Why Have You Never Heard of This?

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After reading my introduction you’re probably wondering why the heck you have never heard of the Sultana. Consider that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank with 29 people on board and everybody knows about that one (thanks to Gordon Lightfoot). In contrast, the Sultana disaster killed as many people as the bombing of the USS Arizona did at Pearl Harbor (maybe more: to this day, no one knows the exact death toll), and it’s buried so deeply in history that only geeks like me can find it. You know I’m a Civil War buff, and the Sultana is tied in with a number of events related to places I’ve been before. For one thing, many of the people on the Sultana were former prisoners of war at Andersonville, Georgia (Camp Sumter), the most infamous Confederate POW camp of the Civil War (the captain of the camp was executed for war crimes, if that is any indication). They stopped in Vicksburg, Mississippi to pick up this load of former prisoners who, now that the war was over, were ready to go home and recover from their wounds and their trauma. The most likely reason this wasn’t covered in history books is WHEN it happened. The newspapers of April 27, 1865 were far too busy covering something else: John Wilkes Booth had been found and killed on April 26 after a 12-day manhunt. Additionally, as the museum guide pointed out, President Lincoln’s funeral train was covered extensively as it traveled from Washington DC to Springfield, Illinois for burial. The train stopped in many major cities along the route to allow the public to view Lincoln’s coffin and pay their respects (instead of lying in state where people make the journey). A similar thing happened in 1968 when Robert Kennedy’s body was shipped via train and made frequent stops as people lined the tracks. When I visited Fort Sumter I mentioned that Major Robert Anderson (Louisville native!!), who had surrendered Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War, returned to the fort on April 14, 1865 to raise the flag that he had lowered four years earlier. That news was overshadowed by what happened later that evening at the Ford Theater. Similarly, the disaster of the Sultana was overshadowed by the coverage of Lincoln’s assassination and the manhunt and eventual death of Booth. In more recent times, you may remember that Farrah Fawcett died, but her death was quickly replaced by a bigger headline: Michael Jackson’s death later that same day. Although we didn’t have pop culture icons back then, the news — which, remember, traveled painfully slowly (via courier or telegraph, and many telegraph stations had been damaged or destroyed during the war [which is why it took so long for the news of Emancipation to reach Texas and the reason behind Juneteenth]). There was no CNN, no AP, and no cell phone video. But now you have heard about it, and you’re going to hear more! The photo attached is inside the Sultana Disaster Museum: a photographer happened to be at the dock when the Sultana was leaving port, less than 12 hours from its disastrous end.