AFTER MONTHS, EVEN YEARS, OF RESTING THEIR HEADS on the hard ground of army camps, spooning on cold winter nights with other men, and in some cases sleeping in upright fetal positions in holes in the ground, the Sultana survivors finally made it home, where they could retire at night to their own beds. For Tolbert it was the familiar wooden four-poster in his mother’s home. But many of them slept fitfully, whether as a result of injuries or diseases or because they had developed a bad case of nerves. It was not as if they left it all behind.
For the most part, the general public did leave it behind. After four years of massive bloodletting, and with everyone’s attention focused on the fallout from the Lincoln assassination and the end of the war, the magnitude of the disaster could penetrate only so far into the national psyche. Stories of Southern depravity were favorite chew-toys in the postwar North, and for a while there was an eager audience for prison tales. Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville, was tried and hanged for war crimes, partly as a result of a groundswell of popular support for revenge against the Rebels. (Champ Ferguson was also hanged.) But the Sultana story was not so satisfying to contemplate. The disaster was overwhelming and the enemy unclear. The Union Army had won the war, and the number of casualties had far exceeded the losses aboard one steamboat. The story quickly faded from the headlines, even as the federal government undertook a perfunctory investigation into the events that brought it about.
Many saw what happened on the Sultana as a terrible accident. A few, particularly among the survivors, claimed that it was a case of Rebel sabotage. In May 1888, a St. Louis newspaper published an article about a veterans’ reunion in which a local resident, William Streeter, claimed that a Confederate blockade-runner had sabotaged the Sultana by placing a bomb—specifically, a disguised torpedo—in the coal bin, knowing that it would later be loaded into the furnace. The story was incredible for many reasons, not the least of which was the difficulty of secreting a bomb aboard the boat and the unlikelihood that the crew would have failed to recognize that something was amiss. Added to that, the problems with the Sultana’s boilers were by then well known. Testimony during a congressional inquiry left no doubt of that.
Though testimony at the tribunals and inquiries revealed that the great loss of life was the responsibility of the army’s chain of command and the greed of private contractors, the prosecutors showed a lack of verve for punishing anyone. They pointed an accusing finger at Wintringer, the engineer, but he suffered no significant repercussions. His engineer’s license was revoked, but in no time the governing agency, the St. Louis Board of Inspectors, reinstated it. In June 1866, a military tribunal found Captain Frederick Speed guilty of negligence and ordered him dismissed from the army, but the verdict was reversed by the judge advocate general, and Speed was honorably discharged. Speed chose to remain in Vicksburg, where he became a criminal court judge and a powerful Mississippi politician. A street in the city still bears his name.
The commissary general over Union prisoners concluded, following the inquiry, that Speed and Captain Rueben Hatch were “the most censurable” but that Captain Kerns (who supervised the loading) and Captain Williams had also contributed to the disaster. Hatch claimed in a rather petulant letter to a fellow officer on September 29, 1865, that he “had no control over the loading the steamer Sultana” and predicted that Speed’s dispatches would provide supporting evidence, though in the end he never had to prove anything. The prosecutors in one inquiry were unable to compel Hatch to testify, likely because of his political connections. A request to the secretary of war to have him arrested and transported to Vicksburg was ignored. Hatch’s career did end on an ignoble note, however. On a later trip aboard the steamer Atlantic, he deposited almost $15,000 in government funds in the boat’s safe, which was subsequently, curiously, robbed. The thief was caught, but the recovered funds did not include $8,500 in government money that Hatch claimed to have put there, and he was forced to pay it back.
Ultimately the Sultana inquiries were mostly for show. Even the death toll was never fully reckoned. Officially, it was listed at just more than twelve hundred, which failed to include an entire trainload of passengers from Camp Fisk. Chester Berry, who later became a preacher, lamented in his book Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors, first published in 1892, that because of the public’s limited interest the tragedy found “no place in American history.” He found that “strange.”
The investigations did reach one meaningful conclusion: That the boilers were the cause of the explosion. After the last survivors departed Memphis and the river level began to fall, much of the Sultana’s surviving machinery was recovered from the wreck, piled on barges, carried to Hen Island, and sold for salvage. The Sultana’s safe, containing at least $32,000, more than half of it in gold, was never recovered. Two weeks after the disaster, pieces of the boilers were inspected, and one was intact, indicating that three of the four had blown. Salecker concludes that the explosion was caused by too much pressure and too little water in the boilers, the latter condition being exacerbated by the frequent careening of the top-heavy, overloaded boat, which left water gaps that caused the tubing to overheat. There is no proof that the patch was a factor, but it seems logical.
For the survivors, there was no real closure, and even returning soldiers who had not endured the Sultana disaster often found their homecomings anticlimactic. As survivor Benjamin Magee wrote years later, “With many of us there was a very noticeable difference between 1862 and 1865—between the going and the coming volunteer. No fluttering handkerchiefs greeted the return of our regiment. No committees of invitation or reception met us at the depot; no loud sounding cannon belched forth thunders of welcome. More than half of the 208,000 Indiana soldiers were already discharged, and the land was full of soldiers then; nearly every other man you met was a soldier.” The returning veterans, he wrote, “had been coming home, and kept coming, till their coming had become monotonous, and ceased to cause remark or ripple in the busy circles of life.” The war had been their shared world, and it was over. After they were mustered out in July, the Sultana survivors faced the next phase of what was to be their long-running challenge, largely on their own.
They were in some ways primed by past travails, but in others they were dangerously ill equipped for the new and different set of stresses that came to bear during the remainder of their lives. A person in any survival situation goes through predictable phases. There are the stages of facing death—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—and, as Laurence Gonzales has pointed out, a person who does not linger too long in any of the stages has a better chance of survival. Denial can cause a person to ignore important cues. Anger can be self-defeating. Bargaining is largely ineffective, and depression sets in motion physical changes that both harm the body and contaminate the chemistry of the brain. Acceptance is probably the most conducive to survival but can itself lead to passivity toward death.
To hold death at bay for as long as possible, a person must strike a balance, at each stage, between thoughtfulness and blind resolve—not an easy task. And just as the descent of a perilous mountain is technically more difficult than the ascent—a fact that is remarkably easy to forget—the Sultana survivors had to come to terms with the cumulative losses, with the injuries and scars, both physical and mental, that they would carry with them the rest of their lives.
THERE WAS A BLINDING RAINSTORM, with vivid lightning, the day Tolbert finally made it home. It was early May, a time when the fields of Saluda were rank with yellow wildflowers, awaiting the plow, and ferns and may-apples were pushing through the mulch of the wooded ravines. The familiar landmarks of his former life were still there: The stone bridge spanning a rushing freshet along the pike between Madison and Saluda; his family’s red-brick farmhouse, with its wooden gingerbread framing the front porch, midway between the Tryus Church and the cemetery where his father lay; the little hamlet of Paynesville, where Maddox’s family farmed.
But otherwise the world had changed in profound ways, and it must have felt strange to finally be home. His brother Tyrus was dead. His younger brother Sammie was basically a broken old man at fifteen. Daniel had lost three fingers and the use of his left hand and would never work again. Mathew, who had endured scurvy and pneumonia as a prisoner of war, would soon marry and move away. Only Silas had come through four years of war largely unscathed. Romulus himself had passed through his own nine circles of hell and was now back where he started from.
The Courier, which had reported him dead only a few weeks before, announced on May 6, 1865: “Romulus Talbot and John Maddux, both of company H, 8th Indiana Cavalry, arrived in Madison yesterday, en route to their homes in Saluda township. They are among the survivors of the ill-fated Sultana, on which they had taken passage as paroled Union prisoners.”
During the previous week, both had taken on entirely new identities. They were now Sultana survivors. Tolbert’s momentous capture was reduced to a footnote. “Talbot was with Messrs. Knowles, Taylor and Sherman, at the time those unfortunate soldiers fell into the hands of the rebel fiends and were so cruelly butchered,” the newspaper reported. “He was taken prisoner, but escaped death. Maddux was taken at another time.”
Among the first things Tolbert’s friends and family would have noticed, aside from the fact that he was gaunt and tired, was that he had trouble talking, not only because he was naturally reserved or because the memories were so raw, but because his tongue had been pierced by one of the bullets that struck him during his capture. He had also lost a tooth and was pained by the gunshot wound to his shoulder. He could not reach his arms very high.
Inside his mother’s house was a photograph of him with his friend James Taylor, taken before their enlistment. Now in the hands of his great-grandson, the photo reveals two boys who clearly thought of themselves as men. Their cheeks, tinted by a photographic artist’s hand, are rosy, but their expressions are resolute. Tolbert’s arms are crossed as if he were spoiling for a fight. It is probably the last photo of Taylor, who was killed in the ambush in which Tolbert was captured.
In another family photo, taken a few years later, Tolbert looks more wary. He is handsome in a slightly pouty way that brings to mind a nineteenth-century Edward Norton. Then, in the next photo, taken after his return, the real change comes. As in every other photographic portrait of him, his hair is carefully coiffed and he is dressed to the nines. But he looks much older, more rugged and worn. His expression is defiant.
Though Tolbert moved back into his mother’s house and began trying to reconstruct his life, the war was clearly still on his mind. The Courier reported that he and Maddox attended the first Jefferson County soldiers’ reunion in Madison in July 1866, along with his brothers Samuel and Mathew, Maddox’s brother William, and their former commanding officer, Thomas Graham, who had survived the ambush in which Tolbert was captured. Tolbert was also among a group of veterans who ran a notice in the paper urging others to attend, to help keep the memory of their service alive.
The reunions were bittersweet affairs, typically held on the anniversaries of major battles, and would continue for decades until all the veterans were gone. Tolbert and Maddox attended an 8th Indiana Cavalry reunion at a campground in nearby Chelsea, where the veterans perhaps felt more comfortable—away from their houses, outside by the firelight, with other men who had experienced similar trials and were trying to assimilate them into their lives. Tolbert and his brother Samuel were again present at the two-day reunion in Madison of Rousseau’s raiders, at which, the Courier noted, the men “assembled in the City Hall to grasp hands once more and rehearse the story of the days that tried men’s souls.” The reunion, on August 19 through 21, 1879, began with a 5:30 a.m. reveille, followed by an artillery salute and a march through the city, complete with “crippled veterans in omnibuses” and a band. The day’s activities included addresses by dignitaries, singing by a choir, the reading of the poem “Relics and Recollections” by Captain W.G. Lawder, and military reenactments that were no doubt somewhat awkward to watch.
If Tolbert sought to preserve some of the camaraderie that had been born of dramatic, shared trials, his postwar life was characterized by a striving for normalcy. After his mother died in 1868, he decided to strike out on his own and moved to Olney, Illinois, where he opened a grocery store. In the spring of 1873, he married Sophronia Eldridge, a strong-boned and strong-willed woman thirteen years younger than he. From his pension application it is evident he was still recovering from his experiences: In March 1875, an examining surgeon reported that he weighed only one hundred thirty-five pounds (at five feet seven inches tall), could not raise his arm above his shoulder, and had lost bits of muscle and bone that limited the use of his tongue “and slightly interferes with distinct articulation in speech.” According to Tolbert’s own testimony, his wounds had largely healed at the time of his release from Cahaba, and further medical treatment was “impracticable & could do no good whatever.”
He and Sophronia had their first child in 1877, and a few years later they moved back to Jefferson County, where he bought his own farm. It was a small parcel of swampy land on a plateau in Chelsea, not far from his family’s old home place. There he built a simple frame house with a picket fence—perhaps the kind of place he had dreamed of during his ordeal—and planted maple trees in the yard. Sophronia convinced him to quit drinking and to move their membership to the New Bethel Methodist Church. She had a template for an orderly life together, and Tolbert followed it. They raised five children: Stella, Edmund, Rolland, Laura, and Ambrose, and they eventually took in Sophronia’s elderly mother, Asenath Eldridge. To judge from a photo of the family lined up along the picket fence, it appears that Tolbert managed to find something like normalcy—something as close to peace and plenty as was possible under the circumstances.
Amid the outpouring of often grandiose and melodramatic published reminiscences in the postwar years, Tolbert and Maddox remained notably mum. They were not overly literate—Maddox signed his enlistment papers with an X, though he later wrote his account for the pension board in longhand—and neither seems to have felt a compulsion to participate. Tolbert’s pivotal moment near Campbellton, when he turned in excitement and fear toward his assailants and was shot through the jaw and shoulder, would be preserved only in his memory and, briefly, in official records. The same would be true of the week he spent lying at death’s door in a stranger’s house in Georgia, drifting in and out of consciousness; of the six weeks in the military hospital in Montgomery; of his imprisonment at Cahaba; and of all the withering episodes that came after—the unnerving train ride to Jackson, when the cars shimmied and threatened to go off the rails and sick and injured men bounced off the walls; the long walk to Vicksburg, with his feet blistered and bleeding as he struggled through the mud; and finally the interminable hours in the river after the explosion of the Sultana. Each episode had brought him one step closer to home, yet seemingly farther away. Now he was finally back. For whatever reasons, he was not inclined to record any of it. When his son Rolland asked how he had managed to survive, he said, “I could swim.”
But if anyone understood what Tolbert had been through, it was Maddox, whose life, like those of so many of their peers, was profoundly changed by his war experiences. The survivors were like a flock of birds that takes flight from a spreading tree and for a moment maintains and approximates the shape of the tree as it wings away across a field. Some maintained the formation longer than others, but eventually they all broke off on their own. If anyone chanced to meet Tolbert on the street, he would have seemed only a quiet, unassuming farmer. There would have been no obvious sign.
It was different for Maddox. Undercutting whatever joy he may have felt upon returning home, he found that his sister Margaret had died at age twenty-three on the same day the Sultana went down. And he and Tolbert, after having spent so many tumultuous days and nights in each other’s company, slowly drifted apart. Perhaps their closeness had to do with their having been stuck together so many times, but back within the small confines of Saluda, their lives carried them in different directions. Maddox never worked much again, though he tried. He suffered numerous maladies, including chronic diarrhea, attacks of vertigo, “nervous debility,” and “smothering spells.”
While Tolbert stayed with Sophronia for the rest of his life, Maddox married five times, and his life had an uneven cast. He often changed the spelling of his name. Born John Christian Maddox, he sometimes spelled his surname Maddux or Maddex, and he went variously by Chris, Christian, John, and, for some reason, C.J. He first married in 1868, but his wife, Elvira, died within two years, after which he moved back in with his parents. Later that same year he married Elvira’s sister Margaret, and he stayed with her until 1880, when he moved in with his mother again (his father had by then died) and sued for divorce. Margaret did not bother to show up for court. He next married Mary, but she died in 1884. The following year he married Sarah, who appears to have been the love of his life—he would be buried beside her—and after she died in 1901 he married Martha, who outlived him (and was later buried alongside him and Sarah).
Despite his disabilities, Maddox had trouble getting a $2-per-month pension, in part because of mix-ups over the spelling of his name and because he had lied about his age when he enlisted. He first applied in 1887, saying he had been disabled by diarrhea, which he attributed to bouts of malaria, improper food, impure water, and exposure during the Sultana disaster. In various documents he said he had first contracted diarrhea in Nashville, or in camp at Cahaba, or after the disaster. Perhaps it was hard to pinpoint exactly when everything went wrong.
Robert C. Lawson, who served alongside Tolbert and Maddox in the 8th Indiana, filed an affidavit on Maddox’s behalf, in which he wrote, “we were separated a while toward the close of the war I know he came sick from the war complaining with Cronic Diarrhea. I have lived a neighbor to him ever since I now of him doctoring with several doctors for two or three years I know of him suffering from said disease to the present time.” He added, “I know this by waiting on him while he was sic.”
Maddox’s decline was unquestionably precipitated by his wartime experience, but there was a cumulative impact, too. As Indiana soldier Benjamin Magee observed after encountering one of his former comrades years later, “something in the sunken lines of his face, in his hair, in the stoop of his shoulders, tells us that the years of peace have broken him more than all the marches and vigils of war.”
Tolbert and his brothers struggled with their health, too. The determined, hapless Samuel, who joined a Saluda band as a violinist, two years later disregarded his disabilities and at the still tender age of seventeen reenlisted as a drummer and fifer in the 4th U.S. Infantry, in October 1867. No doubt he wished that he had been a drummer and fifer during the war, instead of a soldier. He was subsequently stationed at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and served for three years. Afterward he bounced around. When he applied for his pension in 1887, he was thirty-seven years old and unable to do anything that involved taking deep breaths, and he often awoke at night feeling as if he were suffocating. Twenty years after the war, he was still complaining about his side, and his only treatment was the application of liniment. His brothers were as powerless to help him then as they had been during the war. His brother-in-law wrote on behalf of Samuel’s pension application to say that he had paid him to do work now and then, but he could do little, and “If he had not been my Brother in law, and poor & needy, I would not have hired him.”
Samuel’s former captain, A.C. Graves, who saw him again about a decade after the war, said he “looked considerably stouter, but he had not grown much in height.” Ten years later, Samuel visited Graves at his home and spent the night. “We talked over our army life, and how we, both, had been broken in health, etc.,” Graves recalled. “He asked me if I remembered the trouble he had with his side in the army, and on my replying that I did, we were then out in the stable—and unbuttoning his pants, and pulling up his shirt, he showed me a lump in his side, and asked me to feel of it. I felt of it and it felt almost as large as a hen’s egg…He also told me that he was very poor, and that he did not know what he was going to do to better himself as he could not labor. He was so poor that he could not pay for the county clerk’s seal that attested the affidavit I gave him, so I paid for it.”
Samuel’s pension application was initially rejected, so he applied again. In addition to the hernia and respiratory problems, he claimed to suffer eye disease as a result of his service. The night Samuel spent with Graves at his home, the two slept in the same bed, “and when we were lying there just before going to sleep, he said, ‘Capt., I have smothering spells, so if you hear any disturbance tonight, don’t be alarmed,’” Graves wrote. “But, it takes a good deal of racket to wake me, so I did not hear him breathe extraordinarily hard that night. But he is a magnificent snorer, as I learned near morning.” Samuel also suffered heart disease and nervous disorders. A special examiner for the pension board later concluded that Samuel’s “whole system has been permanently injured by the hardships endured in service, and in line of duty.” His pension was finally granted. By then he was also suffering from “premature senility.” He died in 1917.
Mathew Tolbert, who had spent eighteen months in prison, reportedly in Andersonville, though his records do not say exactly where, settled in Plow-Handle Point, a steamboat landing in Saluda, where he, his wife, and her mother died of an unnamed fever within two days in October 1878. He was thirty-seven and left behind a three-year-old son named for his late brother Tyrus.
Silas Tolbert, who married late, also died comparatively young of heart disease at forty-seven, at his home in Saluda in 1893. He had enlisted at fifteen, had served four years in the army without being wounded, and was an artist and musician of local note. Oddly enough, the Courier repeated an earlier error in his obituary, reporting that among the six Tolbert brothers who served in the Union Army, Romulus had been killed aboard the Sultana. Perhaps the error provided for a little levity at the funeral. At the time, their brother Daniel, who had been twice wounded during the war, was living in nearby Paynesville.
Romulus Tolbert’s picture ran in The Rear Guard of Company H.: Officers and Privates surviving January 1st, 1910, a reunion scrapbook. His expression in the photo is not as tentative and apprehensive as in the images of him as a younger man. He is resplendent in his dark suit, starched white high-collared shirt, and tie. His hair is neatly parted, his white mustache carefully trimmed. He looks stolid and respectable. The photos typically were accompanied by a brief biography, and under Tolbert’s is the notation “Gave no particulars about himself but ‘Rom’ is all right. Just the same as he was as a soldier boy.” Maddox is also pictured in a striped three-piece suit, with a long gray beard, close-cropped hair, and a slightly provoked look in his eyes, as if he were expecting a challenge and was not particularly happy about it. The editor wrote, “John did not send any history about himself since the war. So I am unable to say anything, except he says he is always glad to please a comrade. He lives near Hanover, Jefferson County, Indiana and seems to be able to enjoy three meals a day.” In the picture Maddox does appear to have put on a few pounds, though the editor would probably not have mentioned his gastronomic habits had he known what Maddox was going through.
After having survived so much, Tolbert and Maddox may have felt they had proved themselves, or they may have lived in fear of what would happen next. Either way, each moment opened to another, the on-off switches forever flickering but somehow staying on. By the turn of the twentieth century, they had miraculously grown old.
They no doubt occasionally ran into each other and spoke of their experiences together, and may have attended a Sultana survivors’ reunion in Toledo, Ohio, on April 27, 1914, though the only evidence is a newspaper photo caption that today floats, unattached, on an Internet Web site. If so, it would have been an arduous trip for both of them. Tolbert, who was then seventy-one and one of only two surviving Tolbert sons, suffered from pain in the neck and neuralgia of the face and head, and he was two years away from a debilitating stroke that would leave him bedridden. Maddox was sixty-eight, two years away from his own series of strokes, and suffered from chronic diarrhea, hemorrhoids, liver disease, jaundice, a heart murmur, and slight enlargement of the spleen and prostate. The train ride would have been a long and uncomfortable journey into the past.
The Sultana reunion was one of the last chances the survivors had to commiserate about what they had been through together and to see the old familiar faces again. As it turned out, only fourteen made it—fourteen among the thousands who had fought in the war, been imprisoned at Cahaba and Andersonville, and boarded the Sultana, and who were now enduring the final challenge of growing old.
AS THE SURVIVORS OF THE Sultana saga aged and their memories dimmed, the physical reminders of the past began to disappear. Like the town of Cahaba, Andersonville fell into ruin and slowly rotted away. Immediately after the war, Clara Barton, along with a detachment of laborers and soldiers and a former prisoner, visited the abandoned site to identify and mark the thousands of graves of the Union dead. What had been a stinking burial ground was eventually transformed into a serene memorial, but there was no interest in preserving the stockade itself. A.S. McCormick, a soldier with the 86th Indiana Infantry who was captured at Chickamauga, wrote a brief account about his return trip to Andersonville in April 1888, during which he found little left standing. He cut a piece of wood from the north gate post which contained a minié ball as a souvenir. McCormick, one of a party of five who traveled to the site for a picnic, later wrote, “Just think of sitting down to such a feast as this inside of the old stockade at Andersonville! Fellow survivors of Southern prison-pens, I could not keep back the tears as I ate that meal under the shade of persimmon and black-jack oaks, about one hundred feet east of the spring, and remembered how many, many thousands of brave men had starved to death at that very spot!”
There was a groundswell of support for preserving the battlefields, including Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge, which became the nation’s first Civil War park. Chickamauga eventually hosted veterans’ reunions which drew participants from both sides—men who no doubt had more in common in old age, including having tried for two days to kill each other when they were young. The reunions were fertile ground for honing stories of what the men went through, and the results were sometimes at odds with what was recorded in diaries, official army dispatches, military and pension files, newspaper archives, personal letters, and other memoirs and historical accounts. In many cases the carefully crafted accounts suffered from the taint of hindsight, from the desire of their authors to both nail down and sanctify the story.
By the time J. Walter Elliott finished polishing his account of the Sultana saga, it looked as if he had carried his thesaurus with him along the way. Elliott’s vivid prose tended toward the purple end of the spectrum. In his submission to Berry’s book, he wrote of the Sultana’s sinking, “I have seen death’s carnival in the yellow fever and the cholera-stricken city, on the ensanguined field, in hospital and prison, and on the rail; I have, with wife and children clinging in terror to my knees, wrestled with the midnight cyclone; but the most horrible of all were the sights and sounds of that hour. The prayers, shrieks and groans of strong men and helpless women and children are still ringing in my ears, and the remembrance makes me shudder. The sight of 2,000 ghostly, pallid faces upturned in the chilling waters of the Mississippi, as I looked down on them from the boat, is a picture that haunts me in my dreams.”
No doubt the latter was true. Elliott endured epic travails, and it is clear that he was haunted by them for the rest of his life. He had the cast of characters, the drama, the theme, and the scars to prove it. He honed the story for all it was worth, crafting a series of dramatic tableaux that were both stylized and illuminating—the literary equivalent of a series of stained glass windows. Elliott was voluble and occasionally disingenuous, and he seemed always to be working both the story and the room, but it was probably no coincidence that he did so even as his experiences were slowly destroying him. The same dynamic that characterized each of his previous survival trials was still at work in the aftermath of the Sultana. The risks did not go away. They were transformed.
In stylizing and amplifying his tale, Elliott had an agenda: To convey to others the full impact of what he experienced and to justify what he was still going through. In that regard he was not alone. Countless others spent the rest of their lives in lamentation. Many of the survivors suffered from what is today known as post-traumatic stress disorder, and the process of drafting a serviceable narrative was a kind of immersion therapy aimed at controlling, containing, and capitalizing upon a terrible past, even as they slowly succumbed to the physical and mental wreckage that resulted from it.
The shaping of memories inevitably led to disagreements. Memory itself is malleable, and a person in the middle of a violent cataclysm often sees events unfolding in slow motion, with almost no peripheral vision, and so may miss important details that are clearly evident from another person’s vantage point. George Robinson told the pension board that he had floated on his dead mule alongside Ogilvie Hamblin; in response, Hamblin informed the pension board that Robinson had asked him to sign an affidavit to that effect, “but as I could not recollect any such thing I would not sign.” Thomas Newton felt compelled to write a letter to a veterans’ magazine to correct what he claimed was an unthinkably palliated account by a fellow former prisoner concerning the pens in Florence, South Carolina, and Andersonville. “I have written as I have because I feel it a duty to my old comrades who endured the sad, sad torments of that terrible prison pen,” Newton wrote. “It is strange that Comrade Herman Brown’s experience should so nearly coincide with mine at Florence prison and be so different at Andersonville.”
Faced with the inevitable disparities, the survivors tended to dig in their heels. To create a workable self-image required a certain confidence in their memory of the pivotal events of their lives, and the reunions, in particular, were fertile ground for swapping stories about the war, prison, and the Sultana disaster. Over time the men gave their tales more attractive rhythm, cadence, and purpose; emphasized favorite details; omitted others; superimposed later observations; and borrowed from one another. As Laurence Gonzales notes, the stories a person hears beforehand are part of the preparation for any survival challenge. Likewise, the urge to craft a narrative afterward is part of coming to terms with it. Given time to think—something most were deprived of in the heat of the moment—the survivors naturally sought to incorporate their experiences into a new model of the world.
Countless survivors wrote magazine and newspaper articles, spoke at reunions and other events, and published memoirs. George Robinson contributed an account to Chester Berry’s book, as did J. Walter Elliott and Perry Summerville, whose action-packed little piece was a summary of his own full-blown autobiography. In their accounts for Berry’s book, most of the survivors devoted only a few lines to the war and captivity but page after page to the disaster. The exercise was aimed not merely at recording what had happened but in explaining what was happening to them now. Among the two hundred thousand troops Indiana sent off to war, twenty-seven thousand died. In addition to those lost on the battlefield or to disease, twenty-one were reported murdered; eight were killed after being captured, one of whom was executed by the Rebels; eleven committed suicide; eight were executed by the Union Army; twenty died of sunstroke; and nearly eight hundred died of causes that were unclassified or unknown. Hundreds died aboard the Sultana. For most of the surviving veterans, the war trumped all their previous travails. For those who were also former prisoners, captivity trumped the war. And for those who survived the Sultana, the disaster trumped everything.
THE PREDICTABLE FLURRY OF POSTWAR memoirs was both prompted by, and contributed to, the debate over the various cantos of the war. In building his own narrative, Melvin Grigsby decided to fill in the blanks of his memories with living, breathing details. He returned to Cahaba, Alabama, in April 1884, hoping to find out more about Amanda Gardner, who had lent her books to him and other inmates during the war.
There was a clear break in the ranks of survivors over just how bad things had been in the prison camps. Many whose emotional wounds had healed were inclined to accentuate the positive, such as the arrival of the Providence Spring at Andersonville, even to the point of glossing over horrendous details. Others just as determinedly nurtured memories of injustices and hardships, and they sought to lay blame. Grigsby, a nineteen-year-old soldier with the 7th Wisconsin Infantry when he was captured near Vicksburg and imprisoned at Cahaba, was about forty when he returned, and his recollections had softened. In his telling, the Cahaba prisoners were adequately fed and even the enemies were occasionally kind, including two Confederate guards. “We did not know enough then about life in rebel prisons to fully appreciate their kindness,” he wrote in his book, Smoked Yank, published in 1888. “Every day on the arrival of the mail, one of them would bring in a late paper, stand up on a box and read the news.” Even more inspiring was Gardner, who not only had supplied the prisoners with books and blankets but had nursed sick men in her home and given them much-needed fresh potatoes, peas, green beans, and corn. Grigsby traveled to Cahaba from his home in Wisconsin, hoping to find Gardner and her daughter Belle, with whom he had exchanged notes without actually meeting. By then, little was left of the prison itself except for a few broken bricks. The Gardners’ former home was occupied by an erstwhile guard, who said they had moved to Selma, along with most of the rest of the town. By then, continued flooding had taken its toll on Cahaba, resulting in a mass out-migration, mostly to Selma, where Belle worked as a dressmaker to support herself and her aging mother.
During his captivity, while corresponding with her about books, Grigsby had found Belle engaging. In his memoir he wrote, “is it any wonder that my correspondence with this young lady began to seem to me romantic and that I began to entertain for her feelings stronger than gratitude?” Grigsby had often volunteered to cook for other prisoners in the stockade yard, and he slowly enlarged a crack in the fence, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl (how he did this without crossing the deadline he does not say). Upon his return he found not only that he had been watching the wrong house but that the object of his affections had been, at the time, perhaps fourteen years old.
In 1884, Amanda Gardner was sixty-seven and Belle was thirty-three. Grigsby found the elder Gardner much as he remembered her: A woman of culture and refinement, and an elegant conversationalist who still believed the South had been right to secede. She told him she had received numerous letters and presents from former prisoners after the war, and he copied some of the notes, which he later quoted in his book. He also wrote to his own congressional delegation later, seeking, without success, a federal grant to provide her with some financial relief. During his days of watching what he thought was Gardner’s house, Grigsby had developed an elaborate image of Belle, and under the circumstances their meeting was a bit awkward. Belle, he wrote, was gracious but reserved. Grigsby did not say whether Gardner suffered any repercussions for her support of the prisoners, but tellingly, there is no mention of her in the exhaustive, highly romanticized local history, Memories of Old Cahaba, published in 1908, even though her family was prominent and she lost a son in the war. Soon after Grigsby’s visit, Gardner moved from Selma to New York City, where she lived out her life.
The rest of the town slowly faded away. A year after the war ended, the county seat was moved from Cahaba to Selma, and with it went many residents and even several buildings that were dismantled or moved. During Reconstruction, the abandoned courthouse became a meeting place for freedmen, and a community of seventy former slave families took root. By 1900, even that community had largely disappeared, and most of the remaining buildings had fallen in, burned, or been torn down for their bricks. Gardner’s house was torn down, leaving only a mossy crape myrtle that had stood in her front yard.
TOLBERT AND MADDOX DID NOT respond to Chester Berry’s request for their recollections for his book, though the appendix includes their names (both misspelled) in small type on the list of passengers. Berry, who did more than anyone to keep the stories alive, decried the public’s passing interest in the disaster, and himself ended up being buried in an unmarked grave. The lack of interest was galling to many survivors, not only because they remembered what had happened but because for them the disaster was continuing to unfold. Among those who built entire identities around the Sultana saga, a great many continued to suffer from its physical and psychological effects.
George Safford, who crossed paths with J. Walter Elliott in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, slowly went crazy over the next forty years. After surviving the sinking of the boat, Safford had peered into more than a hundred coffins at the Memphis waterfront while looking for his father. He had never recovered from either his manifold illnesses or the horrors of what he saw that day. For him the challenges continued to mount. In February 1885, as he was leaving a hotel in Chicago, Safford slipped on ice and dislocated his shoulder, which seems to have hastened his physical decline. In March 1899, when he was working as a railroad conductor, he wrote the pension board to say that he had been rendered temporarily insane for about three months, during which he had to be confined at home. He had tried taking treatments at various spas, but to no avail, and had been briefly jailed for an unrecorded transgression. He later entered the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C. Though he was soon discharged into his wife’s care, he noted ruefully that after having enlisted in the army at eighteen, spent four months as a prisoner of war, and survived the Sultana disaster, he was penniless and mentally ill. In May 1899, a surgeon for the pension office concluded that Safford, who was then fifty-four years old, suffered from “acute, real atrophy of the brain showing dementia with homicidal tendencies. We think there is no recovery.” He died at the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Marion, Indiana, in 1902, after which his torment-ridden pension file was stamped “DROPPED” and “DEAD.”
Untold numbers of survivors suffered similar fates. Some committed suicide. Others were destroyed by depression, fits of rage, and alcoholism. Many were unable to work again. The more fortunate struggled on as best they could, even as the diseases and injuries they suffered during the war took a cumulative toll. George Young moved to Colorado, where the air was better for the asthma and bronchitis that resulted from breathing steam and smoke during the disaster, though he noted in Berry’s book that “strive as I may, I cannot repress an involuntary fright on hearing in the stillness of the night any unusual noise.” Anna Annis, whose husband and daughter died in the disaster, applied for a widow’s pension but was rejected repeatedly before finally being allotted $17 per month. She wore long sleeves year round to cover her burns. After surviving a shipwreck at sea and the Sultana disaster, she died of a stroke at eighty, in Oshkosh.
J. Walter Elliott also had trouble with the pension board as a result of the confusion over his identity. In correspondence with the board he noted that his family had feared for his life when he was listed as missing in action, again upon hearing that he had been captured and sent to Andersonville, and finally after the Sultana disaster. One sister received the erroneous Sultana report of his death aboard the boat, then traveled to her mother’s house, where a “donation party” was being held for the victorious troops. As Elliott described it, “the war was over, our country was saved, & at least one mother was there who was very happy at thought of letters from her eldest, whom she had mourned as dead, & he was on his way home, would be there soon, when up dashes a buggy and paralyzes the whole party. ‘Walter is certainly dead this time. You know he can’t swim.’” Elliott recreated the scene with what seems like slightly perverse pleasure: “Eagerly they all gather around the paper to learn the horrible details of the disaster that had snatched the chalice from the lip. Brother John, whose education on the field of Chickamauga & others got close enough to glance over the inverted page & cried out, ‘Walter is not lost. His name & command is correctly given among the reserve, and none but he could have given it.’” In fact, Elliott was at that moment at the home of an aunt of his late wife’s in Memphis, undoubtedly coughing up a storm.
Proving all that to the pension board was not easy. His brother David, who was present when he got home, wrote on behalf of his pension application to say that Elliott had been “reduced by hardships of prison life” and had “a peculiar rasping cough which he said and which I believe was caused by inhaling steam and by exposure at time of explosion of boilers and sinking of Steamboat Sultana.” During ten days at his mother’s house, he added, “his cough continued and he complained daily of the raw and inflamed feeling of throat and lungs.”
Despite his disability, Elliott rejoined his army command at Chattanooga and was stationed in Guntersville, Alabama, as commandant of the Union post and agent for the local Freedmen’s Bureau. He remained in Alabama after being discharged in April 1866, saying the climate was better for his still-congested lungs, though it certainly did not help that he was, as one acquaintance noted, “an inveterate smoker.” Elliott told the pension board that he “could not survive the rigor of a northern clime, and, like a leper, I became a voluntary exile—a citizen here during all the long dark days of reconstruction, kukluxism…” In 1866 he married again, but his second wife, like his first, soon died. He married for the third time on Christmas Eve 1870, and afterward he homesteaded a hardscrabble farm of a hundred sixty acres in the mountains near Guntersville, where he fathered six children and worked at various low-impact odd jobs, including teaching, bookkeeping, transcribing legal documents, and supervising manual laborers. His brother David, who visited him in Alabama three times during the 1870s, recalled, “He was still troubled with cough and sore lungs, this being especially the case during my visit there in October 1875.”
Elliott worked for a while in the office of Probate Judge Thomas Street, who later allowed that while he was an efficient clerk, sometimes “any little worry would run him down. He had at times a very lank worn out expression on his face and then at other times he would seem to be all right. I remember at times he had a shortness of breath and at times he had a considerable cough.” Later, Street wrote, “His mind became affected by loss of memory, and in recording for instance, he did bad work and I had to quit him entirely.” He was forty-seven years old.
Elliott eventually got a small pension and over several years sought increases because of his worsening health. He suffered primarily from respiratory problems, but he was also frail, wobbly, and beset by rheumatism and consumption when he visited Indiana for the last time in 1882, at age forty-nine. A surgeon’s report the following year noted that he had no use of his right ring finger because of his wound at Chickamauga and that he had chronic respiratory problems as a result of his trauma during and after the sinking of the Sultana. A few years later, Elliott ran for circuit clerk but lost to a Confederate veteran named Willis Currey, who also wrote to support his pension application, confirming Elliott’s respiratory problems, adding, “I noticed in his speech that he would get his words mixed, he would use the proper words, but he would get them transposed, and he got so bad at our house that we sent him home, and stopped him from work, and he recovered from that condition temporarily, and then he grew gradually worse until he got perfectly helpless.”
Elliott, who appears to have suffered a stroke, soon required the use of a walking stick to “shuffle along.” A former student wrote, “I have seen him fall down lots of times just walking along in a plain road, and he would get up laughing…He also said he had no sense of taste or smell, the he could not smell or taste anything.” By 1891, when he was fifty-eight, Elliott was receiving a pension of $20 per month. The next year he suffered another stroke that partially paralyzed his left side. His daughter said in a deposition that the second attack came during the night when he got up to get a drink “and fell before he got to the water bucket, and laughed so that we would know that he was not hurt, and he went a few steps farther then and fell again, and I called him and he did not answer me, and we got up to see what was the matter with him.” The family at first thought he was dead, but he eventually came around. The next morning he had trouble using one hand. She added that his health rapidly deteriorated: “He was not in his right mind part of the time” and at others he paused so long between breaths “that it would scare me sometimes, and when he did get his breath he would breathe hard for a minute or two.” Toward the end, she said, she could hear his rattled breathing all through the house.
As his wife wrote, “He never had any more attacks, but he just kept getting worse and finally got to be almost helpless about six months before he died, and the last two or three days he was plumb helpless.” She told the pension board that “especially along toward the last, he got in a powerful bad fix, and would rattle in his lungs.” Elliott also lost the ability to speak. About six hours before his death, his wife wrote, “he groaned awful, I could not tell where his pain was because he could not tell me only from his groaning and rattling in his breast, it seemed to be in his throat and breast.” He died on June 3, 1895, at age sixty-two. His doctor stated that the cause of death was asphyxiation resulting from paralysis, which was brought on by “a general nervous condition of the system resulting from the diseased lung and highly inflammatory condition of the larynx and pharynx.” It had taken thirty years, but his injuries aboard the Sultana had finally killed him.
After the war, George Robinson settled into the quiet life of a cobbler in Owosso, Michigan, with a woman he married while on a wartime furlough. He worked alongside a veteran who had survived Andersonville, which perhaps lent a rarified atmosphere to the store (“You don’t like your shoes? You should be glad you even have shoes!”). By the time he was twenty-three, Robinson had experienced enough drama for a hundred lives, and he was plagued by insomnia and “general nervousness,” according to his doctor, who wrote on his behalf to the pension board. Over time, the injuries he sustained during the Sultana disaster made it impossible for him to make shoes, and he became a shoe salesman. In 1888, when he was forty-four, Robinson told the pension board he suffered from chronic diarrhea, hemorrhoids, stomach and liver trouble, vomiting spells, rheumatism, persistent bronchitis, and pain in his chest and wrist, the latter of which were injured in the explosion that killed his friend John Corliss. He added, as a postscript, “I would not pass through that terrible time I did at the destruction of Sultana for worlds again.”
By 1921, when Robinson was seventy-eight, he was suffering both from old age and from the injuries and diseases of his youth, and the two were inextricably linked. He was sometimes bedridden for weeks at a time and needed constant care. By then, his son-in-law wrote, “Most of his trouble comes from his heart.”
Perry Summerville had nerve problems, and he never regained full use of the leg he broke during his attempt to escape the Rebels. By 1920 he also required round-the-clock nursing, and in October 1927 his wife told the pension board she was “his constant attendant and nurse. He is a complete physical WRECK on account of his disability. I can’t exactly explain everything but I am at his side constantly and attend his every wants—he has bladder trouble—can’t sleep of nights—can’t wait on himself—he is an awful sufferer. Some one must be with him all of the time and I am the one.” Summerville died a year later.
The Madison Courier of March 17, 1916, reported that Tolbert suffered a paralytic stroke, and noted that he was “a civil war veteran and is one of the few living survivors of the Sultana disaster.” When his brother Samuel died the following year, Tolbert became the last of the family’s sons alive. By January 1920 he was “entirely helpless requiring two people to handle him. Has spasms every few nights,” according to his pension record. Death finally came on April 24, 1920, on his son Edmund’s birthday, three days before the anniversary of the Sultana disaster. The headline of his obituary announced: “Prominent Farmer Dies.” The same description later ran over John Maddox’s obituary on January 5, 1925, which noted of Maddox that “his entire life was spent in the neighborhood of his birth”—essentially ignoring the most momentous period, when he was “away.”
During all their life-threatening episodes, Tolbert and Maddox would no doubt have been both comforted and shocked to know that they would die of old age and be remembered only as Saluda farmers, which was apparently all they ever wanted to be. They had been through a spectacular onslaught, which changed forms and never fully abated; they had managed to make it home in the face of impossible odds; and they had kept going until there was nothing left to survive.