Sultana Tragedy - Mansfield, OH
N 40° 45.528 W 082° 31.020
17T E 371951 N 4513088
The steamboat Sultana was a Mississippi River paddlewheeler destroyed in an explosion on 27 April 1865, resulting in the greatest maritime disaster in United States history.
Waymark Code: WM2M96
Location: Ohio, United States
Date Posted: 11/19/2007
Views: 55
According to Wikipedia.com (
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An estimated 1,700 of the Sultana's 2,400 passengers were killed when one of the overcrowded ship's four boilers exploded and the Sultana sank not far from Memphis, Tennessee. This disaster was less noticed than it might have been, however, because of the recent assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and the end of the Civil War.
The Sultana, under the command of Captain J.C. Mason of St. Louis, left New Orleans on April 21, 1865, with 75 to 100 cabin passengers, and considerable livestock bound for market in St. Louis. At Vicksburg, Mississippi, she stopped for a series of hasty repairs and to take on more passengers, and well over a thousand crowded aboard. Most of these new passengers were Union soldiers (mostly from Ohio) just released from Confederate prison camps such as Cahawba and Andersonville. Sultana had been contracted by the United States government to transport these former prisoners of war back to their homes. With a legal capacity of only 376, the Sultana was severely overcrowded, and many of her passengers had been weakened by their incarceration and associated illnesses. Passengers were packed into every available berth, and the overflow was so severe that the decks were completely packed.
The cause of the tragedy was a leaky and poorly repaired steam boiler. The boiler gave way several miles north of Memphis at about 3:00 A.M. in a terrific explosion that sent some of those passengers on deck into the water and destroyed a good portion of the ship. Hot coals scattered by the explosion soon turned the remaining superstructure into an inferno, the glare of which could be seen in Memphis.