GEORGE ROBINSON WENT TO SLEEP THAT NIGHT ON the Sultana’s promenade deck, between the twin smokestacks that towered above the filigreed pilot house. He bedded down beside his companion, one of his previous partners in escape, John Corliss. During his many escape attempts Robinson had learned how to size things up and choose his moment. The moment was about to present itself again.
At about 2 a.m. Robinson awoke with a start, in agonizing pain. Inexplicably, he lay in the Sultana’s coal bin, and Corliss was sprawled dead across his legs. His own chest and wrist were injured. His arms were scalded. He had trouble breathing. Someone nearby was screaming that he was being burned alive.
Robinson had not heard the explosion. He had no idea what had happened. All he knew was that the world had come unglued while he slept, and his gut told him that this time he had reached the end. It hit him in high decibels, with blistering heat: There would be no way out. Then he heard a voice say to someone else, “Jack, you can get out this way,” and the drive to survive suddenly kicked in again.
He climbed from the coal bin onto the wrecked deck. As he stood there, trying to figure out what was going on, someone placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “What will I do? I cannot swim.” It was soon to be a common refrain.
Robinson, who may have been too stunned to answer, drifted off toward the bow of the boat, where he saw people being trampled in a rush for the rails. Hundreds of men, a few women and children, and horses and mules were racing back and forth on the decks and streaming into the cold, dark river, where people flailed about for anything to keep their heads above water and drowned each other in waves. Robinson quietly sat down and wrapped one arm around the Sultana’s jackstaff. He had to think. He would not have long.
Ben Davis was on the hurricane deck near the rear of the boat when the boilers exploded. A Kentucky cavalryman originally from Wales, he was one of the few passengers still awake at that hour and, feeling restless, had decided to have a smoke. Picking his way through the soldiers spooning wall-to-wall across the deck, he descended the stairs to the main level in search of a light, found a splinter of wood, stuck it into one of the fireboxes, lit his pipe, then retraced his steps. He was about to take a swig from his canteen when it whirled from his hands into the darkness. Pieces of metal, wood, and body parts began raining down through a cloud of superheated steam, and flames erupted from the heart of the boat. Davis had been sharing blankets with three fellow Kentuckians who had been with him at Cahaba, but he lost sight of them in the pandemonium. As he scoured the boat for something buoyant he came upon one of his friends, Joe Moss, who told him ruefully that he could not swim. Davis gave him a window shutter he had found, and Moss jumped into the river with it and drowned. Davis dove in and swam toward the invisible Arkansas shore. The river was darker than the starless night and bitterly cold with snowmelt from the north, swirling upon itself with implacable velocity and force, but Davis was confident he could make it. He was a strong swimmer.
Perry Summerville awoke to find himself flying through the air. His first thought was that the Sultana had been running close to shore and he had been swept off the deck by an overhanging limb. When he hit the water he plummeted into the depths, came up about a hundred feet from the boat, and began swimming back toward it, calling for help, only to see that it was on fire. He instinctively turned downstream and swam away, which was not easy on his bum leg, with his shoulders and chest severely bruised by the blast and fall, and his back scalded by the steam. He found a section of the boat’s railing to hold on to, and he glanced back in wonder at the terrible scene, at the silhouettes of people clamoring on the decks, some being consumed by flames, while hundreds dove into the water, in most cases to drown.
Joseph Stevens, the English sharpshooter, was sleeping near the stern with his brother-in-law, William Finch, and awoke to see a crowd surging toward the metal yawl suspended above the Sultana’s stern. Stevens tried to calm Finch, telling him they would survive if they kept their wits about them, though neither could swim. He watched men piling into the still-unlaunched yawl and trying to fend off anyone else who attempted to get in. Finch scrambled among them. After the lines were severed, the yawl hurtled into the water upside down, and most of the men hanging onto or inside of it, including Finch, drowned. Stevens dove in, tried his best to dog-paddle away, and was saved by a friend floating nearby on a bale of hay, who grabbed him by the hair. As they drifted into the darkness he saw the Sultana’s captain, Cass Mason, hurling shutters into the water.
W.A. Fast had also been sleeping near the yawl when he felt “a jerk and jar” and hot water on his face and hands. Within moments, perhaps a hundred men were tugging at the yawl. Observing the panic, he moved toward the bow. He noticed that one of the Sultana’s side paddlewheels was wrecked and the other was hanging perilously overhead. Flames were racing through the remains of the pilot house, which was acting as a flue. He jumped onto the middle deck and entered the staterooms, searching for one of the boat’s cork life preservers, but found none. “The men were rushing out from the lower floor or deck, and pouring over the prow into the dark water like a flock of sheep through a gap in a fence,” he later wrote.
J.W. Rush, who had grown up on the shores of Lake Erie, had seen his share of boat disasters and knew he had to get off the Sultana “before the crowd realized the peril they were in,” but it was already too late. As he watched the mob attempting to launch the yawl he saw a woman begging to be allowed on. Though she appeared to be the wife of one of the men already in the boat, she was left behind. With the help of a friend, Rush launched a smaller boat from the upper deck, but it was quickly overwhelmed. “These boats were turned over and over,” he wrote, “and many were drowned in trying to get into them, as every time they would turn bottom side up they would bury from fifty to seventy-five, who were trying to climb in from the opposite side. This was kept up until the crowd had thinned out and the boats drifted off.”
Rush and his mate began throwing anything that would float overboard. They then tried to force a mule into the water, hoping to ride it as it swam, but it would not budge. He saw Mason exhorting people to remain calm. He saw a group of women on their knees, bowed in prayer, their heads resting against the rail.
M.C. White’s first thought was that a Rebel battery had fired on the boat. He heard officers shouting orders for everyone to remain calm, saying the Sultana would head to shore, but it was obvious that with the pilot house gone the boat was out of control. It was every man for himself. The flames were spreading rapidly, illuminating hundreds of faces gasping for breath in the roiling water, horses breaking through the rails, a woman fastening a life preserver on a little girl, mangled men crawling among the frenzied crowds, soldiers stripping their clothes and diving in. The acrid smoke and steam carried the scent of burning flesh. It was a hallucinatory scene. Everyone’s brain and body chemistry was going wild.
Unable to find a life preserver in the staterooms, Fast pulled a door from its hinges and in a moment of brilliant restraint decided to wait for the drowning masses to subside before diving in. He had observed the terrible ebb and flow: Hundreds of people grasping for anything afloat, drowning each other en masse, after which there would be a brief intermission before the next group dove in. He gathered fifteen or twenty feet of rope and tied it to his door, leaving several loops to use as handholds. All around him, men were “struggling, swimming, sinking. My plan was to stick to the boat as long as I could and until the swimmers were well out of my way.” He observed people cursing Lincoln and Jeff Davis and Grant, “any and everybody prominently connected with the war. Some were crying like children.” Others prayed loudly and beseechingly, or formally and gracefully, “all in dead earnest.” Now and then his gaze landed on a strangely calm face. A few retreated from the crowds and absently sang old familiar songs. As Fast waited for his moment, a group of dockhands tried to wrest his door from him. He backed into a stairway, wedged the door between some timbers, took out his small jackknife, and drove them away. As the crowd in the water thinned he undressed; checked his pocket watch, which was tied to his underwear, and saw that it was 2:30 a.m.; tossed his door; and jumped in after it. He was immediately set upon by drowning men, and he struggled to pry their hands from the door one after another until he was exhausted. Within minutes he lost his hold. At that point his memory of the disaster ended. “From the time I lost that door until daylight there is in my life an entire blank, I do not know where I was or what I was doing,” he wrote.
Chester Berry was sleeping forward of the boilers, near where he had sung his hymn at sunset. When the boilers exploded he was struck in the head by a piece of flying wood, which fractured his skull. Dazed, he lay on the deck until a shower of boiling water soaked his blanket and scalded his uncovered bunkmate to death. He found a piece of a board and started forward but changed his mind about jumping when he saw that the water was filled with drowning people. Trying to maintain his presence of mind, he roamed the deck in search of friends and came upon a man who said he could not swim. Berry told him to pull a board from the debris to hang on to. The man found a board, but someone promptly took it from him. Berry told him to get another. He did, and it was taken from him, too. Berry lost patience, shoved the man away, and said, “Drown then, you fool”—words he would regret the rest of his life. Then he moved on.
Albert King was sleeping with a group of friends about thirty feet from the stern, beside the engine room partition. After the explosion he and his companions tried to pry loose part of the partition but were driven away by a frantic rearing horse. His friend Adgate Fleming shouted that he could not swim, and King told him to stay close and away from the crowd at the rail. It was good advice, but Fleming was carried overboard anyway and drowned. King leaped from the starboard rail, bobbed up near the rudder, and was dunked by several men. Seeing an opening in the foundering crowd, he tried to swim away but was submerged by another man. He resurfaced, and a woman grabbed him by the shirt, but King fought her off and swam away. When he came upon a floating board he returned for the woman, and the two paddled away “out of the circle of firelight into the night.” The woman was Anna Annis, and as with most of the others on board, her life’s travails seemed to have been building to that harrowing moment.
Annis, her husband, and their young daughter had occupied a stateroom. Lieutenant Annis had been stationed with the U.S. Colored Troops at Vicksburg after being captured at Shiloh and paroled. He was Anna’s third husband; incredibly, the first two had drowned in shipwrecks, one of which she had survived. Harvey Annis was too ill to make it home to Wisconsin alone, so Anna had traveled to Vicksburg to escort him. After the explosion they put on their life belts, and Harvey led his family to the stern, where he placed his daughter on his back, descended a rope to the water, and told Anna to follow. As she descended the rope a man jumped from above and knocked her off and into the hold of the boat. She climbed out and again descended the rope. Once she was in the water, her life belt began to slip off, and she grabbed the boat’s rudder, remaining fixed to it as she watched her husband and daughter drown. She held on to the rudder with several others until the flames forced them to let go. Her arms were burned from the backs of both hands to her shoulders. She drifted off, struggling to remain afloat. As King passed she tried to cling to him, but he fended her off. Then he came back for her.
Nathaniel Foglesong hung over the rudder post, brushing coals and cinders off his shoulders, until the flames burned his boot and he slid down onto the shoulders of a man below. “Get off from me!” the man shouted, to which Foglesong replied, “In a minute.” Nine men were hanging on to the rudder post. Finally Foglesong let go, calling out, “Here goes for ninety days!”—the prescribed time for militia enlistment. As he surfaced he grabbed someone’s ankle, was kicked away, grabbed it again, and with the other hand caught a cable dangling from the blazing stern. Looking over the fire-lit river, he saw the burned bodies of a man and two women on a section of floating wreckage. An Irishman named Patrick Larky, who had fought with a Michigan regiment, cried, “Come help poor Pat, he is a-drowning!” just before Foglesong saw him go under. Clutching a piece of flotsam, Foglesong dog-paddled to a section of broken floating deck, where a familiar soldier reached out a helping hand. “My God, Thaniel, is that you?” the man asked. “Yes, all that’s left of me,” Foglesong replied.
Inside his stateroom, William Snow, the newly elected congressman from Arkansas, had not heard the explosion and was initially unaware of how dire the situation was. He took the time to dress and to tie his tie. When he emerged, the wind was carrying the fire rapidly over the center of the boat, the decks of which had been sundered by the explosion. Snow took off his coat, returned it to his stateroom, and trotted toward the stern, stepping over trampled bodies. The water was so crowded he decided it would be impossible to jump without landing on someone. Finally he found an open spot near one of the paddlewheels and dove in.
Truman Smith was treading water when he came upon Henry Norton, another member of his Michigan cavalry, who was furious because someone had stolen his bundle of clothes. Smith told him to forget about it, but Norton was confident he could swim to the bank, and he wanted to find the thief. Norton had entered the water with an empty barrel but had a hard time holding on to it. When someone grabbed hold of his shirt, he slipped out of it. “I swam but a few feet when I found myself with four or five others,” he later recalled. “It seemed as though we all wanted to get hold of each other. I succeeded in getting the rest of my clothes off and got rid of my company.” Smith and Norton then swam away.
Like most of the former prisoners, Joseph Bringman was in no condition for a major survival challenge. Thin, weak and sick, he had been sleeping fitfully when the boilers exploded, dreaming that he was on a leisurely walk up a long hill, at the top of which a rocky ledge jutted out over a river. Suddenly the dream merged with reality: When he stepped on the rock to look down at the river, it burst beneath his feet with a sound like the report of a cannon. “I felt pieces of the rock striking my face and head and I seemed to be hurled into the river,” he wrote. When he surfaced he was not yet fully conscious, but he shed his clothes and grabbed a few pieces of wood to keep himself afloat. The first piece was no bigger than his hand, but he quickly scooped up other bits of detritus and clutched them to his chest. A horse swam close by and nearly pushed him under. By the light of the fire he could see perhaps two hundred yards across the river, which was full of people, some swimming boldly, others splashing for a few moments before going under.
William Peacock, who had lost a hundred pounds during his imprisonment, awoke buried in wreckage, bleeding and bruised, with one hip badly scalded. He had been thrown from the boiler deck wearing only his underwear, his hat, and a handkerchief tied around his neck—the parting gift of a friend who had died at Camp Fisk. He crawled off the side of the boat and into the water. A large section of the boiler deck had been thrown into the river intact, along with the men who had been sleeping on it, including Ohio soldier Jotham Maes. Everyone was ejected from the wreckage when it struck the water, but Maes managed to climb back on, along with nine others. Looking back at the boat, he saw the smokestacks collapse in opposite directions, crushing everyone in their way.
William Boor, who had noted the repairs being made to the Sultana’s boilers at Vicksburg and opted not to bed down on the deck above them, was pinned beneath a section of the upper deck that collapsed under the falling smokestacks, but he managed to free himself and his friend Thomas Brink. As they made their way down a wrecked stair Boor asked Brink if he could swim. Brink could. Boor could not. Brink disappeared after diving in, and Boor never saw him again. Boor was afraid of both the water and the crowd. He tied his spare shirt inside a rubber blanket, picked up a piece of wood, tucked the bundle under his arms, and waited.
A large group of Indiana soldiers had been bedded down on the Texas deck, while Romulus Tolbert’s 9th cavalry had chosen a spot directly in front of one of the wheel housings. All were dispersed after the explosion. Tolbert would never offer many details about what happened except to say that he found something to hold on to.
J. Walter Elliott was awakened from his dreams by a sound he compared to the discharge of artillery or a train wreck. His recollections would have a theatrical ring. He was standing on the collapsed deck, wondering what to do, “when the scene lights up from below, disclosing a picture that beggars all description—mangled, scalded human forms heaped and piled amid the burning debris on the lower deck.” He heard shrieks and moans and the hiss of escaping steam. His face, throat, and lungs burned. He hastily dressed, groped his way over the debris, and through the gaping hole in the deck saw red-hot coals below and flames running up the splintered superstructure. He realized that his former cot had disappeared into the conflagration. Huge sections of iron and wood had been driven upward through the cabin, the hurricane deck, the Texas deck, and the pilot house.
When W.S. Freisner heard shouting outside his cabin door, he stepped into the main saloon and peered into the maw, where he saw a man pinned beneath a heavy timber, being burned alive. The man saw him too and cried out, “Help, help, for God’s sake!” but as Freisner lamented, “There was an impossible gulf between us and I turned from the horrid sight.”
William Crisp, a Michigan infantryman, was pinned to the floor beneath red-hot metal and could not move until it cooled. By then the cavern of the explosion was a hellish scene of hundreds of screaming people being burned alive. Crisp went over the side.
George Young’s first thought was that lightning had struck the boat. He was pinned beneath wooden wreckage along with several other men, some of whom had been killed. He managed to extricate himself and struggled to free another man who was still alive, but he could not budge the heavy timbers. Soon the flames drove him away. “We could not escape from his hoarse cries,” he recalled, “and, cruel as it seems, we were relieved when death ended his horrible agony.”
Commodore Smith, whose weight had dropped to less than a hundred pounds during his imprisonment at Cahaba, was buried in “dead and wounded comrades, legs, arms, heads, and all parts of human bodies, and fragments of the wrecked upper decks.” He remained on the boat for perhaps half an hour, during which he helped throw overboard dying men who would otherwise have been burned alive.
Elliott would later claim that he had done the same. As the fire spread he watched stairways and portions of the decks collapse, then the smokestacks groan and topple. He pushed his way back into the smoke-filled cabin, entered an empty stateroom, and found a life preserver. On his way out he came upon a frightened young woman in a nightgown, followed her outside, grabbed her arm, and called a chambermaid to adjust the life preserver on her. Though it seems ludicrous that the chambermaid would still be at his beck and call, Elliott seems to have thought nothing of enlisting her service. Then, as he stood on the burning deck, he reported hearing a polite voice entreating him, and turned to see a calm yet gravely injured Daniel McLeod sitting on a cot at the edge of the burning cavern. McLeod had been reading at a table near the center of the cabin when he was blown across the room by the explosion. He was bruised, cut, and scalded, with both ankles broken so badly that the bones protruded. With his suspenders he had improvised tourniquets for both legs to keep from bleeding to death. Elliott recalled telling McLeod that he could not help him because he could not swim, to which McLeod responded that he wanted only to be thrown overboard so he would not burn alive. In Elliott’s telling, he and another man hoisted McLeod to the rail, from which he descended on a hog chain to the water. McLeod’s account would differ from Elliott’s in one important detail: He would not mention Elliott at all.
On all three decks, injured people were begging to be thrown overboard, believing that burning to death was worse than drowning. The brief choking of those who went under no doubt appeared less horrible than the extended, screaming agony of those being burned alive. M.H. Sprinkle and Billy Lockhart claimed to have thrown at least fifty helpless soldiers over the rail. Commodore Smith threw his share, too, and said it was “the hardest task of my life…the most heartrending task that human beings could be called upon to perform.” Some were so badly scalded that their skin slipped off as Smith struggled to pick them up. He watched them briefly writhe in the water before they went under.
After watching two Kentuckians lament to each other that they could not swim, then jump overboard to drown together, Elliott felt compelled to find something that would float, “but everything available seemed to have been appropriated.” He tried to make a life preserver out of a stool, but that did not work. He threw a mattress overboard, but it was immediately submerged by drowning men. He found another mattress and slipped off to a quieter spot, “but it no sooner touched the water than four men seized it, turned it over, and it went under as I jumped. Down, down I went into the chilly waters. Some poor drowning wretch was clutching at my legs, but putting my hands down to release myself and vigorously treading water, I rose strangling to the surface, my scalded throat and lungs burning with pain. The mattress was within easy reach, with only one claimant. God only knows what had become of the three others.” Like many others that night, Elliott had for the first time caused another man to drown.
As he floated near the boat Elliott narrowly missed being crushed when one of the boat’s wheelhouses collapsed, and he nearly went under the resulting waves. “There seemed to be acres of struggling humanity on the waters, some on debris of the wreck, some on the dead carcasses of horses, some holding to swimming live horses, some on boxes, bales of hay, drift logs, etc. Soon we parted company with the wreck and the crowd and drifted out into the darkness almost alone.”
A.C. Brown had awakened on the opposite side of the cabin from where he had fallen asleep, and had seen the chandeliers of the ladies’ cabin swinging crazily as smoke and steam billowed through the rooms. Once on the deck, he helped a woman push her trunk into the river, watched as she jumped in after it, and then followed her. He would later recall his moment of joy when the Sultana departed Vicksburg, and conclude, “It is well, my friends, that we cannot see into the future.”
Stephen Gaston, at fifteen one of the youngest soldiers on board, had spent the evening gorging on pilfered sugar and now searched in vain for his partner in crime, William Block. Failing to find him, he swung down to the boiler deck on the smokestack supports, then onto the starboard deck, where he found a flour barrel, undressed, and jumped into the river with it. Two or three men tried to overtake his barrel but drowned before reaching it.
George Safford, who was traveling with his father, a member of the Sanitary Commission, fastened life belts to both of them before they dove in together. Once in the water they climbed upon a door. but as they paddled away a horse leaped from the main deck and landed on it, separating them.
William McFarland saw a woman rush out of a stateroom with a small child in her arms, put a life preserver on it, and throw it into the river. When the child hit, only its bottom bobbed above the surface. The woman ran back into the stateroom, came back out, jumped into the water, and grabbed the child. McFarland did not see what happened next. By then he had noticed the seven-foot-tall Tennessean who, back in Memphis, had returned drunk to the boat at the point of bayonets, and he was concerned because he had teased the man.
Ogilvie Hamblin was still on the deck when he heard men shouting that they were trapped inside the cargo hold. One of Hamblin’s arms had been amputated by Rebel surgeons soon after his capture, but with another man’s help he managed to pry open the hatch. The men “came rushing out of the hold like bees out of a hive, followed by dense clouds of steam and smoke.” Hamblin stripped and stood naked on the deck for a few long moments, deliberating until he had no choice but to escape the flames. “Screwing my courage up to the sticking point,” he later wrote—borrowing a phrase from Lady Macbeth—he watched for an opening amid the drowning crowds, then dove in and quickly swam away as best he could with one arm. Helpless against the strong currents, he resorted to floating—a wise move, and a remarkable feat in a moment of extreme agitation.
Most of those who survived, as Elliott’s grandson later observed, did so “by thinking and acting independently.” Ohio soldier William Lugenbeal thought of the alligator in its crate, went to the closet where it was kept, broke in, dragged the box out, and ran his bayonet through the hissing reptile three times. He undressed, threw the box overboard, and climbed in. As he later wrote, “When a man would get close enough I would kick him off, then turn quick as I could and kick someone else to keep them from getting hold of me.” Occasionally someone pleaded that he was drowning, but Lugenbeal knew that if he helped, both would probably die. To those who later expressed shock upon hearing the story, he posed this question: “What do you think you would do?”
By now the disaster was becoming evident from miles away. About seven miles downstream at Memphis, where the waterfront sentinels had admired the brightly lit Sultana steaming around the bend at midnight, the U.S. military packet Pocahontas lay moored at the foot of Beale Street. Shortly after 2 a.m., its watchman noticed a glow upriver and reported it to the pilot. The watchman thought that perhaps a house was on fire. As the glow brightened the pilot surmised that it was a boat, but he did nothing.
In Mound City, Arkansas, two miles below the disaster scene, farmer John Fogleman was awakened by the sound of the explosion and from his veranda saw the burning steamboat in the distance. He aroused three neighbors, but none had a boat. The Pocahontas had been plying the river around Memphis for days, destroying all boats in private hands to prevent Confederate guerillas from using them.
William Woodridge was asleep in his mother’s house on their flooded farm about a mile upriver when he was awakened by the noise of the explosion, which he said “rolled and re-echoed for minutes in the woodlands.” His room was soon lit by a strange light, and he raced to the porch. “It was so light, I could have picked up a pin,” he said of the fire’s glow. Standing with his mother and the farm’s overseer, he heard the cries and saw people jumping into the water. He had secreted a boat away, so he and the overseer hurried to it to begin helping with the rescue. A short distance upriver was a wood yard operated by William Boardman and R.K. Hill, who also set off in a hidden skiff when they heard the screams.
No one, even those on shore, was prepared for what was now unfolding—for the number of lives at stake or the difficulty of coming to their rescue. The Mississippi, even at a normal stage, is not a languorous river. From a distance it appears to move slowly because it is so large, but its velocity is stunning. It is one of the greatest forces on earth, pushing and pulling relentlessly toward the Gulf even though its bottom at Vicksburg is below sea level. The bottom itself is a river of flowing sand, and the channel is riddled with whirlpools strong enough to suck full-grown trees beneath the surface, then propel them violently upward to break with a splash, seemingly from nowhere, miles downstream. As they drifted downstream some of the swimmers were sucked under by whirlpools. Joseph Taylor Elliott and three other men were holding tightly to a section of floating stairs, moving tantalizingly close to the Tennessee bank, when suddenly they struck a cross-current that began to whirl. “Into this we went, and such a twisting and turning round, upside down and every other way, was never seen,” he later recalled. He held on for the ride until the stairs “shot out into the current and on down the river, less one man who was left in the whirlpool and drowned.”
The currents were particularly risky during a flood, more so for weakened men who suddenly found themselves subject to the strange, terrifying, inescapable pull of gravity in a cold, deep, surging river. The sick and injured were also more vulnerable to the water’s bitter chill. The river at that time of year would have been less than sixty degrees, which sounds relatively warm but in fact is extremely cold to a human body. Water draws heat from the body more than twenty times as fast as air, and a body begins to fail when its core temperature drops below about ninety degrees. In water as cold as the Mississippi was that night, even a strong swimmer would have only about ninety minutes before serious trouble started, and swimming—expending energy—would simply hasten the process. Even the shock of entering water that cold can cause an involuntary gasping reflex, sending an able swimmer straight to the bottom. As body temperature drops, heart rate and blood pressure increase dramatically. Blood vessels near the surface constrict as blood is shunted to vital organs. Muscles tense, generating more body heat, which is then lost. Blood pressure then begins to go down. Mental processes become impaired. People become irrational, lose dexterity, and make bad calls, such as swimming away from shore or from rescuers. Often they lose consciousness. Those in the water, even if they could swim, were in a race against time.
At this point, perhaps five hundred people remained on board, including Boor, George Robinson, and the newlywed Hardins. Most had been driven toward the bow by the flames. As long as the remnants of the Sultana’s wheel housings remained upright, the hull had drifted downstream stern first, perhaps because the housings funneled the brisk north wind and kept the bow pointed upstream. But the currents were pushing the boat slowly downriver. Once the wheel housings collapsed, the boat’s wind and water resistance changed, and the resulting pivot sent the flames racing in the opposite direction. Soon thick clouds of smoke, laden with burning cinders, were rolling toward the refuge of the bow. As the flames approached, two Kentucky cavalrymen hurriedly looped a cable and heavy chain to a mooring ring for use as a handhold, thinking that they might be able to lower themselves into the river and escape the fire while holding on to prevent drowning. Boor finally decided it was time to dive in, and when he did, he heard a sizzling sound and realized his bundle of clothes had caught fire. Seth Hardin, who was separated from his bride in the confusion, was also driven into the water, where he swam through the crowd calling her name. On the forecastle stood one of the Sisters of Charity, entreating those in the water to avoid drowning one another. Some survivors later said her words did have a calming effect. She would survive in their memories as a totem figure who eventually went up in flames.
When George Robinson at last dove in, he felt his confidence and stamina flagging almost immediately. Fear normally causes a surge of adrenaline, but it can also sap energy incredibly fast. Fortunately, Robinson caught sight of a dead mule, which was to be the vehicle of his final—and only successful—escape. He climbed on the floating carcass, which was still warm, and drifted away down the river, which must have been both unnerving and, under the circumstances, sublime. As he floated Robinson was apparently calm enough to notice that “some amusing things transpired.” He came across a man going over and over on a floating barrel; the man would crawl upon the barrel, pause briefly to pray, then go over like a clown in a bizarre circus sideshow. Robinson also heard someone calling out, “Morgan, here is your mule,” which had new meaning for him now.
Hiram Allison was drifting in the dark river when he came upon two men holding the ends of a horse trough and praying with their eyes clenched shut. Neither stopped praying when he grabbed the middle of the trough and spoke to them. For a few moments Allison lost track of where he was, and when he looked back both men were gone. He was now alone in the darkness of the open channel.
William Marshall had managed to grab the tail of a swimming horse. His friend Samuel Pickens also grabbed hold of one but let go after the animal panicked and headed back toward the Sultana. Pickens then climbed atop a dead horse and drifted away.
George Young managed to float on his rubber blanket until someone grabbed his shirt sleeve: “To break that hold required a great effort, but, drawing myself up, I put my fist into his side, gave a strong, sudden push and broke from him, and a moment after freed myself from another drowning person who was dragging me beneath the water.” As he floated away Young snagged a pair of pants floating in the water, which he decided he would need when he got out. Determined to survive, he fashioned a better raft from half a cork life belt, his rubber blanket, and a cracker box. He later gave the cracker box to a drowning man to ward him off. “I was very watchful for drowning men,” he recalled, “and the least movement made me cautious.” He eventually came upon a man floating on a log, who warned him not to come closer. Young suggested that they work together to reach the flooded trees. “This met with his approval enough for him to come nearer, but not close enough for me to become a partner with him in the possession of the log.” Together they made their way to the trees, where a voice instructed them to come closer, saying it was possible to touch bottom. The voice belonged to an Arkansas man in a dugout canoe, who had heard the explosion and ferried the two men ashore.
Unable to break free of the currents, Summerville watched the dim outline of the islands and the flooded timber on the banks moving past. He found a large plank about two miles above Memphis and positioned it across his rail. He held the rail with his feet and the plank with his hands. At one point a gunboat passed but did not stop. He also saw a snorting horse swimming downstream with six or eight men hanging on. “When I heard him coming I tried to get to him, but when I saw his load I kept clear for fear some of the boys would get all I had at the time in the world—my rail and plank,” he recalled.
Later, a Michigan cavalry man named Jerry Perker floated close to Summerville on a barrel. Several other men were clinging to debris nearby, and Perker “would cheer the boys by telling them to hold out and we would get out.” Summerville recalled that he was still wearing his socks, which “bothered me more than anything else. They worked partly off my feet and would catch on my rail which caused me to almost sink.” In fact, some men drowned because they could not get their fitted long johns past their feet and became entangled in them. Summerville floated in his annoying socks alongside a man named Kibbs, who he said “was cheerful except when talking of his little girl. There were three of us from Brazil, Ind., two were lost, I being the only one of them saved.”
J.W. Rush was also drifting down the river, driven by the currents so hard against a floating stump that he would bear the scars of puncture wounds for the rest of his life. “Those who have any knowledge of trying to handle a round piece of timber in the water can realize how difficult it is to support one’s self,” he wrote, “especially in the current of the river, upon a piece of wood of such ill shape as a stump with roots protruding in all directions.” Unable to balance himself on the stump, and fearing that the effort would wear him out, he eventually let go.
Ohio soldier L.W. McCrory held on to his valise, with the new civilian clothes he had bought at Vicksburg, and his pocketbook containing $100. With his wallet between his teeth, gripping his valise with one hand, he had jumped eighteen feet from the boiler deck into the river. He proved to be a strong enough swimmer to swim three miles with baggage. But when the man he was swimming alongside said he could go no farther and disappeared beneath the water, McCrory lost his nerve and let go of his valise. He held on to his wallet and swam about two miles farther before reaching land.
While he was still on the boat, Ben Davis, whose canteen had flown from his hands, had fretted about where the Sultana’s alligator might be, and now, in the darkness, men were likewise fearful of encountering it. At one point a group scattered when a horse threw its head over the log they were floating on and they mistook it for the alligator. Everyone was at wit’s end, wary of everything. Truman Smith was floating alone in the darkness when he heard someone cough. “As I came near he kept swimming away,” he recalled. “I called him and asked what regiment he belonged to. He asked what I wanted to know for.” Smith told him he would write to his parents if he drowned, but the man told him not to come any closer. They swam at a distance from each other until someone called out, “Halt!” It was the voice of a guard on the Tennessee shore.
Simeon Chelf managed to hold on to his diary and pictures of his wife and children, though he was otherwise naked in the water. He had been sleeping on the bow of the boat when the boilers exploded, and a friend beside him had been instantly killed. As he watched others jumping into the water he searched for a bucket to fight the fire. Unable to find one, he changed his focus and began looking for something that would float. He found a board, then traded it for a pole to a friend who could not swim. He and his friend then said a prayer and jumped in. When Chelf was halfway between the Sultana and the Arkansas shore, a boat—probably the Bostonia II, which was the first to arrive on the scene—mysteriously appeared, and its crew began dumping hay bales in the river. The boat’s wake nearly drowned him.
The Bostonia II had been about two miles upstream from the Sultana, headed toward Memphis, when its crew noticed the vivid glow on the horizon. The captain thought it was a forest fire until the Sultana came into view. The Bostonia II slowed as it plowed into a mile-long string of victims, and the crew began scattering the hay bales and anything else that would float. But the boat did not immediately stop.
As he drifted Chelf shared his pole with another naked man until they reached a cluster of flooded saplings. Finding that he could not touch bottom, Chelf swam back out into the river, thinking he might be picked up by one of the rescue boats that were starting to arrive.
At half past three the alarm had still not been sounded at the Memphis waterfront, where a dozen boats—packets, gunboats, and other vessels—were moored along the long wooden wharf. Inside the wharf boat, with the door ajar, two men sat in straight chairs beside a pot-bellied stove. Hearing a noise outside, they looked at each other quizzically and stepped onto the deck. It was a cry for help from the river. The first survivor had reached Memphis—at least, the first one to drift close enough to be heard at the wharf. One of the men jumped into a skiff and rowed out into the river. In the dim light of his lantern he saw a partially clothed boy, Wesley Lee of the 102nd Ohio, clinging to a pair of boards. Lee had wasted no time getting off the Sultana. As he explained after he was pulled from the water, he jumped in with two planks he had pried from a stair. Hearing his story, one of the men immediately tapped out the news on a telegraph. Afterward it would be said that the first report of the disaster came from the General Boynton, a military courier boat that had started upstream from Memphis a short time earlier and turned back when its crew discovered the river was full of people. Elliott, in fact, watched, floating on his mattress, as the General Boynton approached, then turned, blew its whistle, and headed back toward the city. According to Lee, the Boynton arrived at the waterfront several minutes after him, carrying a few survivors, and with his permission claimed the bounty that was routinely paid for the first report of a boat disaster.
Lee said that as he drifted alone in the river he had been buoyed by thoughts of home and the desire to simply live as long as he could. As he was warming himself by the wharf boat’s stove, the city’s master of river transport ordered three steamers—the Jenny Lind, the Pocahontas, and a ferry named Rosadella—to fire up immediately and head upstream.
By 4 a.m. the riverfront was clogged with swimmers, many badly scalded or otherwise injured, all numbed by exposure and exhausted. Lifeboats; small craft from the U.S. ironclad Essex, the U.S.S. Grosbeak, and the U.S.S. Tyler; and a dozen or more steamboat yawls and skiffs soon left to aid in the rescue.
As the boats were leaving Memphis a skiff and a dugout canoe from Arkansas were picking up survivors on the opposite shore. In the skiff were William Boardman and R.K. Hill, who operated the wood yard in Mound City. In the canoe was Frank Barton, a Confederate lieutenant who had been camping close by. Still wearing his Confederate Army jacket, Barton rescued Ben Davis and several others, but watched as one man relaxed his hold on a willow tree and slipped beneath the water when the skiff was only a few feet away. As Elliott’s grandson later observed, “The difference between life and death could be measured. It was a matter of yards, feet, inches. It was the length of a reaching arm that was long enough, or a little too short.” Barton paddled his survivors to the wood yard, then went back for more. A shanty at the wood yard was soon crowded with shivering men.
After dropping anchor downstream, the crew of the Bostonia II lowered her yawl and by the light of torches began plucking survivors from the water, among them young Gaston and, according to Elliott’s grandson, “the lady in the hoopskirt.” The boat gathered about a hundred survivors, then headed for Memphis.
Robert Hamilton, who had been struggling to overcome the currents on a floating board, watched crestfallen as the Bostonia II departed at about 4:30 a.m. To make matters worse, the boat’s wake swamped many of the survivors still floating in the river. But Hamilton noticed in the gathering light that a few men, including those who had affixed the cable and chain to the mooring ring of the Sultana’s bow, were climbing back aboard. Most of the boat had burned down to the waterline, and the men had survived by lowering themselves into the water, holding on to the cable and chain, and submersing themselves when the fire got too hot, then coming up for air. It had been a stroke of genius. Two or three shivering, naked soldiers were now pulling others onto the bow, and Hamilton paddled in their direction.
Rush, meanwhile, had joined a demented man floating on a door. “A yawl came near us when I called for help,” he recalled, “but as I reached with my right hand for the rope, my companion reached for me and got hold of my hair, which at the time was very long. He seized my hair with a grasp firm enough to pull me on my back and get me under water, but his hold soon relaxed, and as I came up the yawl passed out of sight, and I was again left in darkness and drifted along with the current of the river. I was a good swimmer, but realized the fact that I could do nothing but keep above water, so I made no effort only to float, in hopes the current would carry me to shore.”
As the Essex drifted downriver from Memphis, picking up survivors, sentries at Fort Pickering twice fired on her. The Essex’s ensign, James Berry, would later lodge a complaint against the officers of Fort Pickering for not only refusing to aid but actually hindering the rescue. Sentries at a post about a mile upstream from Memphis also fired on survivors calling for help in the river.
In his official report, Berry later wrote that he had been awakened with the news that the Sultana had blown up and was burning a few miles upriver, and that the river was full of drowning people. He ordered all the boats under his command to be manned, then boarded a cutter. “The morning was very dark, it being about one hour before daylight, and the weather overcast, and the shrieks of the wounded and drowning men was the only guide we had,” he wrote. “The first man we picked up was chilled and so benumbed that he couldn’t help himself, and the second one died a short time after he was taken on board. We soon drifted down to Fort Pickering, when the sentry on the shore fired at us, and we were obliged to ‘come to’ while the poor fellows near us were crying out and imploring us for God’s sake to save them; that they couldn’t hold out much longer.” Pulling close to the bank, Berry hailed the sentry, who ordered him to come ashore. Berry refused. As the Essex backed out into the river and its crew began picking up more drowning men, the sentries fired on the boat again. “It was not daylight, and though our two boats and a steamboat’s yawl, which came out to lend us a hand, made a large mark to shoot at, I would not leave the poor fellows in the water to attend the sentry on shore,” Berry wrote. “When the day began to dawn the cries of the sufferers ceased, and all who had not been rescued had gone down.” Berry went ashore, where a sentry pointed his musket at him. Berry asked for the officer in charge, who told him that he was under order to fire on any skiffs in the river. “I told him that these boats were not skiffs; that they were a man-of-war’s gig and cutter, and again reminded him of what had happened, and of the drowning men whose cries he could not help hearing, and for the sake of humanity why could he not execute his orders with some discretion in a time like this. He said that he had as much humanity as any one, and in firing at me he had only obeyed orders. I saw a number of skiffs and other boats laying hauled up out of the water, and from appearances no one had made any attempt to launch them, and I reminded him that that did not look much like humanity.”
Though his charges were later contested, Berry claimed that no one at the fort offered to do anything for the survivors in his boats except the watchman of the coal barges, “who, with the assistance of some of my men, built a fire on the shore, and I left a few of the rescued men by it, who wished to remain, and the others I had put on board vessels near by, where they were well cared for. I then crossed the river, and after looking carefully around I returned on board, having taken out of the water sixty men and one lady.”
After the scalded swimmers were pulled from the water, they were sprinkled with flour to relieve their pain and given water and whiskey. Among them was George Robinson, who was plucked from his mule. He had drifted fourteen miles to near Fort Pickering. By then he was “nonsensical,” and he awoke to find himself in the care of an elderly woman.
Like Robinson, many survivors floated past the city before being rescued. Joseph Bringman saw the gas street lights ascending the bluff, heard the shouts of rescuers and the ringing of wharf bells, and saw dozens of boats departing to participate in the rescue, but he could not make his presence known, though he “hallooed for help.” He soon lost consciousness and drifted by. “I was so chilled that I was powerless, and a kind of drowsiness came over me,” he later recalled. “I felt that I was going to sleep, and I seemed as comfortable as if in a downy bed. I soon dropped to sleep, or unconsciousness, with the music of the bells of the steamers ringing in my ears.” He would never know how he survived.
Eventually Joseph Taylor Elliott and the other men on the floating stairs drifted up to a man on a log, and the four floated together until Elliott, in a semiconscious state, was somehow separated from the others. He remembered passing Memphis and seeing the same gas lights climbing the bluff, but after that his memory was blank until he heard the splash of an oar. He tried to call out, but his voice failed. “It was some such feeling as when one tries to call out in a nightmare,” he recalled. But one of the crew members from an Essex cutter saw him, dragged him into the boat, and gave him a shot of whiskey.
After trying to swim ashore and being continually defeated by the currents, Chester Berry was ready to give up—“to shorten my misery”—when he thought of home and in his mind was transported there. He imagined himself walking up the path from the road through the gate to the house, “but, strange to me, when I reached the door, instead of entering at once, I sat upon the step.” His mother was very religious, as his father had been, but because his father was deaf and dumb his mother always read the family devotionals, and he imagined her at that moment praying for him. “As I sat upon the step I thought it was nine o’clock in the evening, and as plainly as I ever heard my mother’s voice I heard it that evening. I cared but little for the prayer until she reached that portion that referred to the absent one, when all the mother-soul seemed to go up in earnest petition—‘God save my boy.’ For ten long weary months she had received no tidings from her soldier boy, now she had just learned that he was on his way home and her thoughts were almost constantly upon him; and for him her earnest prayer was made.” Bolstered by his vision, Berry renewed his efforts, almost immediately heard “a glad cry,” and turned to see the bow light of the Essex. His struggles were not over—the Essex continued past—but he managed to make his way to a snag, where he was eventually rescued by the Pocahontas.
At daybreak, Fast, who had passed out, regained consciousness in the top of a small tree surrounded by deep water. About a quarter-mile downstream he saw the hull of the still-burning Sultana slowly turning round in an eddy, with a small group of men clinging to its bow. He decided to try to swim toward it, a seemingly foolish idea that probably saved his life. He made his way from flooded treetop to flooded treetop until he was close enough, then swam to the hull and caught a line from its bow. He was so tired that it took him an hour of slipping and scuffling to heave himself onto the deck. The hull was about three-quarters of a mile from the flooded Arkansas shore, and when Fast reached it, a few dozen men were still there, some of whom were badly scalded or otherwise maimed. The debris on the hull was still burning—everywhere except the twenty feet or so where the men were marooned—and the able-bodied men were beating back the flames with waterlogged clothes.
After he pulled himself from the water, Fast spotted another swimmer, whom he recognized as a man who had escaped Cahaba and been recaptured. He threw him a length of rope. With another length of rope the two tied the hull to a flooded tree to hold it in place. Then they began throwing water from the river onto the still-advancing flames. As they did so a young man was clinging to a brass mooring ring on the side of the hull, away from the bow, hemmed in by fire. “We could easily hear all he said indeed, could not help hearing it,” Fast recalled. “Sometimes he would pray, then shout for help, then would cry and beg and coax, in the most heartrending manner. He said that he had a mother in Indiana, and that she was well off, and if we would save him she would give us all that she was worth.” This went on, he recalled, “for an hour or two,” but the men could not save him because a wall of fire surrounded him. They attempted to float ropes to him, but each one caught fire before he could grasp it, and he was unable to swim. “Finally, as the fire crept closer and closer to him, and he breathed the hot air and smoke, his voice grew hoarse and more feeble.” The young man soon released his grasp and sank into the river.
Fogleman, the Arkansas farmer, watched the remains of the Sultana drift into the flooded trees and realized that the men on the bow were fighting a losing battle. No one on the rescue boats seemed to have noticed them, so Fogleman and his neighbors began hastily building a raft of twelve-foot-long logs. They set out at about 8 a.m., according to Fast, who saw them coming. By then there were perhaps three dozen men on the bow. About a hundred feet from the hull, Fogleman stopped to negotiate. He called out that he could take six at a time but would not come nearer unless they agreed to go in an orderly fashion. He was afraid, and rightfully so, of being swamped. Fast recalled, “Finally, a comrade, whom I called all the morning ‘Indiana,’ and myself stepped to the edge of the burning hull, and declared in the most solemn manner that if he would approach we would not get on his logs, and would not permit over six persons to get on.” So began the ferrying of the last passengers from the burning boat to the shore. In the interest of time, Fogleman discharged each group among the flooded trees, where they could await the final trip to dry land. Each time the passengers paddled with as much strength as they could muster. Meanwhile, the floor beneath the waiting men began to smolder and burn, and they covered themselves with wet blankets and poured water over their heads. Finally, with thirteen men left, the consensus was that they did not have time for everyone to be ferried to the trees before the remainder of the deck was consumed by fire. As Fast recalled, ‘“Indiana’ and I, and others, hurriedly discussed the situation. Should we strong ones take to the raft and leave the helpless? Human instinct struggling for self-preservation seemed to argue yes. But the maimed ones took in the situation at once, and begged for the strong ones not to abandon them.” When the raft returned, Fast and his Indiana friend loaded the injured men aboard. Because seven would have to go on this load or the next, Fast said, “Seven goes this load,” and slid onto the log. “We landed, the raft went back, got the other six off almost overcome with heat and smoke. The raft had got only about six rods from the burning hull when it sank, leaving nothing but the jack-staff sticking above the water to mark where she went down.” Hugh Kinser, who was resting in a treetop nearby, watched the Sultana’s hull go under, sending hissing water and steam high into the air.
Fast heard men in the distance calling out from their perches in trees or aboard debris in the river. Some sang army or minstrel songs. Others mocked the singing of the birds or the croaking of frogs.
Fogleman took the survivors to his plantation house, where they warmed themselves by the fire, and lay the seriously injured out to tend to their wounds. Among the men were Nathaniel Foglesong, William Boor, and Dewitt Clinton Spikes, who had lost his family. Spikes reportedly became crazed with grief when the bodies of his mother and sister arrived, but eventually he calmed himself and went on to help rescue survivors.
Daniel McLeod, with his broken ankles, bleeding wounds, and scalded skin, floated downriver about two miles before he managed to lodge himself in flooded brush at a place called Cheek’s Island, where he was rescued, along with Ogilvie Hamblin, and taken to the wood yard. As they were headed back to the yard they saw a young girl fighting to keep her head above water. She was about seven years old and wore a life belt, but it had slipped too low on her waist. McLeod, despite his injuries, dragged himself half over the gunwale to try to reach her, and the one-armed Hamblin struggled to assist, but she went under before they could save her. The last they saw was her tiny feet in “miniature high-heeled gaiters.”
When they reached a cabin in the Arkansas woodyard, McLeod was carried inside, as was Young, who dipped his burned hand in a barrel of flour to relieve the pain. Looking out the window, Young saw “a one-armed comrade who was entirely naked, poor from a long prison life, and shivering in the wind.” It was Hamblin, who hesitated to come inside because he was naked and there were women present. He lingered, shivering, outside until Young gave him the extra pants he had snagged soon after leaving the boat.
Albert King floated for hours on his raft of debris with Anna Annis, who continually called for help. Early on she had seemed to verge on hysteria, but she grew quieter over time, only asking now and then if he thought they would be saved. King said little because he was unsure himself. Then he touched something underwater, perhaps a submerged sapling, and found a foothold. They climbed atop a log, which partially sank, but kept their heads above water. By the time they were rescued, they were so cold they could barely speak. Fogleman ferried them to the cabin, where they were wrapped in blankets to warm by the fire. Meanwhile, young William Woodridge and the overseer of his family farm rescued a dozen victims with the help of a long pole and their skiff. Carefully avoiding large crowds of swimmers, they saved about forty-five men and built a bonfire on a spot of dry land.
Still floating in the river, Rush heard men calling out support to one another in army and prison camp slang: “Lie down and keep cool,” “Fresh fish,” “Mister, here’s your mule.” But not everyone was feeling sociable. Lugenbeal, in his alligator box, kept quiet when others were nearby. Some survivors were so terrified, and so alert to the threat of others in the water, that they would not even allow their rescuers to approach.
As the survivors drifted into the flooded cottonwoods and willow trees on the Arkansas side, a new problem presented itself. “As it got lighter,” White wrote, “I could see comrades all around me, some in trees and some on driftwood, and nearly all naked. To make it worse, the buffalo gnats were so thick that they nearly ate us up.”
Otto Bardon, clinging with a group of survivors to flooded saplings and shivering in the cold, broke open a floating trunk but found that “it contained only ladies’ dresses so it was no help to us.” It was an odd time to be concerned about being caught in a dress, particularly because, as Bardon added, “One of these men that had clung to the trunk was so cold that he drowned with his arms around a tree.” Instead, they remained exposed and were tormented by gnats and mosquitoes until their rescue at about 9 a.m.
J. Walter Elliott and his companion floated three miles before reaching a stationary raft of driftwood near the Arkansas shore, where he crawled onto a cypress log and found he had difficulty using his legs. He took three packets of quinine that one of the Sisters of Charity had given him and rubbed his legs until he could stand and walk. His companion remained listless, and that prompted Elliott to begin hitting him with a switch. The man groaned each time and begged him to stop, but eventually he came around and climbed onto the log. Together they pulled a young woman and two men from the water, though the three died of exposure within minutes. Elliott watched the sunrise from his spot atop the drift. Up and down the river he could see men on debris, on rafts of driftwood, perched on snags, clinging to flooded trees. About a hundred yards upriver he saw a group atop a flooded barn.
James Brody, who had floated with fifteen or so men on a large board, and who had lost one sock to a drowning man, had by now made it to what was actually a flooded log stable, where twenty-three men awaited rescue. After the sun came up, “as far as the eye could see, upon every old snag and every little piece of drift big enough, you would see a man. That sight I never will forget. I see it now as I pen these lines.” He also saw a man swim to a drift a short distance away who had been “scalded almost to pieces” and who hollered “boys, it is going to kill me” before he died. “Then, there was a nice mule swam out to us just after daylight. He had a piece of railing twelve or fourteen feet long tied to his halter strap. One of the boys got down and unfastened it. What became of the mule I do not know, as he was there in the water the last I saw of him with just his back, neck and head out of water.” Soon they saw the smoke of the approaching Jenny Lind, which sent smaller boats to rescue them. A doctor on board “gave us something to make us throw up the water,” though Brody did not vomit until later, in a Memphis hospital.
In the early light, J. Walter Elliott watched the young man repeatedly trying to climb a tree trunk, each time losing his grip and falling. The man was clearly about to go under when Barton poled into view, retrieved him, and took him to the barn roof. Soon the Jenny Lind dropped anchor nearby, and Barton began transferring survivors to the steamer. Elliott and his companion were the last to go. He later wrote that he was helped aboard by an Ohio lieutenant whom he had known in prison, whose name was McCord but who was affectionately known, oddly enough, as “Susan.” Elliott recalled that Susan “had the autograph fever” toward the close of his prison stay, “but I reckon he lost his Andersonville collection,” because when he saw him he was dressed only in “a bob-tailed shirt. I stripped & gave him a pair of red flannel drawers.” Stunned to see a dugout canoe pull up to the boat with Daniel McLeod inside, “I helped lift him on board and lay him on deck and gave him a tumbler of whisky.”
As the Pocahontas, the Rosadella, the Bostonia II, and the Jenny Lind nosed in and out of the flooded trees, two more steamers arrived: The Rose Hambleton and the Silver Spray. The latter picked up Congressman Snow, Commodore Smith, Perry Summerville, William McFarland, and the woman he had seen dropping the infant into the water—all of whom survived. Summerville had been picked up a few miles from Memphis by a man in a canoe who ferried him to the Silver Spray. He was freezing, could not stand, and was spitting blood. “After I had been there a few minutes a young man was brought in who was so badly scalded that his skin slipped off from the shoulders to the hands,” he later wrote. “They wrapped him up in oil and he walked the floor until a few minutes before his death. There was a lady brought in also who had a husband and some children on board. She was almost crazy. I don’t think she ever heard of them after that terrible morning.”
Aboard the Pocahontas, McCrory ate breakfast, then sidled up to the bar and asked for a brandy. The bartender set out a bottle and a glass, and when McCrory held up his treasured wallet and said proudly that he could pay, the bartender said it was on the house. McCrory recalled that the survivors congregated on the starboard side, while the dead were placed on the larboard, and that a few who initially survived made the crossing from one side to the other before the boat landed at Memphis.
McFarland—who either was obsessed with Big Tennessee or was making things up, recalled that he again saw the big man near Memphis, where he refused to come aboard a rescue boat and swam the rest of the way. Big Tennessee—or, at least, his legend—also was said to have later refused a ride from a hack at the waterfront, and a detail of guards had to march him to a hospital.
At the Memphis waterfront, which was now teeming with people, women of the Sanitary Commission met the survivors; washed the soot, mud, and blood from them; and gave them blankets and red long johns. As the day wore on, large crowds remained at the waterfront, handing out coffee, food, clothes, and blankets, or simply gawking. The survivors were carried to several hospitals—Adams, Overton, Washington, Gayoso, Officers—and to the Soldiers’ Home. At Adams, McLeod was told that one of his legs—the right one, which had been shattered at Shiloh, and which he had convinced the field surgeon to save—would have to be amputated. At Gayoso, Anna Annis was heavily sedated and treated for shock and burns; she fell asleep while begging for news about her family.
J. Walter Elliott went with “Susan” to the telegraph office, where he gave his correct name, rank, and infantry division. It was the first time he had given his true identity since his capture, and, as he noted, “a Cincinnati paper published it so next day.” As a result he was listed as a survivor, while his assumed name was listed among the lost.
By early afternoon, the search for survivors was called off, though bodies continued to turn up for weeks, some as far downriver as Vicksburg. Among them was a dark-skinned soldier wearing a horsehair bracelet, and a red-haired man with an eagle tattooed on his arm, neither of whom was ever identified. Most of the bodies were never retrieved.
In the confusion of the aftermath, Romulus Tolbert’s hometown newspaper reported that he and his friend John Maddox had been killed. In fact, Tolbert was sent to Adams Hospital, where he was treated for chills. Maddox ended up at the Memphis Soldiers Home.