Sultana by Alan Huffman

It is hard to imagine that the greatest maritime disaster in U.S. history could have been so nearly forgotten, but so it seems. The explosion and fire on board the steamship Sultana killed more than 1,700 people, more than were lost on the Titanic. Yet because the Sultana disaster coincided with the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, it has been overshadowed.

Alan Huffman (the author of an interesting book on Liberia) traces the stories of a few Union soldiers from Indiana who survived battle, prison camp, and the Sultana disaster. He draws on the work of those who have studied the psychology of survival, and spends most of his time—appropriately—conveying not the dramatic horrors of battle but the misery of the sick, wounded, and malnourished.

The Sultana was crammed with 2,400 people when it set off up the Mississippi from Memphis—more than six times the number it was designed to carry. Many of them were Union soldiers recently released from Andersonville and other notorious POW camps. (The north had its own notorious camps, including one in Elmira, New York.)

Huffman describes the view of a local woman overlooking the prison camp at Cahaba, Alabama:

Below her, on the flatlands along the Alabama River, three thousand thin, dirty men milled about inside the crowded stockade of Cahaba prison under a perpetual pall of smoke. Many of the men were sick. Some of them died as easily as fog rose from the river on a cool morning, and their friends had to touch their bodies to make sure they were gone. Others died hard, thrashing on the ground.