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SS Sultana: Explosion, War, and America's Forgotten Maritime Disaster
Paperback
Series: Shipwrecks That Shaped History, Book 26
BoatingCivil War Period (1850-1877)General World History
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 28 2026
Pages: 318
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.79 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The worst maritime disaster in American history did not happen at sea. It happened on the Mississippi River, in the dark hours before dawn, when the overloaded steamboat SS Sultana exploded north of Memphis and turned a journey home into a river of fire.
In April 1865, the American Civil War had just ended. Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. The nation was exhausted, grieving and distracted. Thousands of released Union prisoners of war, many weakened by months in Confederate prison camps such as Andersonville and Cahaba, were being sent home.
They boarded Sultana believing the worst was behind them.
Instead, a damaged boiler, a lucrative transport contract, military haste, overcrowding and institutional failure combined to create one of America's deadliest and most forgotten disasters.
SS Sultana: Explosion, War, and America's Forgotten Maritime Disaster tells the story of the ship, the river, the soldiers, the captain, the boilers, the explosion, the survivors, the failed inquiries and the silence that followed.
This book examines the central questions behind the tragedy:
Why was Sultana so dangerously overloaded?
What role did money, haste and military bureaucracy play?
How did the condition of the former prisoners make the disaster even deadlier?
Why did the inquiry fail to deliver proper justice?
Why did a disaster that may have killed more people than Titanic fade from national memory?
Written in a direct, readable style, SS Sultana is a historical account of war, greed, negligence, survival and forgetting.
The men aboard Sultana had survived prison, hunger and war. They were almost home.
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