The Sultana: America's Forgotten Titanic
About this episode
On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River, killing 1,864 people—more than the Titanic. Most victims were Union POWs who had just survived Andersonville and Cahaba prison camps. This is the story of the deadliest maritime disaster in American history, buried by history because it happened the same day John Wilkes Booth was killed.
Transcript
Introduction
At 2 AM on April 27, 1865, the overcrowded steamboat Sultana exploded seven miles north of Memphis, Tennessee. The death toll—1,864 souls—exceeded the Titanic by over 350 lives. Yet most Americans have never heard of it.
The victims were Union soldiers, many of them teenage farm boys from Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. They had endured months of systematic starvation at Andersonville and Cahaba—the Confederacy’s most notorious prison camps. They had survived hell. They were finally going home.
The Corruption Behind the Catastrophe
The Sultana was designed to carry 376 passengers. On that fateful night, it carried over 2,300—mostly emaciated POWs packed onto every deck like cattle. How did this happen? Greed. Military officers received kickbacks for every soldier they loaded onto contracted steamboats. The more men, the more money.
Captain J. Cass Mason knew his boilers were failing. He knew the ship was dangerously overloaded. He sailed anyway.
The Explosion
The boilers erupted at 2 AM. Scalding steam and shrapnel tore through the packed decks. Weakened men who had survived starvation now faced fire, drowning, and hypothermia in the cold Mississippi waters. Many couldn’t swim. Many were too frail to fight the current.
The men who had survived Confederate prisons died within sight of the shore.
Why History Forgot
The Sultana disaster occurred the same day federal troops shot and killed John Wilkes Booth. Every newspaper in America devoted their front pages to Lincoln’s assassin. The Sultana received a paragraph, if that.
In the chaos of the war’s end, no one was held truly accountable. The dead were buried in mass graves. The survivors scattered. And America moved on—never pausing to remember its deadliest maritime disaster.