The horrors of the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia are well known to Civil War historians and laymen alike. With overcrowding, disease, mass starvation and unchecked violence among prisoners and their captors, it was arguably the worst wartime prison in American history. Release at the end of the war must have been just short of a miracle for the fortunate Union soldiers who survived their ordeal at Andersonville. On April 24, 1865, many of these survivors made their way aboard the steamboat Sultana at Vicksburg, MS, sealing their fate.
The recently released Union soldiers were primarily from Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky. They were being held at a temporary detainment camp at Vicksburg awaiting release. The captain of the Cincinnati-built Sultana was to receive five dollars per enlisted man and ten dollars per officer for transport north. The Sultana, with a legal capacity of 376 passengers, left Vicksburg carrying about 2,100 souls, three-fourths of whom would not make it home.
When she arrived at Vicksburg, the river vessel was already in trouble with leaky boilers. The decision was made to continue upriver without full repairs that would take several days for fear of losing the prisoners’ fares to other boats. As they got underway, the severely overcrowded boat was fighting flood-stage river levels, putting even more strain on the already compromised boilers. A little more than two days into the journey, disaster struck just north of Memphis.
At about 2 a.m., April 27, 1865, the ill-fated Sultana’s two boilers exploded one after the other. The force of the explosion threw some passengers into the river and the vessel became consumed by fire. Many passengers who weren’t immediately killed by the explosion and ensuing fire were in a weakened condition from their prison ordeal, and didn’t have the strength to make it to the riverbanks. In all, there were about 700 passengers who initially survived the horror, but 200 of the survivors soon succumbed to burns in the hospital.
One-time Boone County resident, Cpt. Edmond H. Parrish, died in the accident, a month after his twenty-second birthday. Parrish was the son and grandson of two of Boone County’s wealthiest landowners, E. H. Parrish, Sr. and Reuben Clarkson, both of whom had property in the southern part of the county. He is buried in Georgetown Cemetery, Scott County, with many family members. His headstone reads “Lost on Steamer Sultana, April 27 1865”.
Though it is considered the greatest maritime disaster in U.S. history, it was quickly overshadowed in the news simply due to the timing of the accident. Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, had been killed the day before the explosion, dominating the headlines.
