Two tragic endings, one forgotten story
At 2:20 a.m. on Sunday, April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic of the White Star Line struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. In its maiden voyage, only four days after departing the English port at Southampton in route to New York City, the ocean liner carried passengers and crew of 2,224. Designed to stay afloat with up to four flooded compartments, the ship suffered breaches to six of her sixteen compartments and two of the boiler rooms. Immediately, the crew activated distress flares and radioed for help. Many of the passengers were moved to lifeboats, but through poor supervision, some were launched at less than full capacity. In under three hours, the ship was gone. Over 1,000 were still on board. Those subjected to the icy waters died within minutes.
The RMS Carpathia responded to the SOS but arrived one and one-half hours after the Titanic had sunk into the depths of the Atlantic. Although the lifeboats saved over 600 of those on board, casualty estimates exceeded 1600. Among the dead included many of prominence: Captain Edward John Smith, a veteran of 40 years on the sea; ship architect Thomas Andrews; real estate developer John Jacob Astor IV, one of the wealthiest men in the world; mining magnate Benjamin Guggenheim; and United States Representative Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, co-owners of Macy’s Department Store. Led by violinist Wallace Hartley, the eight members of the ship’s band chose to continue their music as women, children, and some of the men on board climbed into lifeboats; these brave musicians stayed on the deck throughout, performing until they disappeared into the sea. Two weeks later, Hartley’s body was discovered… with his violin still intact.
Outraged by the news of the disaster, the public demanded answers. Why had the Titanic proceeded at full speed in the iceberg-filled waters? Why were there not enough lifeboats for the passengers? Why was the evacuation so poorly managed? Why were the survivors primarily from first and second class and most of those lost passengers from third class? The newspaper reports were particularly critical of J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman and managing director of White Star, who after assisting others aboard the lifeboats, had eventually taken a seat himself.
Captain Smith received both blame and praise for his role. His last words, “Well boys, do your best for the women and children.” A congressional inquiry exonerated Ismay but most importantly resulted in legislation setting safety standards for sea travel, among them a 24-hour radio system requirement and sufficient lifeboats for all passengers. Today, the Titanic, which was finally located in 1985, remains the most noteworthy maritime disaster in American history, so highly publicized at the time and more recently romanticized by the 1997 movie of the same name. This tragic shipwreck, was not, however, the worst such disaster in the history of our country.
At 2:00 a.m., on April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River seven miles north of Memphis. Over 2300 were on board. Estimates of the lost lives ranged as high as 1800. Most were Union prisoners being transported to the North near the end of the Civil War. This is their sad—and rarely told—story.
In 1862, P.L. Atchley enrolled in the Union Army at Knoxville and, in 1864, was mustered in the 3rd Tennessee Cavalry in Nashville. Within months, his company of some 1,000 soldiers were assigned to guard a trestle along a Union supply line at Sulphur Creek near Athens, Alabama. On the morning of September 25th, Confederate forces led by Nathan Bedford Forrest began an artillery assault on the Union fortification. Two hundred Union soldiers, including their commanding officer, were killed in the attack. Conversely, Forrest had no losses. By noon, the Union had surrendered. Atchley and the other survivors in his company were transferred to Confederate prisons. The conditions were horrible in both Andersonville, Georgia, and Cahaba, Alabama, but less so in the latter. Atchley became one of 3,000 prisoners of war incarcerated at Cahaba, a converted cotton shed on the Alabama River having a capacity of only 500. Each man was allotted six square feet of space. In a period of months, many were lost to malnutrition and disease. All were weakened by the lack of sanitation and medical care. In February of 1865, matters got worse. Cold and heavy rains flooded the prison. In what appeared to be a stroke of good fortune, the North and South soon agree d to an exchange of prisoners. Atchley and the other Union soldiers were to be sent to Vicksburg, Mississippi, some 600 miles to the west. By train boxcar, steamer, and on foot, most of the POWs made the trip. Too many others lost their lives along the way. Upon arriving in Vicksburg, Atchley and several of the others required hospitalization before they could be transported northward. In the meantime, events of historic proportions had taken place in other parts of the country. On April 9th, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. Five days later, President Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. by actor John Wilkes Booth.
While the Union soldiers awaited their departure, Union Chief Quartermaster Reuben Hatch made a deal with Sultana Captain J. Cass Mason to transport the enlisted men and officers to Cairo, Illinois: $2.75 per for the former and $8 per for the latter. The arrangement included a kickback to the unscrupulous Hatch. One of the four tubular boilers on Mason’s steamboat developed a leak. Rather than risking the loss of his bargain, he chose to make temporary repairs rather than waiting for a more permanent fix. So, on April 24th, Atchley and an estimated 1959 other prisoners, 22 guards, 70 private pay customers, and the captain and crew, a total of at least 2137, left Vicksburg on board the side-wheeled steamboat.
Unlike the state-of-the-art Titanic, which measured 11 stories from keel to chimney and with a length of almost three times that of a football
field, the Sultana, by comparison, measured 250 feet in length with a width of only 42 feet. From its keel to its four funnels, the wood-structured Sultana, first launched in 1863, was just over three stories high, and with a design capacity of 376 passengers. Its load was over six times specifications.
As the Sultana chugged up the flood-swollen Mississippi, two more events captured the national news. General Joseph Johnson, commander of some 90,000 Confederate troops then located in North Carolina, surrendered to General William T. Sherman, effectively ending the war. On the same day, Booth, who had eluded authorities for almost two weeks, was found in a barn in rural Virginia. After refusing to surrender, he was shot in the neck, paralyzed, and soon died. Only hours later, the Sultana boilers exploded, scalding many of the passengers and sending most aboard to their watery graves.
Those who were not killed by the blast and able to swim clung to floating debris, trees partially submerged by the floodwaters, and, at times, to each other. Most died by drowning, exposure to the cold, or injuries from the explosion. Others somehow made their way to shore as the current carried them downstream toward Memphis. One Good Samaritan, a southern sympathizer, braved the waters with a canoe, saving some 15 of the soldiers from the elements. Atchley, initially reported as one of the dead, was either picked up by the Samaritan or able to swim to the Mound City, Arkansas, shore. Family lore and reports of his rescue are in conflict. In the following days, Atchley first made his way to Memphis and then to his home in East Tennessee. He married Anna Rule within a year of his return and fathered six children.
Reports of this tragic event were relegated to the back pages of the news. Booth’s capture, Lincoln’s funeral, the return of his body to Springfield, and the culmination of a Civil War, which had cost the lives of over 600,000 young men, dominated the attention of the nation. Sadly, no one was ever held accountable for the fate of the Sultana. Captain Mason, like the Titanic’s Smith, went down with his ship. Hatch, with his strong political connections, deftly avoided court martial. There were modest safety improvements as a result of the disaster. There was no high-profile congressional inquiry.
In 1889, John Simpson of Knoxville, one of 463 Tennesseans on board the Sultana, organized the first reunion of those who, like Atchley, lived through the ordeal. That began a tradition which has been continued by the survivors’ descendants over the years. A few monuments commemorate the course of events. One is on the Memphis waterfront and another, donated by the Gray Eagle Marble Company and dedicated in 1916, is at the Mount Olive Baptist Church in Knoxville. Atchley had died in 1910, unaware of the plans for the symbolic commemoration. In 1982, what was left of the Sultana was discovered 32 feet deep in an Arkansas soybean field, some four miles from Memphis. In 1997, attorney Jerry Potter of Shelby County published his meticulously documented book, The Sultana Tragedy.