Buried Crimes: The Forgotten Disaster of the Steamboat Sultana

In 1982, the wreckage of a massive steamboat was found buried under thirty feet of soil in an Arkansas soybean field. Last week, we uncovered the forgotten inferno of Halifax, a city erased by a shipload of explosives. The steamboat Sultana was lost for a different reason: it was buried, first by the river, and then by history itself. The file on this case is thin, not because the crime was small, but because it was convenient to forget. The scene is Vicksburg, Mississippi, in late April, 1865. The Civil War is over. Union soldiers, skeletal and sick from Confederate prison camps, are finally free.

All they want is to go home. They crowd the docks, waiting for transport north. The Sultana, a 260-foot-long paddle-wheel steamboat, is waiting for them. It’s rated to carry three hundred and seventy-six passengers. But there was a problem. And the problem was money. The U.S. government was paying a bounty for each soldier returned home. Five dollars for an enlisted man, ten dollars for an officer. The Sultana’s part-owner, Captain J. Cass Mason, saw an opportunity. He wasn't just offered a few soldiers. He was offered thousands. And he took them. All of them.

More than two thousand men were crammed onto a vessel designed for a fraction of that number. But there was another problem, one that only a few people knew about. One of the ship’s four massive boilers had a leak. A serious one. At Vicksburg, a boilermaker named R.G. Taylor inspected the damage. He told Captain Mason the truth: the bulging iron plate needed to be fully replaced. It would take days. Mason, with his human cargo waiting and the government’s money on his mind, refused. He ordered a temporary patch. Just enough to get them up the river.

Taylor did as he was told, knowing it was not enough. He warned that he wouldn't take the ship to St. Louis for all the money in the world. The patch was a death sentence, hammered into place with greed. At two o’clock in the morning on April twenty-seventh, 1865, just north of Memphis, the patched boiler gave way. Then the others went with it. The explosion tore the Sultana in half. Hundreds were killed instantly by the blast and the scalding steam. Hundreds more were thrown into the Mississippi, which was swollen with spring melt and nearly five miles wide.

In the darkness, survivors clung to debris, to floating mules, to anything that would keep them above the freezing water. Many, weakened by war and imprisonment, simply drowned. Of the roughly two thousand four hundred souls on board, an estimated one thousand eight hundred died. It remains the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history. More people died on the Sultana than on the Titanic. So why have you never heard of it? Because on April fourteenth, President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. On April twenty-sixth, just hours before the Sultana exploded, his killer, John Wilkes Booth, was cornered and killed.

The nation’s attention, its capacity for grief, was already exhausted. The newspapers were full. As one historian put it, America was so beaten down by the horrors of the war that the loss of one more boatload of soldiers… almost passed without notice. There was no major investigation. No one was held accountable for the overcrowding, for the faulty repair, for the raw, calculated greed that sent so many men to their deaths. It took until 1871 for the government to create the Steamboat Inspection Service, a direct response to this kind of disaster.

But for the victims of the Sultana, it was far too late. The river buried the ship. The headlines buried the story. And for more than a century, that’s where it stayed.