This April marks the 160th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. By the time Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in a meeting more than 300 miles northeast of here at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, things had been pretty quiet in Knoxville for more than a year. Longstreet’s Confederates, after their disastrously ill-advised attack on Fort Sanders, had given up on their siege of Knoxville in late 1863. By 1865, Union troops—many of them Black soldiers in the “Colored Infantry” and “Colored Artillery”--occupied the city and manned its formidable ring of fortifications.
Almost as momentous as the war’s end, or for certain Knoxville-area families, even more so—was the news of the strange fate of a large steamboat on the Mississippi River. The explosion and sinking of the Sultana was more costly in human life than many of the bloody war’s battles. It has been called the worst maritime disaster in American history.
There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it. Due to the fact that many American newspapers were hobbled by the war, and that there were so much other news—the end of America’s most traumatic conflict itself, including accounts of the surrenders of Lee and Gen. Joseph Johnston; the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the subsequent pursuit and killing of his murderer; and the capture of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis—the catastrophe of the Sultana was not as broadly known even at the time as it would have been in any other month. People can only take in so much.
But in short, the Sultana was a big steamboat, albeit not big enough for the job it took on that month. It carried a load of very specific passengers, all Union troops recently freed from Confederate prisons in the Deep South, including the notorious one at Andersonville. Although hundreds of them were returning to homes in East Tennessee, their orders were to board the big steamboat and ride it up to Ohio, where they would formally be mustered out, becoming civilians again, only then to return to their homes. It’s estimated that as many as 2,500 men might have been on the ship designed to carry about one-fifth that many.
But as the grossly overloaded riverboat passed Memphis in the post-midnight hours of April 27, something terrible happened. Its steam engine exploded, and the ship went up in flames. Many were killed in the explosion and fire, many others drowned in the dark, swift waters. The ship itself sank rapidly, eventually lost in the silt at the bottom of America’s biggest river. Estimates of the total dead in the disaster are as high as 1,864.
It was not until late May that word arrived in Knoxville listing the names of 174 members of the Third Tennessee Cavalry, many of whom were from Knox, Sevier, and Blount Counties, who had died in the disaster. But that was just a preliminary estimate. By modern counts, the real number of East Tennesseans who died as a result of the Sultana explosion was more than twice that number, around 386.
Some survivors did make it home, and helped organize Sultana reunions over the years. Despite the fact that Knoxville is more than 400 miles from the site of the disaster, Knoxville became known as a gathering place for Sultana survivors, and of family members of victims. Efforts to create a memorial to America’s worst maritime disaster in Washington, D.C., or Memphis, near where the disaster happened, came to nothing.
However, in 1916, as the result of efforts of a dwindling few Sultana survivors in the Knoxville area, a monument emerged in pink Tennessee marble. Led by a couple of South Knoxvillians, notably John H. Simpson, perhaps the nation’s largest memorial to the victims of the Sultana disaster, appeared on a quiet hill in South Knoxville, in Mt. Olive Cemetery, just off Maryville Pike.
The unusual monument, a large plinth of Tennessee marble, includes the carved names of 365 Tennessee victims on one side, and on the other a bas-relief sculpture of the Sultana herself. Attributed by local stonecutter J.H. Troutt, and unveiled with four Sultana survivors attending, this rare memorial has served as a gathering place for several reunions of Sultana survivors, the last of whom lived into the 1930s. You can visit the Sultana monument today; it’s rather easy to find, at the highest point in the cemetery. Chances are, you’ll be the only one there.
But there was also another tradition in town, another gathering place. Beginning sometimes in the years following the Civil War, and for many years thereafter, family members of the Sultana’s victims, along with survivors, gathered downtown on Decoration Day—later Memorial Day—for one vivid event unknown in most cities. They stood on the Gay Street Bridge and strewed roses into the river. Its water flowed by a very circuitous route, first into Alabama, then north through Tennessee again into Kentucky, before joining the Ohio, and then flowing into the Mississippi, past the Sultana’s tomb.
Jack is the Executive Director of the Knoxville History Project, an educational nonprofit whose mission is to research and promote the history of Knoxville. He is a journalist who has been writing about his hometown’s character and heritage for many years. He has written several books about Knoxville and its history, and they can be purchased in various places throughout the city including Union Avenue Books and the Visit Knoxville Gift Shop.
