The Deadliest Disaster in American River History Nobody Remembers

At 2 a.m. on April 27, 1865, seven miles north of Memphis, the steamboat Sultana blew apart in the middle of the Mississippi River. She was licensed to carry 376 passengers. That night she was carrying more than 2,000, most of them Union soldiers who had just walked out of Andersonville and Cahaba, two of the most notorious prison camps of the Civil War, finally going home. More than a thousand people died in the explosion, the fire and the freezing floodwater. It is still the deadliest disaster in the history of American rivers, and almost nobody remembers it. The day before, John Wilkes Booth had been shot dead, and the country's newspapers had a bigger story. This is the story of a boiler patched in a single day, a corrupt quartermaster whose brother had Abraham Lincoln's ear, and a kickback that crammed more than five times the legal load onto one boat. It covers the alligator crate that saved a soldier's life, the names washed off the coffins by a thunderstorm, and three investigations that never punished anyone. And it ends with the place the Sultana lies today: buried under a soybean field in Arkansas, two miles from the river. Was someone in your family on the Sultana, or did they come home from Andersonville or Cahaba? Tell us their name in the comments. So many of those men came from Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, and their names deserve to be remembered. If you love the hidden, dark and forgotten stories of America's great rivers, subscribe to Below the Levee. The floods, the disasters and the decisions that were buried below the levee are all here. #Sultana #MississippiRiver #CivilWar