Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History [Hardcover]

Alan Huffman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 24, 2009

In April 1865, the steamboat Sultana slowly moved up the Mississippi River, its overtaxed engines straining under the weight of twenty-four hundred passengers—mostly Union soldiers, recently paroled from Confederate prison camps. At 2 a.m., three of Sultana's four boilers exploded. Within twenty minutes, the boat went down in flames, and an estimated seventeen hundred lives were lost.

The worst maritime disaster in American history, the sinking of the Sultana is a forgotten tragedy lost in the turmoil of the times—the war's end, the assassination of President Lincoln, the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth. Alan Huffman presents this harrowing story in gripping and vivid detail and paints a moving portrait of four individual soldiers who survived the Civil War's final hell to make it back home.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The explosion and wreck of the Mississippi riverboat Sultana in 1865, which killed 1,700 passengers, mostly Union soldiers recently released from Confederate POW camps, is but the capstone of this engrossing survey of the many varieties of suffering in the Civil War. Journalist Huffman (Mississippi in Africa) doesn't even get aboard the Sultana until the last third of the saga. Before that, he fills in the backstories of four Yankee survivors as they fight in the battle of Chickamauga, go raiding with Sherman's cavalry and finally get captured and sent to the infamous Southern prison camps at Andersonville, Ga., and Cahaba, Ala. There they endure the torments of starvation, exposure, festering and maggoty wounds, predatory criminal gangs, lice and diarrhea—a scourge, Huffman notes, that was far deadlier to soldiers than bullets. Making skillful use of war diaries and memoirs, the author makes these quieter ordeals just as moving as the Sultana's doomed voyage, with its hellish scene[s] of hundreds of screaming people being burned alive or drowning each other in panic. Huffman fits the climactic disaster into a meticulously researched, harrowing look at the sorrow and the pity that was the Civil War. (Apr.)
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Review

“Huffman succeeds in establishing the Sultana’s rightful place in Civil War historiography. Recommended.” (Library Journal )

Huffman rescues the Sultana tragedy from obscurity and brings the people and events surrounding it to vibrant life...[and] chronicles the explosion and its aftermath in startling detail with a wealth of striking images...A short but moving history that effectively captures both the disaster and the soldiers’ ordeal. (Kirkus Reviews )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Smithsonian; 1St Edition edition (March 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061470546
• ISBN-13: 978-0061470547
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #930,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alan Huffman is known for chronicling epic sagas that have somehow slipped through the cracks of history, such as his book Mississippi in Africa, which explores two parallel universes: The U.S. state of Mississippi and a largely forgotten freed-slave colony by the same name on the west coast of Africa. The book's backdrop is sweeping -- it spans two continents and two centuries, yet Huffman brings the story to life through engaging and thoughtful portraits of characters ranging from a 19th century Mississippi slaveholder who abhorred slavery to a contemporary Liberian man grappling with his nation's civil war, the causes of which were rooted in the conflicts of the old American South.

Ten Point, Huffman's first book, likewise takes place against a historical backdrop. Through his grandmother's poignant and revealing photographs, the book illustrates the final days of the wilderness of the Mississippi Delta, which served as the setting for Faulkner's short story, "The Bear."

Sultana, released in 2004, follows three young soldiers through a remarkable series of survival challenges during and after the Civil War, including their capture and imprisonment, culminating with their surviving the worst maritime disaster in American history.

Huffman's upcoming book, We're with Nobody, co-authored with Michael Rejebian, is an illuminating, quirky romp through the contemporary American political landscape, focusing on his and Rejebian's 18 years as opposition researchers, during which they've roamed the U.S. in a succession of cheap rental cars, getting the goods on candidates from presidential appointments and congressional representatives down to local school board members (HarperCollins/William Morrow, January 2012). Note: This book was released in galley form (and initially, on Amazon for pre-order, under the title Open Season.

Also, despite being listed on Amazon as the author of a book on French grammar and another on plate tectonics in Utah, those were written by different Alan Huffmans.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A true story of survival, American Civil War and the Sultana Disaster, April 3, 2009

By 

An American (The United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History (Hardcover)

This is a story about survival and the many things that that means.

It is all true, every moment , and it is mostly in the words of the people that lived it.
YOU can walk in their shoes for awhile, you can have the shoes blown right off your feet. And you can live to remember.

Imagine: You went to fight. You get injured in ways you can never recover from,
Your body does not heal. You go to prison. You finally get released and think you are going home to finally get back to the life you remember or what you can still live of it based on your new limitations. And then the worst happens: the ship you are on to take you home - the boiler blows in the middle of the night and the ship catches on fire. You have two choices: Jump into water you know you can't live long in because it is so cold and because people are drowning each other OR
burn alive. It is April 27, 1865 around 2 am...

You will see varying accounts of the number of people on board but this is the worst maritime disaster in United States history, worse than the Titanic and yet you never heard of it. So consider these numbers:

2400 people on board a ship designed to hold 376. Only 700 survivors.

This book will take you there through several individual stories and many diaries and first hand recollections. This book made me empathize my way through the war, prison and the disaster. Many voices, one story: individual but universal.

Go there and see it, live it for a moment. Remember. Pass it on...

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nightmare on the Mississippi, May 7, 2009

By 

J. R. Mellefont "Nakhoda" (Australian National Maritime Museum) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History (Hardcover)

What's more extraordinary? That a huge riverboat, criminally overloaded by corrupt officials with thousands of sick and suffering Civil War POW survivors trying to return home, blows up in the middle of the night and kills 1700 men, women and children who burn or drown in scenes of unimaginable panic and chaos? Or the fact that the single worst maritime disaster in US waters is virtually forgotten, becoming just a footnote to a brutal industrialised war?

An amazing and piteous tale, competently told, it follows a few ordinary soldiers through their entire war experiences and marvels at their extraordinary ability to survive again and again and again. First they survive the chaos of battle and capture, and their terrible wounds, then train wreck en route to POW camps where they endure disease, exposure and disgusting victuals ... and finally they survive the nightmare on the Mississippi. The tales of panic and desperation in the dark, frigid waters are tragic, and one is amazed that anyone lived.

Just as melancholy is the postscript where we learn that surviving the Civil War - like surviving Vietnam or Iraq - so often left a legacy of illness, depression, alcoholism and domestic difficulties. Not a happy read ... but certainly a worthwhile one. For this Australian reader, an introduction to many unknown facets of America's Civil War, and as a maritime historian a sobering addition to my knowledge of shipwreck and disaster.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth the Read, July 7, 2009

By 

Tim Challies (Oakville, Ontario) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History (Hardcover)

This is a book about the worst maritime disaster in American history. Through gross greed and negligence, the Sultana, hugely overloaded with Union soldiers recently liberated from Confederate prison camps, exploded and sank in the Mississippi. Around 1700 of the 2400 passengers aboard the ship died. The book does more than recount the disaster. It follows several of the men involved through their service in the Union army, through their imprisonment and it is only in the final few chapters that we come to the Sultana. Ironically, I found the earlier chapters more interesting and more compelling than the tale of the disaster itself. I appreciated that the author saw fit to widen the scope of the book by making it about the whole war and not just about a single tragedy. Any Civil War enthusiast will appreciate this book, I'm sure.