Reviews

Disaster on the Mississippi: The Sultana Explosion, April 27, 1865

They had braved the horrors of the first modern war. They had lived through the inhuman conditions in Cahaba and Andersonville prison camps. And now, 17 days after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, they were free aboard the sidewheel steamboat Sultana and heading north. Most would never make it home. The Sultana was built to carry 376 passengers. On April 26, it left Vicksburg, Mississippi, with 2,500 on board, including 2,300 recently paroled Union prisoners of war (including more than 650 Ohioans). The boat made it as far as Memphis, Tennessee, before its boilers exploded. The accident claimed 1,700 lives and remains the worst maritime disaster in the history of the United States. In Disaster on the Mississippi, Gene Eric Salecker pieces together—through survivors’ letters and recollections, newspaper clippings, government records and other sources—the nearly forgotten story of the Sultana “The force of the blast on the Sultana was tremendous,” Salecker writes, “with the three boilers completely shredded. Shards of red-hot metal, ranging in size from larger than a man to a fraction of an inch, flew outward from the center of the main deck.”

The blast threw passengers 40 or 50 feet in the air across the deck of the boat or out into the frigid Mississippi. The steam from the boilers scalded anyone unfortunate to be in its path. One Ohio soldier was protected by a blanket but received burns on his feet, hands and head.

Pvt. John H. Kochenderfer of the 102nd Ohio Infantry, D company, recalled, “I found myself 300 feet from the boat, shrouded in total darkness and in what appeared to be an ocean of water. To say I was dumbfounded would but faintly express my condition.”

Men who couldn’t swim jumped from the burning wreckage and then clung to whatever floated and was within reach. James King P. Brady (Company B, 64th Ohio Infantry) witnessed as 300 men dropped into the water clutching a stageplank. It surfaced with only 15 or 20 men still holding on.

by Gene Eric Salecker

of men in the water pleading for help, clinching to one another … going down in the dozens.”

Pvt. William Boor (Company D, 64th Ohio Infantry) was at first prescient, later almost a hero. When he boarded the Sultana, he was told to bunk above the boilers, which he found “not very favorable. … If the boat should blow up … we (will) go higher than a kite.”

After the explosion, Boor found his “comrade” Thomas Brink, pinned beneath the wreckage. “I commenced clearing away broken timbers … and got him out.” Brink, who could swim, jumped over and was never seen again. Boor went into the river with a length of board to keep him afloat. But before he did, he was distressed to “see hundreds

Pvt. William Lugenbeal (Company F, 135th Ohio Infantry) proved resourceful. “Remembering the Sultana’s (living) mascot alligator and the sturdy wooden crate that it was kept in,” Salecker writes, Lugenbeal “stabbed the alligator with a bayonet, and dumped the dead reptile on the burning deck.” He held onto the crate until he was rescued by the steamboat Essex. In his afterword, Salecker laments the forgotten victims (and heroes) of the Sultana disaster.

“The paroled prisoners who had been shoe-horned onto the Sultana, along with her forgotten civilian passengers and crew, were not important enough to be remembered. No Astors or Strauses or Guggenheims were on the Sultana

“Her victims were just ordinary citizens and common soldiers on their way home to their loved ones after doing their part for their country.”

—Bill Eichenberger, Echoes Magazine

Learn more about President Warren G. Harding and first lady Florence Harding at the Ohio History Connection’s new Harding Presidential Library & Museum in Marion, where you can also visit the restored Harding Home and nearby Harding Memorial that President Herbert Hoover dedicated in 1931. Plan your visit to Marion’s Harding Presidential Sites at hardingpresidentialsites.org.

See The Voyage of Understanding—Warren Harding’s Trip West and Untimely Death, page 30.