The Sultana

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

The Sultana at Helena, Arkansas on 26 April 1865. She burned the following night. T. W. Bankes. Library of Congress.

More people died on the Sultana than on the Titanic. Almost nobody has heard of her. Her legal capacity was three hundred and seventy-six passengers and eighty-five crew. When she left Vicksburg she was carrying two thousand one hundred and twenty-seven people. Most of them were Union soldiers just released from the Confederate prison camps at Andersonville and Cahaba — men who had survived the war, and survived the camps, and were going home. At around two in the morning on 27 April 1865, seven miles north of Memphis, three of her four boilers exploded. The official cause was found to be mismanagement of the water level in the boilers, made worse by severe overcrowding, top-heavy loading, and a temporary patch on a leaking boiler. The best current estimate puts the dead at about one thousand one hundred and sixty-four. Roughly nine hundred and sixty-three people were pulled out alive. It remains the worst maritime disaster in the history of the United States. It made almost no impression on the newspapers, because John Wilkes Booth had been shot and killed the day before and the country was reading about that instead. No one was ever held accountable. If one of those men was your ancestor, add his name below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.