An historian has declared that the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, the question arises, “Why can we not let go of that ‘tragic’ event?” April being also Civil War History Month, I am sadly reminded of the cruel irony of the fact that Americans little noted nor have long remembered the worst maritime disaster in United States history, the sinking of the SS Sultana, its losses greater than the Titanic, raising the question, “Why have we not taken hold of the Sultana?”
As our Coast Guard conducts its annual commemoration of the sinking of the Titanic, as London observes the centennial of that event, and as the movie Titanic returns to the screen in 3D to enthrall audiences worldwide, Americans, deep into the Civil War Sesquicentennial’s second year, are almost totally unmindful of the Sultana’s some 1,800 casualties–union soldiers, recently released from Andersonville and other Confederate prisons, and civilians, including women and children–who perished April 27, 1865 at 2 am, in darkness, in a cold rain, in the Mississippi River just above Memphis, as the assassinated President’s funeral train was crossing the United States.
An estimated 1,800 perished when the Sultana exploded, compared with the Titanic’s 1,523. More military passengers were from Ohio, 652, and Tennessee, 463, than from other states. About 800 survived, about 300 of whom later died of burns and exposure.
Among survivors who lived long lives afterward was Daniel Allen, from Sevier County, who testified in 1892, “I pressed toward the bow, passing many wounded sufferers, who piteously begged to be thrown overboard. I saw men, while attempting to escape, pitch down through the hatchway that was full of blue curling flames, or rush wildly from the vessel to death and destruction in the turbid waters below. I clambered upon the hurricane deck and with calmness and self-possession assisted others to escape.”
In my hometown Knoxville, in divided East Tennessee, the survivors met in April each year, including 1912, twelve days after the Titanic sank, until only one veteran showed up in 1930. July 4, 1916, survivors dedicated an impressive monument in Mount Olive Baptist Church Cemetery, 2500 Maryville Pike.
Writers have derived a plethora of meanings from the Titanic legacy, but in a very general context; the Civil War context for the unexamined symbolic relevance of the Sultana legacy is painfully specific, for as Shelby Foote said, “The Civil War is the cross-roads of our being as a nation.”
Despite the publication over the years of books about the Sultana, most Americans still have never heard of it. The first was Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors (1892) by Chester D. Berry, a survivor, (reprinted in 2005 by the University of Tennessee Press). Seventy years later James W. Elliott’s Transport To Disaster (1962) appeared; Jerry Potter, Memphis lawyer, published The Sultana Tragedy thirty years later. Not even Jim Brown’s excellent article in the News Sentinel two decades ago left a lasting impression on East Tennesseans.
But in 1987, Knoxville attorney Norman Shaw, not a descendant, started the Association of Sultana Descendants and Friends, whose newsletter is called Sultana Remembered. They have met annually in Knoxville, Memphis, Cincinnati, and other relevant cities.
The rest is silence.
No rich celebrities were among the estimated 2,400 passengers who boarded the Sultana, a boat built for only 376, over-loaded in a conspiracy of greedy civilian and military men. No iceberg-like external force ignited the explosion of four boilers known to be defective. No divers descend now to gaze upon a sea-preserved ship worthy of exhibition in replica at Dollywood, because the “Muddy” Mississippi shrugged its shoulders and moved into other channels, leaving the SS Sultana and its victims under mud where now a soybean field thrives.