Terror on the Mississippi: The Sultana Disaster, Part I

Normally I would have just browsed the article and placed the magazine in it's appropriate place on the stack with the others; but this one held a special interest for me - one of the Union soldiers on board the Sultana when it exploded just happened to be my G. G. Grandfather, Abner Absalom Boling. Fortunately for him - and me - he survived.

He had joined at the age of 13 on April 7th. 1864, just in time to participate in the Atlanta campaign. During this campaign he participated in and was captured during the McCook-Stoneman raid of July 27, 1864.

He spent the following nine months in rest and relaxation at the Andersonville resort as a guest of the Confederate states.

In April 1865 a prisoner exchange was agreed to and 5,000 weak and emaciated but happy Andersonville prisoners, including my great-great-grandfather, were sent on their way as best they could, walking and by rail, to Camp Fisk near Vicksburg, Mississippi.

From there, the plan called for their return to Camp Chase Ohio by steamboats, at which point they would be mustered out.

On the night of April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana was headed north grossly overloaded with it's human cargo of exchanged Union prisoners of war, when it suddenly exploded in the middle of the flooded Mississippi river just north of Memphis Tenn.

The Sultana was licensed to carry 376 passengers including crew, but a war powers act had made all boats operating under U.S. government contracts void of the few existing regulations.

So when the Sultana was loaded with over 2,000 returning prisoners of war from Andersonville and Cahaba, plus the regular paying passengers that included 12 Sisters of Charity and their escort as well as a Chicago Opera Troupe, they technically hadn't broken any laws.

The resulting lose of life from the Sultana was more than was lost on the Titanic, and was approximately equal to the number of Union Soldiers killed during the Battle of Shiloh.

Forgotten History

Since the introduction of riverboats in 1812, there had been 200 riverboat accidents attributed to boiler explosions, killing over 1,500 passengers and crew. The Sultana Disaster would more than double that figure overnight, with between 1,700 to 2000 passengers and crew dead.

Ordinarily if such a tragic calamity had taken place at any other time it would have been front-page news, yet it received only secondary coverage by the major news sources outside of the Vicksburg area.

Perhaps this

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