Sultana

by Alan Huffman

  Tolbert and Maddox, who were separated during the disaster and afterward treated at different hospitals, did not keep up with each other on the trains either. Maddox’s chronic diarrhea, which he had contracted in camp, and which had gotten worse at Cahaba, hit him hard again on the way home, when he was further weakened from his Sultana ordeal. As he later wrote, “I was taken with Chronic Diarrhea as I was coming home on the cars between Cairo, Ill. and Indianapolis, Ind. It was between the first and forth of May 1865 I was not with eney one that I noad the name of All the comred that had bin with me in the prison had bin seprated by the expotion of the Sultana I did not report to eney dockter as I thought get a furlow home.”

  He and Tolbert both arrived in Madison, Indiana, by train on May 6.

  Tolbert would later write his own brief account in support of Maddox’s application for a military pension, in which he claimed physical disability as a result of his service: “I am ackuainted with John C. Maddox,” he said, in obvious understatement. “I have been ackuainted with him every since he was a boy. I believe him to be truthfull and onest. I was with him in prison and on the Boat Sultana when it exploded and then we were seperated I did not see him until after I got home and not living in the same neighborhood did not see him verry ofton. He told me he had diarea bad. I took diarea under the same circumstances. But few left after the explosion and being seperated makes the required evidence hard to find. Will he haft to go unpensioned because his eye witnesses died in prison or was blowed away or drowned.”

  The answer would be a long time in coming.

  Chapter Fifteen

  HOME

  AFTER MONTHS, EVEN YEARS, OF RESTING THEIR HEADS on the hard ground of army camps, spooning on cold winter nights with other men, and in some cases sleeping in upright fetal positions in holes in the ground, the Sultana survivors finally made it home, where they could retire at night to their own beds. For Tolbert it was the familiar wooden four-poster in his mother’s home. But many of them slept fitfully, whether as a result of injuries or diseases or because they had developed a bad case of nerves. It was not as if they left it all behind.

  For the most part, the general public did leave it behind. After four years of massive bloodletting, and with everyone’s attention focused on the fallout from the Lincoln assassination and the end of the war, the magnitude of the disaster could penetrate only so far into the national psyche. Stories of Southern depravity were favorite chew-toys in the postwar North, and for a while there was an eager audience for prison tales. Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville, was tried and hanged for war crimes, partly as a result of a groundswell of popular support for revenge against the Rebels. (Champ Ferguson was also hanged.) But the Sultana story was not so satisfying to contemplate. The disaster was overwhelming and the enemy unclear. The Union Army had won the war, and the number of casualties had far exceeded the losses aboard one steamboat. The story quickly faded from the headlines, even as the federal government undertook a perfunctory investigation into the events that brought it about.

  Many saw what happened on the Sultana as a terrible accident. A few, particularly among the survivors, claimed that it was a case of Rebel sabotage. In May 1888, a St. Louis newspaper published an article about a veterans’ reunion in which a local resident, William Streeter, claimed that a Confederate blockade-runner had sabotaged the Sultana by placing a bomb—specifically, a disguised torpedo—in the coal bin, knowing that it would later be loaded into the furnace. The story was incredible for many reasons, not the least of which was the difficulty of secreting a bomb aboard the boat and the unlikelihood that the crew would have failed to recognize that something was amiss. Added to that, the problems with the Sultana’s boilers were by then well known. Testimony during a congressional inquiry left no doubt of that.

  Though testimony at the tribunals and inquiries revealed that the great loss of life was the responsibility of the army’s chain of command and the greed of private contractors, the prosecutors showed a lack of verve for punishing anyone. They pointed an accusing finger at Wintringer, the engineer, but he suffered no significant repercussions. His engineer’s license was revoked, but in no time the governing agency, the St. Louis Board of Inspectors, reinstated it. In June 1866, a military tribunal found Captain Frederick Speed guilty of negligence and ordered him dismissed from the army, but the verdict was reversed by the judge advocate general, and Speed was honorably discharged. Speed chose to remain in Vicksburg, where he became a criminal court judge and a powerful Mississippi politician. A street in the city still bears his name.

  The commissary general over Union prisoners concluded, following the inquiry, that Speed and Captain Rueben Hatch were “the most censurable” but that Captain Kerns (who supervised the loading) and Captain Williams had also contributed to the disaster. Hatch claimed in a rather petulant letter to a fellow officer on September 29, 1865, that he “had no control over the loading the steamer Sultana” and predicted that Speed’s dispatches would provide supporting evidence, though in the end he never had to prove anything. The prosecutors in one inquiry were unable to compel Hatch to testify, likely because of his political connections. A request to the secretary of war to have him arrested and transported to Vicksburg was ignored. Hatch’s career did end on an ignoble note, however. On a later trip aboard the steamer Atlantic, he deposited almost $15,000 in government funds in the boat’s safe, which was subsequently, curiously, robbed. The thief was caught, but the recovered funds did not include $8,500 in government money that Hatch claimed to have put there, and he was forced to pay it back.

  Ultimately the Sultana inquiries were mostly for show. Even the death toll was never fully reckoned. Officially, it was listed at just more than twelve hundred, which failed to include an entire trainload of passengers from Camp Fisk. Chester Berry, who later became a preacher, lamented in his book Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors, first published in 1892, that because of the public’s limited interest the tragedy found “no place in American history.” He found that “strange.”

  The investigations did reach one meaningful conclusion: That the boilers were the cause of the explosion. After the last survivors departed Memphis and the river level began to fall, much of the Sultana’s surviving machinery was recovered from the wreck, piled on barges, carried to Hen Island, and sold for salvage. The Sultana’s safe, containing at least $32,000, more than half of it in gold, was never recovered. Two weeks after the disaster, pieces of the boilers were inspected, and one was intact, indicating that three of the four had blown. Salecker concludes that the explosion was caused by too much pressure and too little water in the boilers, the latter condition being exacerbated by the frequent careening of the top-heavy, overloaded boat, which left water gaps that caused the tubing to overheat. There is no proof that the patch was a factor, but it seems logical.

  For the survivors, there was no real closure, and even returning soldiers who had not endured the Sultana disaster often found their homecomings anticlimactic. As survivor Benjamin Magee wrote years later, “With many of us there was a very noticeable difference between 1862 and 1865—between the going and the coming volunteer. No fluttering handkerchiefs greeted the return of our regiment. No committees of invitation or reception met us at the depot; no loud sounding cannon belched forth thunders of welcome. More than half of the 208,000 Indiana soldiers were already discharged, and the land was full of soldiers then; nearly every other man you met was a soldier.” The returning veterans, he wrote, “had been coming home, and kept coming, till their coming had become monotonous, and ceased to cause remark or ripple in the busy circles of life.” The war had been their shared world, and it was over. After they were mustered out in July, the Sultana survivors faced the next phase of what was to be their long-running challenge, largely on their own.

  They were in some ways primed by past travails, but in others they were dangerously ill equipped for the new and different set of stresses that came to bear during the remai
nder of their lives. A person in any survival situation goes through predictable phases. There are the stages of facing death—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—and, as Laurence Gonzales has pointed out, a person who does not linger too long in any of the stages has a better chance of survival. Denial can cause a person to ignore important cues. Anger can be self-defeating. Bargaining is largely ineffective, and depression sets in motion physical changes that both harm the body and contaminate the chemistry of the brain. Acceptance is probably the most conducive to survival but can itself lead to passivity toward death.

  To hold death at bay for as long as possible, a person must strike a balance, at each stage, between thoughtfulness and blind resolve—not an easy task. And just as the descent of a perilous mountain is technically more difficult than the ascent—a fact that is remarkably easy to forget—the Sultana survivors had to come to terms with the cumulative losses, with the injuries and scars, both physical and mental, that they would carry with them the rest of their lives.

  THERE WAS A BLINDING RAINSTORM, with vivid lightning, the day Tolbert finally made it home. It was early May, a time when the fields of Saluda were rank with yellow wildflowers, awaiting the plow, and ferns and may-apples were pushing through the mulch of the wooded ravines. The familiar landmarks of his former life were still there: The stone bridge spanning a rushing freshet along the pike between Madison and Saluda; his family’s red-brick farmhouse, with its wooden gingerbread framing the front porch, midway between the Tryus Church and the cemetery where his father lay; the little hamlet of Paynesville, where Maddox’s family farmed.

  But otherwise the world had changed in profound ways, and it must have felt strange to finally be home. His brother Tyrus was dead. His younger brother Sammie was basically a broken old man at fifteen. Daniel had lost three fingers and the use of his left hand and would never work again. Mathew, who had endured scurvy and pneumonia as a prisoner of war, would soon marry and move away. Only Silas had come through four years of war largely unscathed. Romulus himself had passed through his own nine circles of hell and was now back where he started from.

  The Courier, which had reported him dead only a few weeks before, announced on May 6, 1865: “Romulus Talbot and John Maddux, both of company H, 8th Indiana Cavalry, arrived in Madison yesterday, en route to their homes in Saluda township. They are among the survivors of the ill-fated Sultana, on which they had taken passage as paroled Union prisoners.”

  During the previous week, both had taken on entirely new identities. They were now Sultana survivors. Tolbert’s momentous capture was reduced to a footnote. “Talbot was with Messrs. Knowles, Taylor and Sherman, at the time those unfortunate soldiers fell into the hands of the rebel fiends and were so cruelly butchered,” the newspaper reported. “He was taken prisoner, but escaped death. Maddux was taken at another time.”

  Among the first things Tolbert’s friends and family would have noticed, aside from the fact that he was gaunt and tired, was that he had trouble talking, not only because he was naturally reserved or because the memories were so raw, but because his tongue had been pierced by one of the bullets that struck him during his capture. He had also lost a tooth and was pained by the gunshot wound to his shoulder. He could not reach his arms very high.

  Inside his mother’s house was a photograph of him with his friend James Taylor, taken before their enlistment. Now in the hands of his great-grandson, the photo reveals two boys who clearly thought of themselves as men. Their cheeks, tinted by a photographic artist’s hand, are rosy, but their expressions are resolute. Tolbert’s arms are crossed as if he were spoiling for a fight. It is probably the last photo of Taylor, who was killed in the ambush in which Tolbert was captured.

  In another family photo, taken a few years later, Tolbert looks more wary. He is handsome in a slightly pouty way that brings to mind a nineteenth-century Edward Norton. Then, in the next photo, taken after his return, the real change comes. As in every other photographic portrait of him, his hair is carefully coiffed and he is dressed to the nines. But he looks much older, more rugged and worn. His expression is defiant.

  Though Tolbert moved back into his mother’s house and began trying to reconstruct his life, the war was clearly still on his mind. The Courier reported that he and Maddox attended the first Jefferson County soldiers’ reunion in Madison in July 1866, along with his brothers Samuel and Mathew, Maddox’s brother William, and their former commanding officer, Thomas Graham, who had survived the ambush in which Tolbert was captured. Tolbert was also among a group of veterans who ran a notice in the paper urging others to attend, to help keep the memory of their service alive.

  The reunions were bittersweet affairs, typically held on the anniversaries of major battles, and would continue for decades until all the veterans were gone. Tolbert and Maddox attended an 8th Indiana Cavalry reunion at a campground in nearby Chelsea, where the veterans perhaps felt more comfortable—away from their houses, outside by the firelight, with other men who had experienced similar trials and were trying to assimilate them into their lives. Tolbert and his brother Samuel were again present at the two-day reunion in Madison of Rousseau’s raiders, at which, the Courier noted, the men “assembled in the City Hall to grasp hands once more and rehearse the story of the days that tried men’s souls.” The reunion, on August 19 through 21, 1879, began with a 5:30 a.m. reveille, followed by an artillery salute and a march through the city, complete with “crippled veterans in omnibuses” and a band. The day’s activities included addresses by dignitaries, singing by a choir, the reading of the poem “Relics and Recollections” by Captain W.G. Lawder, and military reenactments that were no doubt somewhat awkward to watch.

  If Tolbert sought to preserve some of the camaraderie that had been born of dramatic, shared trials, his postwar life was characterized by a striving for normalcy. After his mother died in 1868, he decided to strike out on his own and moved to Olney, Illinois, where he opened a grocery store. In the spring of 1873, he married Sophronia Eldridge, a strong-boned and strong-willed woman thirteen years younger than he. From his pension application it is evident he was still recovering from his experiences: In March 1875, an examining surgeon reported that he weighed only one hundred thirty-five pounds (at five feet seven inches tall), could not raise his arm above his shoulder, and had lost bits of muscle and bone that limited the use of his tongue “and slightly interferes with distinct articulation in speech.” According to Tolbert’s own testimony, his wounds had largely healed at the time of his release from Cahaba, and further medical treatment was “impracticable & could do no good whatever.”

  He and Sophronia had their first child in 1877, and a few years later they moved back to Jefferson County, where he bought his own farm. It was a small parcel of swampy land on a plateau in Chelsea, not far from his family’s old home place. There he built a simple frame house with a picket fence—perhaps the kind of place he had dreamed of during his ordeal—and planted maple trees in the yard. Sophronia convinced him to quit drinking and to move their membership to the New Bethel Methodist Church. She had a template for an orderly life together, and Tolbert followed it. They raised five children: Stella, Edmund, Rolland, Laura, and Ambrose, and they eventually took in Sophronia’s elderly mother, Asenath Eldridge. To judge from a photo of the family lined up along the picket fence, it appears that Tolbert managed to find something like normalcy—something as close to peace and plenty as was possible under the circumstances.

  Amid the outpouring of often grandiose and melodramatic published reminiscences in the postwar years, Tolbert and Maddox remained notably mum. They were not overly literate—Maddox signed his enlistment papers with an X, though he later wrote his account for the pension board in longhand—and neither seems to have felt a compulsion to participate. Tolbert’s pivotal moment near Campbellton, when he turned in excitement and fear toward his assailants and was shot through the jaw and shoulder, would be preserved only in his memory and, briefly, in official re
cords. The same would be true of the week he spent lying at death’s door in a stranger’s house in Georgia, drifting in and out of consciousness; of the six weeks in the military hospital in Montgomery; of his imprisonment at Cahaba; and of all the withering episodes that came after—the unnerving train ride to Jackson, when the cars shimmied and threatened to go off the rails and sick and injured men bounced off the walls; the long walk to Vicksburg, with his feet blistered and bleeding as he struggled through the mud; and finally the interminable hours in the river after the explosion of the Sultana. Each episode had brought him one step closer to home, yet seemingly farther away. Now he was finally back. For whatever reasons, he was not inclined to record any of it. When his son Rolland asked how he had managed to survive, he said, “I could swim.”

  But if anyone understood what Tolbert had been through, it was Maddox, whose life, like those of so many of their peers, was profoundly changed by his war experiences. The survivors were like a flock of birds that takes flight from a spreading tree and for a moment maintains and approximates the shape of the tree as it wings away across a field. Some maintained the formation longer than others, but eventually they all broke off on their own. If anyone chanced to meet Tolbert on the street, he would have seemed only a quiet, unassuming farmer. There would have been no obvious sign.

  It was different for Maddox. Undercutting whatever joy he may have felt upon returning home, he found that his sister Margaret had died at age twenty-three on the same day the Sultana went down. And he and Tolbert, after having spent so many tumultuous days and nights in each other’s company, slowly drifted apart. Perhaps their closeness had to do with their having been stuck together so many times, but back within the small confines of Saluda, their lives carried them in different directions. Maddox never worked much again, though he tried. He suffered numerous maladies, including chronic diarrhea, attacks of vertigo, “nervous debility,” and “smothering spells.”