Friday, April 16, 1999
Plaque would note Sultana's hellish end
On sails the steamer through the gloom,
On sleep the soldiers to their doom.
And death's dark angel — oh, so soon,
Calls loud the muster, roll in!
— William Norton, Civil War soldier and Sultana survivor from Summit County, Ohio.
BY RANDY McNUTT
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Sometimes Chris Heather walks along the Cincinnati riverfront and imagines what would have been if the Sultana had returned home.
That's the way it was supposed to be. The riverboat, overloaded with former prisoners of war, left Memphis on April 26, 1865, bound for Cairo, Louisville and Cincinnati. But early on April 27, the side-wheeler, a product of Cincinnati's boat yards, exploded in the darkness. People in Memphis, 10 miles to the south, heard the boom when the boat's leaky boilers exploded.
The disaster claimed about 1,700 of the Sultana's estimated 2,300 passengers, later prompting the nickname “Titanic of the Mississippi.” (1,503 people died when the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic in 1912.)
“The magnitude of the disaster has never received its proper place in history, mainly because it occurred just after Mr. Lincoln's assassination and at the conclusion of the Civil War,” Mr. Heather said. “The public was tired of bad news.”
But the Colerain Township videographer wants to keep alive the riverboat's connection to Cincinnati. He has asked the Ohio Bicentennial Commission in Columbus to erect a Sultana commemorative historical marker at Sawyer Point, near where the boat was built in 1862.
Many Sultana victims were weak Union soldiers returning from Southern prisoner-of-war camps in Andersonville, Ga., and Cahaba, Ala. Lost with the Sultana were 791 Buckeyes, 459 Hoosiers, 194 Kentuckians, and 1,500 horses, cows and pigs. And the ship's mascot alligator.
“It's a significant American tragedy with a solid Ohio connection,” said Brian Newbacher, spokesman for the Bicentennial Commission. “Of course, the decision is up to the marker committee. But the idea is good.”
The commission is seeking nominations for historical markers in time for Ohio's 200th birthday celebration in 2003. The deadline is June 30. So far this year, the commission has approved 15 markers at $1,500 to $2,000 each.
Mr. Newbacher said a local person or group must pay one-third of the cost of each marker; the remainder will be split between the Longaberger Legacy Initiative and the commission. Longaberger, a basket company in Dresden, Ohio, has donated $100,000 for the state's marker program, administered by the Ohio Historical Society.
Mr. Heather has requested a standard 4-by-4-foot cast-aluminum marker with text on both sides.
“The Sultana certainly deserves a marker,” Mr. Heather said. “It was the worst river disaster in American history, and the boat was built here in Cincinnati. The factory site is now a downtown riverfront park, visited by thousands of people annually. Perfect place for a marker.”
The factory, John Lithoberry Shipyard on Front Street, is gone. So is the Sultana's boiler maker, Moore and Richardson Steam Boiler Co., which was also on Front Street.
“The sad thing is, the Union soldiers survived Andersonville prison, only to blow up on the Sultana,” said Mr. Heather, 42, a former guide at the Petersburg National Battlefield in Virginia. “The thing that amazes me is that the remains of the boat are still buried under a 20-foot bed of mud in a soybean field. There is no memorial at the site, but there is one in Memphis.”
To help commemorate the boat, Mr. Heather has formed the Cincinnati Sultana Association. His goals: raise $700, enough for the local match, and use a Civil War re-enactment group at the marker's dedication at Sawyer Point.
The idea struck him last year, while watching a Civil War television special. With the help of Barbara Dawson, a reference librarian at the Cincinnati Historical Society, Mr. Heather started researching the Sultana. He learned that it was built in Cincinnati.
“In the mid-19th century, Cincinnati was a major (riverboat) construction site,” Ms. Dawson said. “Especially on the east side of town, by the river. It was known as the Fulton area.”
She said she found the factories' names in old city directories and a reference book on packet boats.
“Cincinnati's role in the war has always been downplayed,” Mr. Heather said. “The city had a number of factories that cast cannons. Cincinnati supplied many soldiers, including my own great-great-grandfather. That got me interested in the war as a kid. My goal is to keep alive the history here.”
After its birth in Cincinnati, the Sultana became a river transport. On April 21, 1865, it steamed up the Mississippi from New Orleans with a load of sugar and about 100 passengers.
At Vicksburg, the boat expe rienced problems with its high-pressure boilers. Engineers patched them. Capt. J.C. Mason, an experienced riverman from St. Louis, opened his vessel to hundreds of Union soldiers who waited to go home. They crammed onto the hurricane deck, the Texas deck, the boiler deck — even into the pilot house.
“The crew kept herding soldiers on board,” Mr. Heather said. “It surprises me that such a knowledgeable river man could be so careless. But greed does that. The captain received $5 a head for each enlisted man — a lot of money then.
“Many of the soldiers were emaciated from the prison camps. Andersonville was a terrible place. The fire ants and humidity were unbelievable.”
The south-central Georgia town was home to a 261/2-acre prison that at its peak held 32,000 Union soldiers. It was designed to hold 10,000. By the spring of 1865, 12,912 men died there — mostly from malnutrition — in 14 months.
Camp survivors crammed the decks of the Sultana as it pushed its way north, the big wheels pounding the black current. The soldiers must have felt relieved, for finally they were heading north, to home and family.
At 2 a.m., as the Sultana rounded a bend, a massive fireball illuminated the flooded river and sent a hailstorm of red-hot coals and metal raining upon the passengers. Those who weren't killed leaped into the freezing river. Some were too weak to swim, or couldn't swim.
Others awoke suddenly and entered a nightmare. The twin stacks crashed onto the decks. The boat's 10-foot alligator mascot thrashed in a sturdy wooden cage. A soldier stabbed the gator to death with a bayonet, threw the cage overboard and jumped on top of it. Later, the soldier was rescued.
In Damn the Torpedoes! Naval Incidents in the Civil War, writer A.A. Hoehling said the river brimmed with skulls, clothes and charred wood that morning.
Ohioan William H. Norton, who lived to write poems and narratives about his experience, always remembered “that awful wail of hundreds of human beings burning alive in the cabins and under the fallen timber.”
The Sultana drifted and burned until it struck a small island, then sank, with a great hiss of steam, into history.
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