Editorials

A view from the present

The wreck of the steamboat Sultana

Does anyone know

Where the love of God goes

When the waves turn the minutes

to hours? . . .

And all that remains

are the faces and names

Of the wives and the sons

and the daughters . . .

--Gordon Lightfoot

A hundred and ten years before the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior, the United States suffered its worst maritime disaster in its history, near Marion, Arkansas--that is, out on the Mississippi River--150 years ago. And what a nightmare it must have been.

The steamship Sultana had sailed up and down the Mississippi through most of The War, many times carrying military types on their way to or back from some bloody theater in the Late Unpleasantness. On April 21, 1865, she steamed north again from New Orleans.

The Sultana stopped in Vicksburg, Miss., to pick up Union soldiers who'd just been released from Confederate POW camps. Now that the war was over, prisoner exchanges were common. These soldiers were finally bound for home--for Ohio, for Indiana and farther points north and east. They were eager to get aboard the steamboat, and the crew was eager for the government money that the boat's captain was paid for each man. It's said that the boat was built to handle fewer than 400 people. But when she backed out of Vicksburg on the night of April 24, 1865, with spring waters pushing the Mississippi over its banks, the Sultana held more than 2,100 passengers, not including crew.

Up the Mississippi she crept. Folks at the time reported seeing the river so high that month that it spread out for miles over its banks. On April 26, the boat reached Memphis, did some trading, and left about midnight. A few hours later, at about 2 a.m. on April 27, her boilers exploded.

The people not killed in the explosion did their best to get into the water. But many of the soldiers were weakened by their stay in POW camps. They were in no shape to swim, much less fight the Mississippi's spring current. Some historians say the death toll could have been as high as 1,800 souls. (For a comparison, the Titanic's death toll was closer to 1,500.) They were finding corpses from the Sultana down river for months.

As big as it was, the disaster seems to have been a forgotten calamity. Maybe it was because, at the time, this country was desensitized to all the bad news--and newspaper reports of thousands of people dying in one day on the battlefield weren't rare. Maybe it was because other news happened so close to April 27, 1865: the surrender of Lee's Army on April 9, the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, and only the day before the Sultana blew up, the killing of Lincoln's murderer.

But people in Marion, Arkansas, haven't forgotten. And they're doing their best to remind the rest of us of what happened with the steamboat.

For the past few days, and for the next few, Marion is marking the 150th anniversary of the disaster with exhibitions, lectures, Civil War re-enactments, and a wreath-laying ceremony. Which is a good idea. Maybe not a fun idea, given the subject. But a good idea--a needed history lesson. Even these days, when history is the star of books and film, when folks young and old have history at their fingertips via the internet, even now we could all use a reminder, sometimes, of what's come before.

Up to 1,800 people. The worst maritime disaster the United States has ever seen. And it happened in our back yard. Thank you, Marion, Ark. It shouldn't take a Hollywood blockbuster, or a haunting song from the 1970s, to get us to remember.

Editorial on 04/25/2015

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