Sultana

by Alan Huffman

  Like the men at Camp Fisk, the Sultana had spent the last few days in a kind of limbo. On the return trip from New Orleans, one of the massive coal-fired boilers, which heated water for the boat’s steam engines, had sprung a leak, threatening to thwart Captain Mason’s plans to haul his share of paroled soldiers. None of the prisoners were yet aware of the trouble, and few concerned themselves with how they were to be loaded, or on which boat. The war was over and they were going home. Traveling north in spring would mean going back in time, not only from the verdant flowering of the deep South to the first buds at the end of the Midwestern winter, but to a place that had remained static in their memories as the world around them unraveled again and again. Samuel Raudebaugh, a paroled prisoner who boarded the Sultana that day, wrote, “We were on our way home from those horrid dens of cruelty and starvation. Yes, we had lived through it all, and hoped, yes expected soon, to see loved ones and home and enjoy some of the peace we had fought to restore. Home!”

  But not everyone was ready to rejoice. The men had encountered new perils at every step of the way during the war, and many times they had been mistaken in believing their troubles were behind them. Ohio soldier William Boor was among the wary ones. He heard the sound of hammering on the Sultana’s boiler and went to investigate. When he saw what was going on, he advised his friends that they should avoid sleeping atop the boiler room. They did so—but they boarded the boat anyway. They were desperate to get home.

  The Sultana was licensed to carry three hundred seventy-six passengers and already had about one hundred eighty private passengers and crew on board, all of whom no doubt watched in dismay as more than two thousand additional passengers—the paroled prisoners, their Union Army guards, a few Rebel soldiers headed home, and members of the U.S. Sanitary Commission—snaked from the gangplank along the waterfront.

  The Sultana had been built two years earlier for Captain Preston Lodwick of Cincinnati, at a cost of $60,000, and outfitted with dual side wheels. Coal-fired furnaces heated four high-pressure boilers, each eighteen feet long, which in turn drove the steam engines. The boilers were of a new design, of lighter construction. The Sultana was not a particularly luxurious boat, but it was, under normal circumstances, commodious: Two hundred sixty feet long and forty-two feet at its widest point. A wide stairway led from the bow to the second-floor deck, where a long hallway or saloon led to the staterooms. The saloon was finely appointed with glass chandeliers, elaborate woodwork, and stylish carpets and furniture. There were both a bar and a ladies’ lounge. The panels of the stateroom doors were embellished with distinctive oil paintings, but most of the staterooms were small—about eight feet square, furnished with bunk beds and a chair, wash basin, and chamber pot, with a second door leading onto the deck, where Windsor chairs and cuspidors invited passengers to view the passing scenery. At mealtimes a long collapsible table was set up in the main cabin, where food was served on fine china and crystal. Most of the paroled prisoners would not see any of this. The better accommodations were restricted to private passengers and officers, though no one was truly comfortable once the ragged masses came aboard. Cots were set up in the hallways and on the decks, and in between men claimed any spot they could find. They relieved themselves over the rails.

  Beneath the cabin floor were quarters allotted for cheaper fares, where the passengers shared space with the crew, the freight, and the boilers; dined on tin plates; and slept on the floor. Above the promenade deck was the hurricane deck, where a yawl hung that the crew sometimes used to test the water’s depth ahead of the steamer. Still higher was the Texas deck, which included a small enclosed area where the boat’s officers were quartered. Crowning it all was the pilot house, enclosed by glass windows, with a large spoked wheel five feet in diameter, a rope that operated the steam whistle, and a cord leading to a brass signal bell below. There was also a bench where passengers could visit with the pilot and observe the scenery from a lofty perch.

  Despite their embellishments, the fine china, and their often pretentious names, steamboats were not built to last. As a result of fires, boiler explosions, and hull-puncturing snags, their average life span was only a few years. By 1860, almost two hundred boats had been destroyed in boiler explosions alone, and more than three hundred fifty people had died. Owners considered such accidents part of the cost of doing business. The Sultana had paid for itself twice over during its first year of operation, after which Captain Mason and five associates bought her for $80,000. Mason had begun his steamboating career as a clerk and got a leg up when he married the daughter of a shipping magnate, Captain James Dozier of St. Louis, in 1860. At the time he took over the helm of the Sultana, Mason was thirty-four years old and “cut a handsome figure in his black frock coat, the uniform of his calling,” according to J. Walter Elliott’s grandson, James W. Elliott, author of Transport to Disaster. The mates, Elliott the younger wrote, were a different sort. “Typically, the steamboat mate was big and burly, whiskered and tattooed, and he attacked his sundry problems with a raging gusto which was awesome to behold. Even his smallest command was delivered in an angry roar, and his every ‘heave’ and ‘belay’ was accompanied by a sulfurous stream of profanity.” On the Sultana, the first and second mates were William Rowberry and William Butler.

  Among the seventy-five or so passengers who had boarded at New Orleans was the Spikes family, emigrating north from Louisiana and reportedly carrying with them their life savings, $1,700 in gold. Seth Hardin, a former Illinois infantryman who was returning with his wife from their honeymoon, also boarded at New Orleans, as did a Kansas businessman named William Long, who deposited $700 in the boat’s safe, and Daniel McLeod, a crippled veteran from Illinois whose right knee had been shattered by a bullet at Shiloh. As the Sultana embarked from New Orleans, carrying a modest cargo of hogs, mules, and sugar, Lincoln’s funeral train was starting its seventeen-hundred-mile course through the North.

  When the Sultana was about seventy-five miles below Vicksburg, Mason’s chief engineer, Nathan Wintringer, informed him that one of the boilers had sprung a leak. According to Elliott’s grandson, the boilers had been a source of “frequent, almost constant, annoyance” for months, and on previous trips the boat had been forced to stop at Natchez and Vicksburg for repairs. The Sultana’s boilers were of a newer tubular design, lighter than the older versions, which were essentially giant kettles over a firebox. Tubular boilers were considered more productive and fuel efficient, but they proved difficult to keep free of sediments and other debris that impeded the flow, particularly on the muddy Mississippi, because the water was drawn directly from the river. A blockage in a boiler was potentially disastrous because it would lead to a concentration of superheated water, which in turn could cause an explosion. Likewise, the accumulation of sediments could lead to corrosion, and any careening of the boat could cause water to drain, opening dangerous air pockets in the superheated tubes. A resulting leak could cause a sudden eruption of pressurized hot water and steam. The Sultana’s tubes and tanks had been cleaned before the boat left St. Louis, but on the return trip from New Orleans, a trickle of water began dripping from between two warped plates. Wintringer told Mason that the repairs could not be made while the boat was underway and the metal was hot, so Mason agreed to make the repairs at Vicksburg. His plan was to put off doing anything major until he reached St. Louis. Instead, the leak would be patched with a plate, about two feet by one foot wide and a quarter-inch thick—which, significantly, was thinner than the boiler itself.

  The Sultana arrived back at Vicksburg at 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 23. The embers from the fireboxes were dumped overboard, the boilers were allowed to cool, and “Without waiting for the gangplank, one of the fire men sprang onto the wharf and went racing toward town,” James Elliott wrote. The fireman (so named because he stoked the fire that heated the boiler water) headed to a foundry, where he requested the services of a boiler mechanic and a riveting hammer. Meanwhile, the Sultana’s business agent hurried down
the steep bluff to meet the boat. By then the Henry James had left with its thirteen hundred parolees, and the Olive Branch had left with seventeen hundred. The two boats had been overloaded, but the regulations had been routinely ignored by the military during the war. The standard price paid was $5 per head for enlisted men and $10 for officers, and even at the bulk rate the Sultana’s owners reportedly received—$3 per head for two thousand men—they could expect $6,000 in extra profits.

  The Sultana was the fifth boat to carry the name (the word has several meanings, including the wife, sister, or mother of a sultan), and its predecessors had all ended their runs in disaster. One collided with another steamer, resulting in great loss of life. One burned at the St. Louis wharf. Another lost her smokestacks to a gale, and the fourth burned at Hickman, Kentucky. The current Sultana had its persistent boiler problems, which, coupled with the wartime interruption of commerce, had caused it to decline in profitability to the point that Mason, a part-owner of the company, was forced to sell part of his share in early 1865. He then joined an association of boats called the Merchant and People’s Steamboat Line, which contracted with the federal government to transport troops and supplies. As part of its contract, the Sultana was inspected in St. Louis on April 12, 1865, where the inspectors were surprised to find a pet alligator that served as the crew’s mascot. The boilers passed the inspection.

  Upon his arrival, Mason and his agent went to Hatch’s office to try to get a commitment for passengers. According to Salecker, “Hatch was anxious to see Mason get the men and, perhaps at the time, to line his own pockets.” Mason reportedly became angry over the length of time he was told it would take to assign passengers, and he told Hatch it would not be worth waiting an extra day for the prisoners’ rolls to be completed. Hatch blamed the delay on Speed, so Mason visited him, and Speed told him that he could give him anywhere from three hundred to seven hundred parolees, depending upon how many were on the finished rolls. Mason responded that he was “entitled to those men,” according to his agent’s testimony during a later inquiry, and said Hatch would take care of the trains to get the men to the waterfront. Speed insisted that he could not come up with any more men on Mason’s schedule, but eventually he agreed to hasten the process by checking the names of the parolees as they were being loaded on the boat—a plan Dana approved. Speed told Mason that he had about fourteen hundred men left at Camp Fisk, though he later learned there were more than two thousand, and they agreed that all would go on the Sultana. The repairs to the boilers, which continued through the night, were never mentioned, and Captain William Kerns, who was normally in charge of river transport, was not informed of the plan.

  The next day, as Speed was dressing, Hatch arrived and said he wanted to divert some of the parolees to the Pauline Carroll, which was also tied up at the Vicksburg wharf. While Salecker surmised that Hatch had gotten a better kickback deal with the other boat, it was Hatch who raised the possibility of bribery after Speed insisted on putting all the remaining men on the Sultana. At about 11 a.m., another boat, the Lady Gay, docked at Vicksburg beside the Sultana. There was talk of diverting some of the Sultana’s passengers to the boat, but the idea never got off the ground. At about noon, the first trainload of remaining parolees left Camp Fisk, and an hour later they began filing from the depot on their way to the waterfront. Among them were twenty-three patients confined to cots and two hundred seventy-seven men who were unable to walk unassisted, all of whom had been in area hospitals. The cots were to be placed on the forward end of the cabin deck, above the boilers, where the patients would be warmer. The train continued to shuttle between the city and Camp Fisk for the rest of the day. Seeing that the Sultana was getting overcrowded, the Union surgeon in charge at Vicksburg requested permission to remove the seriously ill men and to prevent the nonambulatory patients from boarding, because he felt they would be in jeopardy. Dana granted him permission to do so—a decision that no doubt saved many lives.

  The last trainload arrived just before dark, and the officials in charge of the loading were still jockeying for position, attempting to undermine one another’s efforts. It was obvious that the men would be more comfortable, and the passage safer, if some were shunted to the Pauline Carroll, but that never happened. One officer later testified that he stopped Speed at the wharf and warned him that the Sultana was becoming dangerously overloaded, but that Speed simply walked away. The loading continued. When the men from the last train saw the overcrowding aboard the Sultana, and the empty decks of the Pauline Carroll beside it, about a third of them resisted boarding. An officer then told them that the Pauline Carroll was infected with smallpox, and the men reluctantly shuffled aboard the Sultana. With so many aboard, the men had to be redistributed to prevent structural damage to the boat, despite hastily installed auxiliary supports to the decks. According to later testimony, even Captain Mason protested the overloading. “Mason by this time was thoroughly alarmed,” James Elliott wrote. “He had been anxious to make a profit—and still was, for that matter—but he had no desire to see his boat crushed under foot. Throughout the afternoon he had managed to maintain an uneasy silence. But now, as the shadows lengthened with evening’s approach, he could keep quiet no longer. Stepping in front of the gangway he held up his hand and halted the marching line. One of the prisoners heard him say that he had enough men on board and could take no more.” But he had lost control and was overruled.

  After the last man boarded, the initial head count was thirteen hundred, which was absurdly low. The first and third trainloads alone had carried sixteen hundred men combined. Told that an additional six hundred fifty men had come on a second train, Captain George Augustus Williams, who was charged with keeping records of the loading, simply added them in and came up with just under two thousand. In fact, there were many more; Gambrel’s tally was about twenty-four hundred, not counting a hundred civilian passengers and a crew of eighty, for a total of almost twenty-six hundred.

  At 8 p.m., Kerns left the boat and headed toward the Pauline Carroll. He had earlier convinced the boat’s captain to delay his departure until the Sultana left, hoping it would become obvious that some of the men should be transferred. The captain had agreed to stand by, but now Kerns told him he might as well go. Soon the Pauline Carroll backed away from the wharf, bearing a total of seventeen paying passengers.

  Attempts to keep the parolees in orderly groups, putting most of the Ohioans on the hurricane deck and the Indianans on the boiler deck, proved futile. The men went where they wanted to go. In the end there was not even a reliable accounting of the passengers’ names. Nearly all the men were young—on average, twenty to twenty-one years old—but most were also weak and weary, and crowded uncomfortably together. As they milled around on the decks the floors creaked ominously underfoot.

  At about 1 a.m., the Sultana cast off. Soon after, Gambrel, the boat’s clerk, stopped by Ohio soldier Alexander Brown’s stateroom, where they talked about Andersonville and the war. Brown asked Gambrel how many passengers were aboard the boat. Gambrel gave him a figure of twenty-four hundred and said that if the Sultana reached Cairo, it would set the record for the greatest number of passengers on a boat on western waters.

  Among the civilians who had boarded at Vicksburg was Anna Annis, the wife of Lieutenant Harvey Annis, who was ill. She had come to Memphis with their young daughter to escort him home. Also boarding was the Chicago Opera Troupe, en route to a performance in Memphis. The troupe would later put on a free show for the Sultana passengers, including blackface routines and the singing of familiar soldiers’ songs, on the bow of the boat. Meanwhile, twelve women of a group sometimes referred to as the Sisters of Charity—officially, the Ladies Christian Commission, a volunteer organization—wandered through the throngs, handing out hymnals and crackers.

  James W. Elliott wrote that neither Mason nor his engineer felt good about the situation. Wintringer “nursed his fractious boilers with more than usual suspicion and watched apprehensively for
the next sign of trouble.” Meanwhile, Rowberry and his crew continued adding supports to the sagging decks. The boat was so top-heavy that she rolled slightly with every turn and strained under the weight against the flooded river. The pilots attempted to hug the banks, avoiding the strongest currents, but periodically had to cross to the other side when the boat shuddered against the grain. Occasionally, floating logs struck the sides.

  The Sultana reached Helena, Arkansas, at about 7 a.m. on Wednesday, April 26, thirty hours after leaving Vicksburg. The first night and day had gone uneventfully, J. Walter Elliott recalled, though there was a brief scare at Helena when the passengers crowded to one side to pose for a photographer. Curious townspeople had also gathered at the waterfront, and when the passengers saw the photographer they rushed to the port side, wanting to be in the photo, the boat listed and nearly capsized.

  The Sultana remained at Helena only about an hour. The Chicago troupe performed another show, the crew put a stop to the alligator-gawking by moving the reptile to a locked closet beneath a stairway, and the passengers went back to their chosen spots. The one stove on the deck was used solely for making coffee, and even that was difficult to get to, so most of the men had to eat hardtack and dried meat and wash it down with river water. The water closets were largely inaccessible, too, which mattered because many of the men suffered from chronic diarrhea. Their only option was to hang over the rails or to use holes some of the men had cut in the wheel housings. The men entertained themselves by watching the passing scenery—mostly plantation houses, slave cabins, and other boats. As the sun set, painting the sky vivid orange, Chester Berry, who had spent most of the day leafing through one of the hymnals given out by the Sisters of Charity, sat against a wall and sang “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” a song that had been popular when he left home. When the Sultana finally reached Memphis, an Illinois cavalry regiment stationed on the bluffs cheered, and the men on the boat responded in kind.