THEY CAUGHT THEIR BREATH AT CAMP FISK. IT WAS where they would officially put the war and prison behind them. But for the military command, Camp Fisk was also a vast, potentially dangerous holding pen, with unique, pressing demands made not only by the prisoners, who needed everything, but by the representatives of the steamboat companies hired to transport them home, for whom the camp was a warehouse of lucrative, perishable commodities.
Camp Fisk was named for Colonel Archie Fisk, a Union Army assistant adjutant general at Vicksburg. Fisk had proposed the site, which had also been used to hold Confederate prisoners on their way to being paroled, for paroling the Union prisoners. Operated jointly by the Union and Confederate armies, it was little more than a broad sloping field, with no real infrastructure other than the nearby Union Army post and the railroad into Vicksburg. Considering what the men had left behind, it was an improvement, though. There was food. The American flag flew overhead.
Fisk had come up with the parole plan in response to pleas from the Confederate military for supplies for its Union prisoners. He felt that because the war was ending it made more sense to simply send the prisoners home. He chose the site and designated members of the U.S. Colored Troops as guards (until they were paroled the men were technically prisoners, though in Union hands). During the war the timber had been cleared for several miles along the Big Black for army camps, and the river, spanned by a pontoon bridge, represented the dividing line between the Union and Confederate domains. Everything east of the Big Black was officially controlled by the Confederacy, while everything to the west was in Union hands. The Union Army post, with its orderly lines of white tents, overlooked the site.
After crossing the river, the prisoners were loaded onto flatcars for a laboriously slow, hour-long train ride to the camp, which was eight miles from the river and four miles from Vicksburg. The prisoners, most of whom would remain at Camp Fisk for several weeks, immediately set about building crude shelters of branches and cane, organizing themselves into communities, singing by the campfire, and fighting—everything they had done in the army and in prison, though now in a comparatively more convivial atmosphere. On April 14, Union Major General Napoleon J.T. Dana, commander of the Department of Mississippi, reported the population of Camp Fisk at forty-seven hundred. Of those, more than a thousand—mostly men from Andersonville—were sick. “The rest of the prisoners are in excellent health,” Dana wrote, “the Cahaba prisoners particularly.” Their health, of course, was relative.
The day Dana submitted his report, the steamboat Sultana was docked in Cairo, Illinois, where an announcement in the local newspaper read, “The regular and unsurpassed passenger packet ‘Sultana,’ in command of Capt. J. Cass Mason, departs tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock for New Orleans, Memphis and all way landings. The ‘Sultana’ is a good boat, as well as a fleet one. Mr. Wm. Gamble has control of the office affairs, while our friends Thomas McGinty and James O’Hara will be found in the saloon, where everything of the ‘spirit’ order can be had in due time.”
River traffic had been picking up since the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, and much of it involved the transportation of Union troops. Military contracts were a profitable economic niche, coveted by steamboat companies, whose owners knew that the focus would soon shift to transporting former prisoners of war. None of the companies were fully prepared for the task, nor was anyone aware of how profoundly the national dynamic was about to change. On the night of April 14, after Dana sent his report to Washington, John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. When the Sultana embarked from Cairo, it carried the news downriver.
Union Army officials were consumed by deliberations over how to get the prisoners home, which was not to be a simple matter, and repeated delays proved costly for the sick prisoners. Among the casualties was Melville Cox Robertson, the soldier from Jefferson County, Indiana, who had left this plaintive message in his father’s Bible when he went off to war: “To-day at 2 o’clock P.M. I leave home perhaps forever. If I should return at the end of three years alive I hope to have the proud satisfaction of saying ‘my country is saved and I have done my duty as one of its citizens.’ If I fall, let my friends forget my faults and remember me only as a dead soldier of the republic. I want no brighter immortality.” Robertson had reiterated his desire to make it home, dead or alive, in his last diary entry at Cahaba on June 24, 1864. “While writing the preceding the death gasp of a fellow soldier called me away…God preserve me from such a burial,” he wrote. “Let me die and be buried at home by friends no matter how humble they may be.”
Ten days after leaving Cahaba, in a letter to his brother from Camp Fisk, Robertson wrote, “Now there is a great deal I could tell you and a great deal I would of perils by land and water, among thieves, false brethren and confederates if I could do it orally instead of by letter.” At that point, he wrote, he was in good health, and weighed perhaps 180 pounds, “but am in rather poor trim for walking having bruised my feet considerably by a march of about twenty five miles day before yesterday, the most of it in a heavy rain.” He reported that the men at Camp Fisk were being aided by the Christian Commission and the citizens of Vicksburg, who provided them with combs, spoons, tobacco, and other items. But during the lengthening wait, Camp Fisk became its own breeding ground for disease, and Robertson contracted typhoid fever. He would later board a steamboat named the Baltic but would not make it home. While on the Baltic he again wrote home to say that he was sick. He died in St. Louis before his father and brother could arrive to escort him home. Robertson apparently knew that his chances of surviving were slim. He had mailed home the earlier pages of his diary after his capture, and at Camp Fisk he entrusted the parts concerning his captivity to a friend who later boarded the Sultana.
During the wait at Camp Fisk, J. Walter Elliott steadfastly maintained his ruse as Captain David E. Elliott. As he later explained, “never until I had shaken the dust of the Confederacy from my feet did I disclose my identity to friend or foe—and the sixty autograph albums gotten up by my companions in Castle Reed will attest to it.”
After as long as a month in limbo, the men were itching to get under way. Dana was under pressure to move them, not only because they were anxious but because tensions were developing between them and the guards. On April 4, a near riot broke out over a confrontation between one of the white officers of the U.S. Colored Troops and an officer representing the prisoners. In response, Dana replaced the guards with white soldiers, and the tensions died down. As Gene Eric Salecker wrote in his book Disaster on the Mississippi, the prisoners tried to make the most of their wait during the first two weeks of April. Some were able to get passes to visit Vicksburg, a battle-scarred town atop a series of undulating bluffs overlooking the river, where they inspected the Confederate works and marveled that the seemingly impregnable city had fallen. Some had money wired to them from home. Private Lewis McCory used his money to buy a new suit of clothes, a valise to put them in, and a sturdy pocketbook in which he stashed $100.
Soon, word came that Richmond had fallen, then that Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Now the Confederacy was in no position to quibble over the details of a prisoner exchange. A telegram arrived in Vicksburg on April 13 instructing that all prisoners be paroled unconditionally, and the next day there was an official celebration. The prisoners cheered and sang patriotic songs. The guards fired their guns. They organized military parades. John Clark Ely wrote in his diary, “Today Major Anderson again raises the same old flag over Sumter and today the North rejoice over their victories and today came an order from General Dana for us to be paroled and sent North. Bully, we may soon see our sweethearts.” But jubilation quickly gave way to mourning. News of Lincoln’s death reached the camp on April 15, and that prompted the understandably nervous Confederate officers and guards to withdraw across the Big Black River into more friendly territory. With no suitable objects for their anger, some of the prisoners sang a song called “Hang Jeff Davis from a Sour Apple tree” before settling in for the night.
The official exchange of prisoners took place on a sunny spring day, with officers from both sides seated in Windsor chairs at a small outdoor table, signing the papers. It was a milestone event, though little changed at Camp Fisk right away. The prisoners were not aware that the delays were the result of more than typical army bureaucracy. Steamboat owners were paid by the head for each man they carried, and everyone wanted in on the action. Among the central figures in the negotiations over who would carry the paroled prisoners north was Colonel Reuben Hatch, the Union Army’s chief quartermaster at Vicksburg, whose name had already been sullied by allegations of government graft. The Chicago Tribune had reported allegations that Hatch had skimmed profits from government lumber purchases in Cairo in 1861. Though Hatch reportedly dumped his incriminating ledgers in the Ohio River, they had washed up on the bank and been found, and he had been arrested and court-martialed. During the course of the investigation it came to light that Hatch also sold army supplies for personal gain and chartered steamboats to carry Union troops while taking part of the fee. When he was brought to trial, he turned to his influential brother, the Illinois secretary of state, who used his political clout to pressure President Lincoln, a personal friend, to intercede in the “frivolous” charges. Lincoln did.
As late as February 1865, a government examining board had concluded that Hatch was “totally unfit” to serve as quartermaster, but instead of getting rid of him the army brass had sent him to Vicksburg, where he became involved in loading the boats. Officially, Captain Frederick Speed—assistant adjutant general for the region—was in charge, but Captain Mason of the Sultana apparently felt it would be more useful to work through Hatch.
On April 17, Speed hurriedly supervised the boarding of a group of comparatively fortunate Illinois parolees on a steamboat provided by the quartermaster’s department, and sent them on their way. But the process soon bogged down in what would later be characterized as a conspiracy of bribery and greed. When the Sultana docked at Vicksburg on her way to New Orleans, Hatch paid a visit to Captain Mason. According to Salecker, the meeting left Mason with the impression that Hatch was in charge of loading the parolees, and he wanted to get as large a load as possible when he returned from New Orleans. For good measure, Mason asked a friend, Union General Morgan Smith, to pull some strings. According to later testimony in a government inquiry into the matter, Smith told the Sultana’s agent in Vicksburg, “I will give Captain Mason a load as he comes up and if Hatch or Captain Speed don’t turn the men out to him, you let me know it.”
Meanwhile, Speed began organizing the passage of paroled prisoners on whatever boats were available. Dana had instructed him to send them upriver in groups of about one thousand, but keeping the groups together proved difficult. Although each prisoner’s name, company, and regiment had ostensibly been recorded upon his arrival at Camp Fisk, discrepancies and confusion over the continuing arrival of new prisoners complicated the process. Even worse, as Salecker wrote, some boat captains and their agents, in an effort to get their share of the human cargo, “were not above offering a monetary inducement to any officer willing to be a party to their hustling and scheming. It was no coincidence that such an offer was made in the office of Colonel Hatch.”
What followed was a frenzy of lobbying, corner-cutting, and perhaps bribery by steamboat captains, their agents, and the Union military in Vicksburg. Even when all the negotiations were above board, it was clear that whichever boat a paroled prisoner ended up on was going to be seriously overloaded. Few steamboats were equipped to carry more than a few hundred passengers; yet, one of the first to embark from Vicksburg, the Henry James, was crowded with more than thirteen hundred men. For the men, it was all about getting home. The Sultana, the Henry James, the Olive Branch, the Pauline Carroll—the boats were all the same to them.
IN A SENSE, TOLBERT AND MADDOX had been here before. So had every other soldier waiting at the wharf to board the Sultana that balmy April day. They had waited in line at the muster office when they enlisted, had waited in line to be issued their uniforms, had waited in line during drill, had waited in line to enter the godforsaken prisons, and once inside, had waited in line for their daily rations and their turns at the latrines. They had waited in line to get out, had waited in line to board the filthy, rickety trains and the overburdened steamboats that carried them from Georgia and Alabama to Mississippi, had waited in line to cross the pontoon bridge across Big Black River, had waited in line to be issued new clothing and food and medicine at Camp Fisk, and finally had waited in line to board the cars for the short ride into Vicksburg. Now the line stretched from the gangplank of the Sultana, along the wharf, and up the hill out of sight. The delays that had kept the men sequestered at Camp Fisk for as long as a month continued until the moment they boarded.
The delays were the result of multiple factors. There was confusion about names. Steamboat captains and Union officers interrupted the flow, jockeying for position and scrambling for favors. Hasty repairs were being made to the Sultana—in secret. Though some of the recently paroled prisoners were bewildered by the delays, others were taciturn and cared only about getting on the boat. Many were seeing the Mississippi River for the first time, which no doubt made the wait more interesting. Tolbert’s father had traveled the Ohio and Mississippi rivers between Madison, Indiana, and New Orleans, shipping and selling whiskey and other commodities. Tolbert’s own experience with rivers was limited to the Ohio, along which he had grown up, and the Tennessee and smaller waterways that he had crossed and recrossed during the war. The Mississippi was impressive—wide, deep, and forbidding, flowing fast and full with snowmelt from the north. Timbers and rafts of logs bumped against the hulls of the great filigreed boats tied up at the wharf. The waterfront was lined with ravaged storefronts and warehouses, and in the distance, the bluffs were surmounted by mangled trees, damaged mansions, and silent Rebel batteries.
Like the men at Camp Fisk, the Sultana had spent the last few days in a kind of limbo. On the return trip from New Orleans, one of the massive coal-fired boilers, which heated water for the boat’s steam engines, had sprung a leak, threatening to thwart Captain Mason’s plans to haul his share of paroled soldiers. None of the prisoners were yet aware of the trouble, and few concerned themselves with how they were to be loaded, or on which boat. The war was over and they were going home. Traveling north in spring would mean going back in time, not only from the verdant flowering of the deep South to the first buds at the end of the Midwestern winter, but to a place that had remained static in their memories as the world around them unraveled again and again. Samuel Raudebaugh, a paroled prisoner who boarded the Sultana that day, wrote, “We were on our way home from those horrid dens of cruelty and starvation. Yes, we had lived through it all, and hoped, yes expected soon, to see loved ones and home and enjoy some of the peace we had fought to restore. Home!”
But not everyone was ready to rejoice. The men had encountered new perils at every step of the way during the war, and many times they had been mistaken in believing their troubles were behind them. Ohio soldier William Boor was among the wary ones. He heard the sound of hammering on the Sultana’s boiler and went to investigate. When he saw what was going on, he advised his friends that they should avoid sleeping atop the boiler room. They did so—but they boarded the boat anyway. They were desperate to get home.
The Sultana was licensed to carry three hundred seventy-six passengers and already had about one hundred eighty private passengers and crew on board, all of whom no doubt watched in dismay as more than two thousand additional passengers—the paroled prisoners, their Union Army guards, a few Rebel soldiers headed home, and members of the U.S. Sanitary Commission—snaked from the gangplank along the waterfront.
The Sultana had been built two years earlier for Captain Preston Lodwick of Cincinnati, at a cost of $60,000, and outfitted with dual side wheels. Coal-fired furnaces heated four high-pressure boilers, each eighteen feet long, which in turn drove the steam engines. The boilers were of a new design, of lighter construction. The Sultana was not a particularly luxurious boat, but it was, under normal circumstances, commodious: Two hundred sixty feet long and forty-two feet at its widest point. A wide stairway led from the bow to the second-floor deck, where a long hallway or saloon led to the staterooms. The saloon was finely appointed with glass chandeliers, elaborate woodwork, and stylish carpets and furniture. There were both a bar and a ladies’ lounge. The panels of the stateroom doors were embellished with distinctive oil paintings, but most of the staterooms were small—about eight feet square, furnished with bunk beds and a chair, wash basin, and chamber pot, with a second door leading onto the deck, where Windsor chairs and cuspidors invited passengers to view the passing scenery. At mealtimes a long collapsible table was set up in the main cabin, where food was served on fine china and crystal. Most of the paroled prisoners would not see any of this. The better accommodations were restricted to private passengers and officers, though no one was truly comfortable once the ragged masses came aboard. Cots were set up in the hallways and on the decks, and in between men claimed any spot they could find. They relieved themselves over the rails.
Beneath the cabin floor were quarters allotted for cheaper fares, where the passengers shared space with the crew, the freight, and the boilers; dined on tin plates; and slept on the floor. Above the promenade deck was the hurricane deck, where a yawl hung that the crew sometimes used to test the water’s depth ahead of the steamer. Still higher was the Texas deck, which included a small enclosed area where the boat’s officers were quartered. Crowning it all was the pilot house, enclosed by glass windows, with a large spoked wheel five feet in diameter, a rope that operated the steam whistle, and a cord leading to a brass signal bell below. There was also a bench where passengers could visit with the pilot and observe the scenery from a lofty perch.
Despite their embellishments, the fine china, and their often pretentious names, steamboats were not built to last. As a result of fires, boiler explosions, and hull-puncturing snags, their average life span was only a few years. By 1860, almost two hundred boats had been destroyed in boiler explosions alone, and more than three hundred fifty people had died. Owners considered such accidents part of the cost of doing business. The Sultana had paid for itself twice over during its first year of operation, after which Captain Mason and five associates bought her for $80,000. Mason had begun his steamboating career as a clerk and got a leg up when he married the daughter of a shipping magnate, Captain James Dozier of St. Louis, in 1860. At the time he took over the helm of the Sultana, Mason was thirty-four years old and “cut a handsome figure in his black frock coat, the uniform of his calling,” according to J. Walter Elliott’s grandson, James W. Elliott, author of Transport to Disaster. The mates, Elliott the younger wrote, were a different sort. “Typically, the steamboat mate was big and burly, whiskered and tattooed, and he attacked his sundry problems with a raging gusto which was awesome to behold. Even his smallest command was delivered in an angry roar, and his every ‘heave’ and ‘belay’ was accompanied by a sulfurous stream of profanity.” On the Sultana, the first and second mates were William Rowberry and William Butler.
Among the seventy-five or so passengers who had boarded at New Orleans was the Spikes family, emigrating north from Louisiana and reportedly carrying with them their life savings, $1,700 in gold. Seth Hardin, a former Illinois infantryman who was returning with his wife from their honeymoon, also boarded at New Orleans, as did a Kansas businessman named William Long, who deposited $700 in the boat’s safe, and Daniel McLeod, a crippled veteran from Illinois whose right knee had been shattered by a bullet at Shiloh. As the Sultana embarked from New Orleans, carrying a modest cargo of hogs, mules, and sugar, Lincoln’s funeral train was starting its seventeen-hundred-mile course through the North.
When the Sultana was about seventy-five miles below Vicksburg, Mason’s chief engineer, Nathan Wintringer, informed him that one of the boilers had sprung a leak. According to Elliott’s grandson, the boilers had been a source of “frequent, almost constant, annoyance” for months, and on previous trips the boat had been forced to stop at Natchez and Vicksburg for repairs. The Sultana’s boilers were of a newer tubular design, lighter than the older versions, which were essentially giant kettles over a firebox. Tubular boilers were considered more productive and fuel efficient, but they proved difficult to keep free of sediments and other debris that impeded the flow, particularly on the muddy Mississippi, because the water was drawn directly from the river. A blockage in a boiler was potentially disastrous because it would lead to a concentration of superheated water, which in turn could cause an explosion. Likewise, the accumulation of sediments could lead to corrosion, and any careening of the boat could cause water to drain, opening dangerous air pockets in the superheated tubes. A resulting leak could cause a sudden eruption of pressurized hot water and steam. The Sultana’s tubes and tanks had been cleaned before the boat left St. Louis, but on the return trip from New Orleans, a trickle of water began dripping from between two warped plates. Wintringer told Mason that the repairs could not be made while the boat was underway and the metal was hot, so Mason agreed to make the repairs at Vicksburg. His plan was to put off doing anything major until he reached St. Louis. Instead, the leak would be patched with a plate, about two feet by one foot wide and a quarter-inch thick—which, significantly, was thinner than the boiler itself.
The Sultana arrived back at Vicksburg at 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 23. The embers from the fireboxes were dumped overboard, the boilers were allowed to cool, and “Without waiting for the gangplank, one of the fire men sprang onto the wharf and went racing toward town,” James Elliott wrote. The fireman (so named because he stoked the fire that heated the boiler water) headed to a foundry, where he requested the services of a boiler mechanic and a riveting hammer. Meanwhile, the Sultana’s business agent hurried down the steep bluff to meet the boat. By then the Henry James had left with its thirteen hundred parolees, and the Olive Branch had left with seventeen hundred. The two boats had been overloaded, but the regulations had been routinely ignored by the military during the war. The standard price paid was $5 per head for enlisted men and $10 for officers, and even at the bulk rate the Sultana’s owners reportedly received—$3 per head for two thousand men—they could expect $6,000 in extra profits.
The Sultana was the fifth boat to carry the name (the word has several meanings, including the wife, sister, or mother of a sultan), and its predecessors had all ended their runs in disaster. One collided with another steamer, resulting in great loss of life. One burned at the St. Louis wharf. Another lost her smokestacks to a gale, and the fourth burned at Hickman, Kentucky. The current Sultana had its persistent boiler problems, which, coupled with the wartime interruption of commerce, had caused it to decline in profitability to the point that Mason, a part-owner of the company, was forced to sell part of his share in early 1865. He then joined an association of boats called the Merchant and People’s Steamboat Line, which contracted with the federal government to transport troops and supplies. As part of its contract, the Sultana was inspected in St. Louis on April 12, 1865, where the inspectors were surprised to find a pet alligator that served as the crew’s mascot. The boilers passed the inspection.
Upon his arrival, Mason and his agent went to Hatch’s office to try to get a commitment for passengers. According to Salecker, “Hatch was anxious to see Mason get the men and, perhaps at the time, to line his own pockets.” Mason reportedly became angry over the length of time he was told it would take to assign passengers, and he told Hatch it would not be worth waiting an extra day for the prisoners’ rolls to be completed. Hatch blamed the delay on Speed, so Mason visited him, and Speed told him that he could give him anywhere from three hundred to seven hundred parolees, depending upon how many were on the finished rolls. Mason responded that he was “entitled to those men,” according to his agent’s testimony during a later inquiry, and said Hatch would take care of the trains to get the men to the waterfront. Speed insisted that he could not come up with any more men on Mason’s schedule, but eventually he agreed to hasten the process by checking the names of the parolees as they were being loaded on the boat—a plan Dana approved. Speed told Mason that he had about fourteen hundred men left at Camp Fisk, though he later learned there were more than two thousand, and they agreed that all would go on the Sultana. The repairs to the boilers, which continued through the night, were never mentioned, and Captain William Kerns, who was normally in charge of river transport, was not informed of the plan.
The next day, as Speed was dressing, Hatch arrived and said he wanted to divert some of the parolees to the Pauline Carroll, which was also tied up at the Vicksburg wharf. While Salecker surmised that Hatch had gotten a better kickback deal with the other boat, it was Hatch who raised the possibility of bribery after Speed insisted on putting all the remaining men on the Sultana. At about 11 a.m., another boat, the Lady Gay, docked at Vicksburg beside the Sultana. There was talk of diverting some of the Sultana’s passengers to the boat, but the idea never got off the ground. At about noon, the first trainload of remaining parolees left Camp Fisk, and an hour later they began filing from the depot on their way to the waterfront. Among them were twenty-three patients confined to cots and two hundred seventy-seven men who were unable to walk unassisted, all of whom had been in area hospitals. The cots were to be placed on the forward end of the cabin deck, above the boilers, where the patients would be warmer. The train continued to shuttle between the city and Camp Fisk for the rest of the day. Seeing that the Sultana was getting overcrowded, the Union surgeon in charge at Vicksburg requested permission to remove the seriously ill men and to prevent the nonambulatory patients from boarding, because he felt they would be in jeopardy. Dana granted him permission to do so—a decision that no doubt saved many lives.
The last trainload arrived just before dark, and the officials in charge of the loading were still jockeying for position, attempting to undermine one another’s efforts. It was obvious that the men would be more comfortable, and the passage safer, if some were shunted to the Pauline Carroll, but that never happened. One officer later testified that he stopped Speed at the wharf and warned him that the Sultana was becoming dangerously overloaded, but that Speed simply walked away. The loading continued. When the men from the last train saw the overcrowding aboard the Sultana, and the empty decks of the Pauline Carroll beside it, about a third of them resisted boarding. An officer then told them that the Pauline Carroll was infected with smallpox, and the men reluctantly shuffled aboard the Sultana. With so many aboard, the men had to be redistributed to prevent structural damage to the boat, despite hastily installed auxiliary supports to the decks. According to later testimony, even Captain Mason protested the overloading. “Mason by this time was thoroughly alarmed,” James Elliott wrote. “He had been anxious to make a profit—and still was, for that matter—but he had no desire to see his boat crushed under foot. Throughout the afternoon he had managed to maintain an uneasy silence. But now, as the shadows lengthened with evening’s approach, he could keep quiet no longer. Stepping in front of the gangway he held up his hand and halted the marching line. One of the prisoners heard him say that he had enough men on board and could take no more.” But he had lost control and was overruled.
After the last man boarded, the initial head count was thirteen hundred, which was absurdly low. The first and third trainloads alone had carried sixteen hundred men combined. Told that an additional six hundred fifty men had come on a second train, Captain George Augustus Williams, who was charged with keeping records of the loading, simply added them in and came up with just under two thousand. In fact, there were many more; Gambrel’s tally was about twenty-four hundred, not counting a hundred civilian passengers and a crew of eighty, for a total of almost twenty-six hundred.
At 8 p.m., Kerns left the boat and headed toward the Pauline Carroll. He had earlier convinced the boat’s captain to delay his departure until the Sultana left, hoping it would become obvious that some of the men should be transferred. The captain had agreed to stand by, but now Kerns told him he might as well go. Soon the Pauline Carroll backed away from the wharf, bearing a total of seventeen paying passengers.
Attempts to keep the parolees in orderly groups, putting most of the Ohioans on the hurricane deck and the Indianans on the boiler deck, proved futile. The men went where they wanted to go. In the end there was not even a reliable accounting of the passengers’ names. Nearly all the men were young—on average, twenty to twenty-one years old—but most were also weak and weary, and crowded uncomfortably together. As they milled around on the decks the floors creaked ominously underfoot.
At about 1 a.m., the Sultana cast off. Soon after, Gambrel, the boat’s clerk, stopped by Ohio soldier Alexander Brown’s stateroom, where they talked about Andersonville and the war. Brown asked Gambrel how many passengers were aboard the boat. Gambrel gave him a figure of twenty-four hundred and said that if the Sultana reached Cairo, it would set the record for the greatest number of passengers on a boat on western waters.
Among the civilians who had boarded at Vicksburg was Anna Annis, the wife of Lieutenant Harvey Annis, who was ill. She had come to Memphis with their young daughter to escort him home. Also boarding was the Chicago Opera Troupe, en route to a performance in Memphis. The troupe would later put on a free show for the Sultana passengers, including blackface routines and the singing of familiar soldiers’ songs, on the bow of the boat. Meanwhile, twelve women of a group sometimes referred to as the Sisters of Charity—officially, the Ladies Christian Commission, a volunteer organization—wandered through the throngs, handing out hymnals and crackers.
James W. Elliott wrote that neither Mason nor his engineer felt good about the situation. Wintringer “nursed his fractious boilers with more than usual suspicion and watched apprehensively for the next sign of trouble.” Meanwhile, Rowberry and his crew continued adding supports to the sagging decks. The boat was so top-heavy that she rolled slightly with every turn and strained under the weight against the flooded river. The pilots attempted to hug the banks, avoiding the strongest currents, but periodically had to cross to the other side when the boat shuddered against the grain. Occasionally, floating logs struck the sides.
The Sultana reached Helena, Arkansas, at about 7 a.m. on Wednesday, April 26, thirty hours after leaving Vicksburg. The first night and day had gone uneventfully, J. Walter Elliott recalled, though there was a brief scare at Helena when the passengers crowded to one side to pose for a photographer. Curious townspeople had also gathered at the waterfront, and when the passengers saw the photographer they rushed to the port side, wanting to be in the photo, the boat listed and nearly capsized.
The Sultana remained at Helena only about an hour. The Chicago troupe performed another show, the crew put a stop to the alligator-gawking by moving the reptile to a locked closet beneath a stairway, and the passengers went back to their chosen spots. The one stove on the deck was used solely for making coffee, and even that was difficult to get to, so most of the men had to eat hardtack and dried meat and wash it down with river water. The water closets were largely inaccessible, too, which mattered because many of the men suffered from chronic diarrhea. Their only option was to hang over the rails or to use holes some of the men had cut in the wheel housings. The men entertained themselves by watching the passing scenery—mostly plantation houses, slave cabins, and other boats. As the sun set, painting the sky vivid orange, Chester Berry, who had spent most of the day leafing through one of the hymnals given out by the Sisters of Charity, sat against a wall and sang “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” a song that had been popular when he left home. When the Sultana finally reached Memphis, an Illinois cavalry regiment stationed on the bluffs cheered, and the men on the boat responded in kind.
The Sultana’s main reason for stopping in Memphis was to discharge one hundred twenty tons of sugar, ninety-seven crates of wine, and the herd of hogs. With the cargo went most of the boat’s ballast, and Mason, still anxious about the overloading, was reportedly a frequent visitor to the Sultana’s bar. No doubt the Irish bartenders, McGinty and O’Hara, were nervous, too. But as Chester Berry later wrote of the paroled soldiers aboard the boat, “A happier lot of men I think I never saw than those poor fellows were. The most of them had been a long time in prison, some even for about two years, and the prospect of soon reaching home made them content to endure any amount of crowding.”
MEMPHIS WAS THE FIRST sizeable city most of the men had seen in months—in some cases years—and though they were told to remain on board, the flickering gas lights leading up the bluff from the waterfront beckoned. Half an hour after the boat docked, hundreds of men disembarked into the city. They made their way to the Soldiers’ Home, one of several way stations operated in major cities by the U.S. Sanitary Commission, where soldiers could find a bed or a meal, or nosed their way around the riverfront saloons. As roustabouts unloaded the Sultana’s cargo of sugar beneath oil lamps, George Robinson pitched in to help, and afterward he and a friend headed into town for supper. Two boy-soldiers, William Block and Stephen Gaston, the latter of whom had served in the 8th Indiana with Tolbert and Maddox, took advantage of several broken sugar casks, loading their pockets, haversacks, and hats.
Memphis was the final destination for some of the passengers, including the Chicago troupe, and a few new ones boarded, no doubt with some trepidation, including U.S. Representative-elect W.D. Snow of Arkansas, (whose election Congress had not yet agreed to recognize). According to Elliott’s grandson, when Snow visited the clerk’s office to pay his fare and receive his stateroom assignment, he “expressed curiosity” over the number of people aboard. Among the other private passengers boarding at Memphis were two women, one of whom Elliott’s grandson described as “a great beauty”—she no doubt drew much attention from the passengers—and a man he described as “the finely-groomed J.D. Fontaine of Dallas City, Illinois.” Elliott also wrote that his grandfather, “on an impulse” the night before, had given his cot to a sergeant he had met at Camp Fisk, and so slept in a chair. Now, as J. Walter Elliott sat reading beneath one of the cabin chandeliers, the sergeant approached and asked where he was going to sleep. Elliott pointed to a cot on which his hat lay, but the sergeant said it was in a hot and dangerous location above the boilers and suggested another cot (which presumably had already been claimed by someone else—it is doubtful there were any empty ones) near the end of the ladies’ cabin. According to J. Walter Elliott’s own account, he initially demurred. ‘“Give it to some poor fellow who had none last night,’ I said; but a moment afterwards he came and told me he had removed my hat to the cot selected by him, and that I would have to take that or none.” For the record, then, Elliott was coerced into sleeping outside the ladies’ cabin, where he would read in his cot until he fell asleep, “dreaming of the loved ones at home—a motherless daughter, a noble christian mother, two devoted sisters, and my brothers.”
At about 10:30 p.m., the crew rang the bell on the hurricane deck to announce the Sultana’s impending departure, and guards began roaming the waterfront streets rounding up soldiers. Gaston and Block sat on the Texas deck gorging on sugar until, remarkably, they drifted off to sleep. William McFarland of the 42nd Indiana remembered seeing an unusually tall man from Tennessee who got drunk onshore and had to be escorted onto the boat by guards. “He was a thin seven-footer, and he came down to the boat shouting and cursing, at the point of bayonets, so drunk he could hardly walk. He was brought up to the hurricane deck, where he caused considerable disturbance.” Having been at Andersonville, McFarland did not know that the man went by the name Big Tennessee and had been a friend to the downtrodden at Cahaba. In fact, Big Tennessee’s identity is still subject to debate, but according to Elliott, he cursed the guards as he was forced onto the gangplank and onto the Texas deck. McFarland “poked fun at the Tennessean and, infuriated, the intoxicated trooper lunged toward his tormentor,” Elliott wrote. “But he succeeded only in stepping on a number of innocent men, and was soundly cuffed on all sides.”
Private Epenetus McIntosh had arrived in Memphis on the Henry James but had tarried too long in town and missed the boat. He considered himself in great good luck when he was able to get on the Sultana. Several other Sultana passengers failed to make it back in time. Michigan soldier W.C. Porter found on his return to the boat that his space in an empty coal bin had been taken, so he moved to a spot between the smokestacks but was rousted from there and eventually settled down to sleep on the stair landing. The men in the empty coal bin pulled the hatch shut to stay warm, which would prove a fateful decision. Elliott recalled awakening as the Sultana backed away from the wharf, then falling back asleep.
The Sultana crossed the river to a coal yard on the Arkansas side and loaded a thousand burlap bags of coal to fuel the furnaces. In a case where seeming bad luck would have actually been good, and where seeming good luck was actually bad, one of the men who had missed the boat in Memphis. George Downey of the 9th Indiana Cavalry (who had telegraphed home for money from Camp Fisk) paid a boatman $2 to row him to the coal yard, where he again boarded the Sultana. He was no doubt proud of this maneuver, which would cost him his life.
At 1 a.m. on April 27, the Sultana left the coal yard and headed upriver. The guards posted at the Memphis waterfront watched the brightly lit boat steam around the bend, and would later recall that it presented a beautiful sight. The night was dark, the moon and stars shrouded by clouds that soon began drizzling rain. Pilot George Kayton was behind the wheel. At midstream he began to steer through the cluster of flooded islands known as Paddy’s Hen and Chickens, with Rowberry, the first mate, alongside him in the pilot house. Down below, Wes Clemens, the assistant engineer, was at his post by the boilers. The boat was traveling at about ten miles per hour. At fifteen minutes before 2 a.m., with most of the passengers asleep, Kayton began steering past submerged Island 41 in a broad reach of river that because of the flood was roiling along, close to five miles wide.