Crossing the Deadline (22 page)

AUTHORS NOTE

Several years ago, while discussing books about boat disasters, the topic of the
Sultana
came up. “Have you heard about the worst ship disaster in America's history?” I was asked. I admitted I had not. It shocked me even more to learn the event happened in my home state of Tennessee on the Mississippi River. After doing preliminary research, I became intrigued as to how such an important event in our nation's history happened and why it has remained relatively unknown for one hundred and fifty years.

Though
Crossing the Deadline
is a work of fiction, sadly many details and events are true. Stephen M. Gaston was born on January 11, 1850, in Centerville, Indiana, hometown of Governor Oliver Morton. He enlisted at the age of thirteen in the town of Moores Hill and became Eli Lilly's bugler in
Company K of the Indiana 9th Cavalry. Stephen must have been a very bright and talented young man to have been given that responsibility at such a young age.

Centerville is approximately fifteen miles from Fountain City, home of Levi Coffin, known as the “president” of the Underground Railroad. The typical distance covered each night on the Underground Railroad was fifteen miles, the same distance between Stephen's birthplace and Levi Coffin's house. An abolitionist once argued that humans who could speak English and French, as many slaves in the Deep South could do, were intelligent and not inferior to white citizens as some believed. The scene where Clay reunites with his mother in the governor's house is totally fictional. There's no evidence Governor Morton was involved in the Underground Railroad. This scene was written as a secondary reason to compel Stephen to join the war effort, the first being to support his mother.

Stephen's capture at Sulphur Branch Trestle near Elkmont, Alabama, was written exactly as the events happened, ending with him blowing surrender precisely at noon on September 25, 1864. It has been documented that the 111th Colored Troops were not shot or sent to prison following the surrender of the fort, but were placed on work details defending
Mobile, Alabama. Richard Pierce aka “Big Tennessee” stood nearly seven feet tall. He was from East Tennessee and was captured along with Stephen at Sulphur Branch.

Stephen arrived at Cahaba Prison the first week in October 1864. Just months earlier General Ulysses S. Grant convinced President Lincoln to suspend prisoner exchanges except for officers. Grant believed the practice prolonged the war, and Lincoln agreed. Prison camps, North and South, were dirty, often short on food, and filled with diseases. Stephen remained in Cahaba, referred to by the locals as Castle Morgan, until his release in March.

The number of men confined at the prison during Stephen's confinement swelled to 2,151, an area intended to hold 500. By the time the facility emptied in March, that number had grown larger. The average space per man was 7.5 square feet. Imagine the area of a football field, but only from the end zone to the 33-yard line (138.5′ × 109′ =15,096.5 square feet). That's exactly the size of Cahaba Prison. Despite being the most overcrowded prison (North or South), records indicate that fewer than 150 men died there, one of the lowest death rates of any Civil War prison.

The town of Cahaba was located at the convergence of the Cahaba and Alabama Rivers and was the first capital of
Alabama. Constant flooding forced the legislators to move to Montgomery. Just before the prisoners were released, the town flooded again. The commander refused to allow the prisoners to evacuate to a nearby hill despite a petition signed by prison guards. Prisoners sat in cold floodwaters for a week.

After the war, many prisoners mentioned Amanda Gardner in documents, diaries, and books. Some called her an angel and said her generosity kept them alive through the harsh winter of 1865. Remarkably, losing her son in the war in Virginia did not extinguish her kindness toward the prisoners from the North.

Cahaba began emptying in March 1865, and men made their way by boat, train, and on foot to Union-controlled Camp Fisk, seven miles east of Vicksburg. They joined prisoners from other places, such as Andersonville, Georgia. Over the next weeks, boats carried soldiers home, and the population of Camp Fisk dwindled.

On April 21, 1865, the
Sultana
left New Orleans loaded with many barrels of sugar, passengers including the Chicago Opera Troupe, livestock, and other cargo. She headed north to Vicksburg to take former Cahaba and Andersonville prisoners home. However, hours before arriving in Vicksburg, one of
the boilers began leaking, the result of a faulty design. The boat limped into Vicksburg, where repairmen urged a boiler replacement, a fix that would have taken up to five days. Captain J. C. Mason, knowing every soldier would have been loaded onto the other boats, demanded a quick patch.

While the boilers were rapidly repaired, all remaining prisoners from Camp Fisk crammed onto one boat, the
Sultana.
Why was that decision made with other boats waiting to receive passengers? Many people have the opinion there could only be one explanation. Steamboat companies earned between five and ten dollars per soldier carried home from the South. It is believed the assigning officers may have been frequently bribed by boat captains into putting as many men as possible onto the vessels they owned. At nine o'clock on April 24, Captain J. C. Mason's boat left Vicksburg with 2,400 passengers.

When the
Sultana
stopped in West Helena, Arkansas, to refuel, the Chicago Opera Troupe did, in fact, provide a brief concert for townspeople and
Sultana
passengers. This is also where the only photograph was taken of the boat with its massive load of people. Soldiers, knowing a picture of the boat was being taken, nearly caused the
Sultana
to capsize as they rushed to the side near the photographer.

The
Sultana,
with a capacity of 376 but carrying 2,400, exploded and sank about six miles north of Memphis in the early-morning hours of April 27, 1865. Most historians put the loss of life somewhere around 1,700. That eclipses the
Titanic
by 200.

There is much speculation as to why the
Sultana
exploded. One conspiracy theory is that a bomb was loaded on the boat with the coal in Memphis. Conventional wisdom states that the boilers exploded from a faulty design and from quick and shoddy repairs done while in Vicksburg.

Because of hastily made manifests in Vicksburg, nobody knows the exact death toll, only estimates. The clerk of the
Sultana
reported: 2,400 passengers with 100 fare paying, 85 crewmen, 200 horses, and over 300,000 pounds of sugar.

Why did so many die? One answer may be found in a letter written by Thomas W. Horan to his parents while waiting at Camp Fisk to board a steamer home:

When the gate was opened [
Cahawba
[sic]
Prison],
I felt I could march 50 miles as poor and as weak as I was. When I was captured my weight was 175 pounds and when I was released I weighed 106 pounds. Thank God I am spared to return to the land of plenty.

Sadly, Horan's remains were never found.

Commodore Smith wrote:

“
My weight when captured was 175 pounds, and when I reached our lines at Vicksburg, Miss., March 16, 1865, my weight was 94 pounds, although I had not been sick a day while in prison.”

Many soldiers were simply too weak to swim. They faced the choice of burning on the
Sultana
or drowning in the Mississippi River. Those who could swim faced a gauntlet when they entered the river. Spring thaws from the north swelled the Mississippi up to five miles wide in places. The water was extremely cold. Drowning men pulled (otherwise) able swimmers to their deaths.

On page 120, Jerry O. Potter writes in his book,
The
Sultana
Tragedy:

“Dr. Irwin estimated that 530 survivors were placed in hospitals and another 260 in the Soldier's Home. (Dr. Irwin's estimate included a few civilian passengers.) According to published accounts in the Memphis newspapers, the Gayoso Hospital received 139 patients; the Adams, 139; the Washington, 143; the Overton, 90; the Officers', 6; and the Webster and the Soldiers' Home, a few more.”

To this day, the
Sultana
remains the worst maritime
disaster in US history. However, the story of the
Sultana
is mostly unknown. There was almost no coverage in the newspapers at the time. John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln thirteen days earlier. The nation's focus was on the end of the war and President Lincoln's assassination and burial. Telegraph wires had been severed during the war to keep each side from communicating with troops, so information about the
Sultana
was slow to spread.

Many of the events in this book were taken from letters and diaries of survivors. For the sake of the story, different characters took on experiences that may have happened to other people in real life. For instance, Samuel Pickens (a survivor) actually wrote that trading a live horse for a dead one was the best deal he ever made. Stephen M. Gaston wrote that he saved himself by floating down the Mississippi River on a barrel of flour.

I don't know why Stephen came to hold the Lone Star State so dear to his heart, but he ended up moving there. He had several children and named one of his daughters Texas. Stephen M. Gaston died in 1910 and is buried in Sherman, Texas, beside his wife and one of his sons.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Crossing the Deadline
is the fourteenth book from author Michael Shoulders and Sleeping Bear Press. Previous books include
Say Daddy!, M is for Money,
and
T is for Titanic.
Having been involved in education for more than thirty years, Michael now writes and travels extensively, visiting schools and speaking at conferences across the country. He visits nearly one hundred schools each year, spreading his message that “Reading IS Magic.” Michael lives is Clarksville, Tennessee, with his wife, Debbie. They are the proud parents of two sons, one daughter, one very large standard poodle, and two very spoiled cats—and the happy grandparents to one grandson and two granddaughters.