Sultana

by Alan Huffman

  Nathaniel Foglesong hung over the rudder post, brushing coals and cinders off his shoulders, until the flames burned his boot and he slid down onto the shoulders of a man below. “Get off from me!” the man shouted, to which Foglesong replied, “In a minute.” Nine men were hanging on to the rudder post. Finally Foglesong let go, calling out, “Here goes for ninety days!”—the prescribed time for militia enlistment. As he surfaced he grabbed someone’s ankle, was kicked away, grabbed it again, and with the other hand caught a cable dangling from the blazing stern. Looking over the fire-lit river, he saw the burned bodies of a man and two women on a section of floating wreckage. An Irishman named Patrick Larky, who had fought with a Michigan regiment, cried, “Come help poor Pat, he is a-drowning!” just before Foglesong saw him go under. Clutching a piece of flotsam, Foglesong dog-paddled to a section of broken floating deck, where a familiar soldier reached out a helping hand. “My God, Thaniel, is that you?” the man asked. “Yes, all that’s left of me,” Foglesong replied.

  Inside his stateroom, William Snow, the newly elected congressman from Arkansas, had not heard the explosion and was initially unaware of how dire the situation was. He took the time to dress and to tie his tie. When he emerged, the wind was carrying the fire rapidly over the center of the boat, the decks of which had been sundered by the explosion. Snow took off his coat, returned it to his stateroom, and trotted toward the stern, stepping over trampled bodies. The water was so crowded he decided it would be impossible to jump without landing on someone. Finally he found an open spot near one of the paddlewheels and dove in.

  Truman Smith was treading water when he came upon Henry Norton, another member of his Michigan cavalry, who was furious because someone had stolen his bundle of clothes. Smith told him to forget about it, but Norton was confident he could swim to the bank, and he wanted to find the thief. Norton had entered the water with an empty barrel but had a hard time holding on to it. When someone grabbed hold of his shirt, he slipped out of it. “I swam but a few feet when I found myself with four or five others,” he later recalled. “It seemed as though we all wanted to get hold of each other. I succeeded in getting the rest of my clothes off and got rid of my company.” Smith and Norton then swam away.

  Like most of the former prisoners, Joseph Bringman was in no condition for a major survival challenge. Thin, weak and sick, he had been sleeping fitfully when the boilers exploded, dreaming that he was on a leisurely walk up a long hill, at the top of which a rocky ledge jutted out over a river. Suddenly the dream merged with reality: When he stepped on the rock to look down at the river, it burst beneath his feet with a sound like the report of a cannon. “I felt pieces of the rock striking my face and head and I seemed to be hurled into the river,” he wrote. When he surfaced he was not yet fully conscious, but he shed his clothes and grabbed a few pieces of wood to keep himself afloat. The first piece was no bigger than his hand, but he quickly scooped up other bits of detritus and clutched them to his chest. A horse swam close by and nearly pushed him under. By the light of the fire he could see perhaps two hundred yards across the river, which was full of people, some swimming boldly, others splashing for a few moments before going under.

  William Peacock, who had lost a hundred pounds during his imprisonment, awoke buried in wreckage, bleeding and bruised, with one hip badly scalded. He had been thrown from the boiler deck wearing only his underwear, his hat, and a handkerchief tied around his neck—the parting gift of a friend who had died at Camp Fisk. He crawled off the side of the boat and into the water. A large section of the boiler deck had been thrown into the river intact, along with the men who had been sleeping on it, including Ohio soldier Jotham Maes. Everyone was ejected from the wreckage when it struck the water, but Maes managed to climb back on, along with nine others. Looking back at the boat, he saw the smokestacks collapse in opposite directions, crushing everyone in their way.

  William Boor, who had noted the repairs being made to the Sultana’s boilers at Vicksburg and opted not to bed down on the deck above them, was pinned beneath a section of the upper deck that collapsed under the falling smokestacks, but he managed to free himself and his friend Thomas Brink. As they made their way down a wrecked stair Boor asked Brink if he could swim. Brink could. Boor could not. Brink disappeared after diving in, and Boor never saw him again. Boor was afraid of both the water and the crowd. He tied his spare shirt inside a rubber blanket, picked up a piece of wood, tucked the bundle under his arms, and waited.

  A large group of Indiana soldiers had been bedded down on the Texas deck, while Romulus Tolbert’s 9th cavalry had chosen a spot directly in front of one of the wheel housings. All were dispersed after the explosion. Tolbert would never offer many details about what happened except to say that he found something to hold on to.

  J. Walter Elliott was awakened from his dreams by a sound he compared to the discharge of artillery or a train wreck. His recollections would have a theatrical ring. He was standing on the collapsed deck, wondering what to do, “when the scene lights up from below, disclosing a picture that beggars all description—mangled, scalded human forms heaped and piled amid the burning debris on the lower deck.” He heard shrieks and moans and the hiss of escaping steam. His face, throat, and lungs burned. He hastily dressed, groped his way over the debris, and through the gaping hole in the deck saw red-hot coals below and flames running up the splintered superstructure. He realized that his former cot had disappeared into the conflagration. Huge sections of iron and wood had been driven upward through the cabin, the hurricane deck, the Texas deck, and the pilot house.

  When W.S. Freisner heard shouting outside his cabin door, he stepped into the main saloon and peered into the maw, where he saw a man pinned beneath a heavy timber, being burned alive. The man saw him too and cried out, “Help, help, for God’s sake!” but as Freisner lamented, “There was an impossible gulf between us and I turned from the horrid sight.”

  William Crisp, a Michigan infantryman, was pinned to the floor beneath red-hot metal and could not move until it cooled. By then the cavern of the explosion was a hellish scene of hundreds of screaming people being burned alive. Crisp went over the side.

  George Young’s first thought was that lightning had struck the boat. He was pinned beneath wooden wreckage along with several other men, some of whom had been killed. He managed to extricate himself and struggled to free another man who was still alive, but he could not budge the heavy timbers. Soon the flames drove him away. “We could not escape from his hoarse cries,” he recalled, “and, cruel as it seems, we were relieved when death ended his horrible agony.”

  Commodore Smith, whose weight had dropped to less than a hundred pounds during his imprisonment at Cahaba, was buried in “dead and wounded comrades, legs, arms, heads, and all parts of human bodies, and fragments of the wrecked upper decks.” He remained on the boat for perhaps half an hour, during which he helped throw overboard dying men who would otherwise have been burned alive.

  Elliott would later claim that he had done the same. As the fire spread he watched stairways and portions of the decks collapse, then the smokestacks groan and topple. He pushed his way back into the smoke-filled cabin, entered an empty stateroom, and found a life preserver. On his way out he came upon a frightened young woman in a nightgown, followed her outside, grabbed her arm, and called a chambermaid to adjust the life preserver on her. Though it seems ludicrous that the chambermaid would still be at his beck and call, Elliott seems to have thought nothing of enlisting her service. Then, as he stood on the burning deck, he reported hearing a polite voice entreating him, and turned to see a calm yet gravely injured Daniel McLeod sitting on a cot at the edge of the burning cavern. McLeod had been reading at a table near the center of the cabin when he was blown across the room by the explosion. He was bruised, cut, and scalded, with both ankles broken so badly that the bones protruded. With his suspenders he had improvised tourniquets for both legs to keep from bleeding to death. Elliott recalled telling McLeod
that he could not help him because he could not swim, to which McLeod responded that he wanted only to be thrown overboard so he would not burn alive. In Elliott’s telling, he and another man hoisted McLeod to the rail, from which he descended on a hog chain to the water. McLeod’s account would differ from Elliott’s in one important detail: He would not mention Elliott at all.

  On all three decks, injured people were begging to be thrown overboard, believing that burning to death was worse than drowning. The brief choking of those who went under no doubt appeared less horrible than the extended, screaming agony of those being burned alive. M.H. Sprinkle and Billy Lockhart claimed to have thrown at least fifty helpless soldiers over the rail. Commodore Smith threw his share, too, and said it was “the hardest task of my life…the most heartrending task that human beings could be called upon to perform.” Some were so badly scalded that their skin slipped off as Smith struggled to pick them up. He watched them briefly writhe in the water before they went under.

  After watching two Kentuckians lament to each other that they could not swim, then jump overboard to drown together, Elliott felt compelled to find something that would float, “but everything available seemed to have been appropriated.” He tried to make a life preserver out of a stool, but that did not work. He threw a mattress overboard, but it was immediately submerged by drowning men. He found another mattress and slipped off to a quieter spot, “but it no sooner touched the water than four men seized it, turned it over, and it went under as I jumped. Down, down I went into the chilly waters. Some poor drowning wretch was clutching at my legs, but putting my hands down to release myself and vigorously treading water, I rose strangling to the surface, my scalded throat and lungs burning with pain. The mattress was within easy reach, with only one claimant. God only knows what had become of the three others.” Like many others that night, Elliott had for the first time caused another man to drown.

  As he floated near the boat Elliott narrowly missed being crushed when one of the boat’s wheelhouses collapsed, and he nearly went under the resulting waves. “There seemed to be acres of struggling humanity on the waters, some on debris of the wreck, some on the dead carcasses of horses, some holding to swimming live horses, some on boxes, bales of hay, drift logs, etc. Soon we parted company with the wreck and the crowd and drifted out into the darkness almost alone.”

  A.C. Brown had awakened on the opposite side of the cabin from where he had fallen asleep, and had seen the chandeliers of the ladies’ cabin swinging crazily as smoke and steam billowed through the rooms. Once on the deck, he helped a woman push her trunk into the river, watched as she jumped in after it, and then followed her. He would later recall his moment of joy when the Sultana departed Vicksburg, and conclude, “It is well, my friends, that we cannot see into the future.”

  Stephen Gaston, at fifteen one of the youngest soldiers on board, had spent the evening gorging on pilfered sugar and now searched in vain for his partner in crime, William Block. Failing to find him, he swung down to the boiler deck on the smokestack supports, then onto the starboard deck, where he found a flour barrel, undressed, and jumped into the river with it. Two or three men tried to overtake his barrel but drowned before reaching it.

  George Safford, who was traveling with his father, a member of the Sanitary Commission, fastened life belts to both of them before they dove in together. Once in the water they climbed upon a door. but as they paddled away a horse leaped from the main deck and landed on it, separating them.

  William McFarland saw a woman rush out of a stateroom with a small child in her arms, put a life preserver on it, and throw it into the river. When the child hit, only its bottom bobbed above the surface. The woman ran back into the stateroom, came back out, jumped into the water, and grabbed the child. McFarland did not see what happened next. By then he had noticed the seven-foot-tall Tennessean who, back in Memphis, had returned drunk to the boat at the point of bayonets, and he was concerned because he had teased the man.

  Ogilvie Hamblin was still on the deck when he heard men shouting that they were trapped inside the cargo hold. One of Hamblin’s arms had been amputated by Rebel surgeons soon after his capture, but with another man’s help he managed to pry open the hatch. The men “came rushing out of the hold like bees out of a hive, followed by dense clouds of steam and smoke.” Hamblin stripped and stood naked on the deck for a few long moments, deliberating until he had no choice but to escape the flames. “Screwing my courage up to the sticking point,” he later wrote—borrowing a phrase from Lady Macbeth—he watched for an opening amid the drowning crowds, then dove in and quickly swam away as best he could with one arm. Helpless against the strong currents, he resorted to floating—a wise move, and a remarkable feat in a moment of extreme agitation.

  Most of those who survived, as Elliott’s grandson later observed, did so “by thinking and acting independently.” Ohio soldier William Lugenbeal thought of the alligator in its crate, went to the closet where it was kept, broke in, dragged the box out, and ran his bayonet through the hissing reptile three times. He undressed, threw the box overboard, and climbed in. As he later wrote, “When a man would get close enough I would kick him off, then turn quick as I could and kick someone else to keep them from getting hold of me.” Occasionally someone pleaded that he was drowning, but Lugenbeal knew that if he helped, both would probably die. To those who later expressed shock upon hearing the story, he posed this question: “What do you think you would do?”

  By now the disaster was becoming evident from miles away. About seven miles downstream at Memphis, where the waterfront sentinels had admired the brightly lit Sultana steaming around the bend at midnight, the U.S. military packet Pocahontas lay moored at the foot of Beale Street. Shortly after 2 a.m., its watchman noticed a glow upriver and reported it to the pilot. The watchman thought that perhaps a house was on fire. As the glow brightened the pilot surmised that it was a boat, but he did nothing.

  In Mound City, Arkansas, two miles below the disaster scene, farmer John Fogleman was awakened by the sound of the explosion and from his veranda saw the burning steamboat in the distance. He aroused three neighbors, but none had a boat. The Pocahontas had been plying the river around Memphis for days, destroying all boats in private hands to prevent Confederate guerillas from using them.

  William Woodridge was asleep in his mother’s house on their flooded farm about a mile upriver when he was awakened by the noise of the explosion, which he said “rolled and re-echoed for minutes in the woodlands.” His room was soon lit by a strange light, and he raced to the porch. “It was so light, I could have picked up a pin,” he said of the fire’s glow. Standing with his mother and the farm’s overseer, he heard the cries and saw people jumping into the water. He had secreted a boat away, so he and the overseer hurried to it to begin helping with the rescue. A short distance upriver was a wood yard operated by William Boardman and R.K. Hill, who also set off in a hidden skiff when they heard the screams.

  No one, even those on shore, was prepared for what was now unfolding—for the number of lives at stake or the difficulty of coming to their rescue. The Mississippi, even at a normal stage, is not a languorous river. From a distance it appears to move slowly because it is so large, but its velocity is stunning. It is one of the greatest forces on earth, pushing and pulling relentlessly toward the Gulf even though its bottom at Vicksburg is below sea level. The bottom itself is a river of flowing sand, and the channel is riddled with whirlpools strong enough to suck full-grown trees beneath the surface, then propel them violently upward to break with a splash, seemingly from nowhere, miles downstream. As they drifted downstream some of the swimmers were sucked under by whirlpools. Joseph Taylor Elliott and three other men were holding tightly to a section of floating stairs, moving tantalizingly close to the Tennessee bank, when suddenly they struck a cross-current that began to whirl. “Into this we went, and such a twisting and turning round, upside down and every other way, was never seen,” he later recalled. He held o
n for the ride until the stairs “shot out into the current and on down the river, less one man who was left in the whirlpool and drowned.”

  The currents were particularly risky during a flood, more so for weakened men who suddenly found themselves subject to the strange, terrifying, inescapable pull of gravity in a cold, deep, surging river. The sick and injured were also more vulnerable to the water’s bitter chill. The river at that time of year would have been less than sixty degrees, which sounds relatively warm but in fact is extremely cold to a human body. Water draws heat from the body more than twenty times as fast as air, and a body begins to fail when its core temperature drops below about ninety degrees. In water as cold as the Mississippi was that night, even a strong swimmer would have only about ninety minutes before serious trouble started, and swimming—expending energy—would simply hasten the process. Even the shock of entering water that cold can cause an involuntary gasping reflex, sending an able swimmer straight to the bottom. As body temperature drops, heart rate and blood pressure increase dramatically. Blood vessels near the surface constrict as blood is shunted to vital organs. Muscles tense, generating more body heat, which is then lost. Blood pressure then begins to go down. Mental processes become impaired. People become irrational, lose dexterity, and make bad calls, such as swimming away from shore or from rescuers. Often they lose consciousness. Those in the water, even if they could swim, were in a race against time.