blown into the Mississippi River in the worst U.S. maritime disaster have met to recall it in Memphis.
The Association of Sultana Descendants and Friends met for the 16th year in Memphis over the weekend.
Glenna Jenkins Green was born late in her father's life and thought Samuel Jenkins was spinning a great tale when he told kids about how he survived the Sultana disaster. Only later did she discover how terrible the event was.
The steamboat Sultana was vastly overloaded with Union soldiers released from Confederate prisoner of war camps when it exploded near Memphis on April 27th, 1865.
An estimated 18-hundred people died.
There were 23-hundred people aboard the Sultana when the boilers let go. The boat's normal capacity was 376."
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