Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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...

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.

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.

Meticulous and insightful, journalist Huffman takes the reader on a vivid journey through the Civil War landscape. A large cast of characters provides slice-of-life experiences to give the reader a panorama of human experience during a tumultuous period.
Artifacts of Sultana survivors are few, unlike the Titanic. A surviving diary belonging a soldier who did not survive the river disaster is haunting, as he records daily routines and then adds an occasional poetic flourish.
A highly recommended, novelistic history lesson.

This story is so much more than an account of the worst martime disaster in American history. Anyone with an interest in Civil War history -- or war in general, or in simply how to survive the worst that can befall a person -- has asked this question: How can a mere boy march headlong into a withering enemy fire, knowing he is likely to die, yet keep going, on and on? This book by Alan Huffman finally helps answer that question by getting into the mind of soldiers who faced the absolute worst life could bring. And this story, though set 150 years ago, is applicable today as our soldiers plod through Iraq and Afghanistan, uncertain that they may ever see tomorrow. Huffman's detail of the perils faced -- from bullets to disease to shoddy equipment provided by unscrupulous war profitteers, has frightening similarities to current events. Yet it is his ability to allow the reader to "befriend", in a sense, the characters he follows from one human disaster to another that makes this story one to read and to share with others. As Huffman writes: "Survival is not an achievement. It is a process, and it is impossible to know, at any given moment, where you are in that process." As this book so perfectly understands, whether it be war or the devastating hardships of a distastrous economy, the human mind, body and soul are boundless in what they can withstand.

A seldom studied aspect of the Civil War is the immediate aftermath. Thousands of soldiers were far from home and needed to be returned to civilian life. Boat owners were more than anxious to cram every soldier possible on their boats and so was the case with the Sultana. Huffman estimates that nearly 2,600 men were on board though there is no passenger list. At least 1,700 of these men perished in the disaster. All of this plus the conspiracy theory that the Confederates played a role in the explosion of the boilers should have led to a fast paced and exciting story. Unfortunately that's not what we get.

Huffman takes the long route to get to the meat of the story. We read about friends from Indiana who join the military. We get to meet people like Big Tennessee who really have nothing at all to do with the story. He may (or most likely was not) on the Sultana and legend has it he swam away. We read about prison camps and the hope and despair they caused. Finally we get to the joy of being able to go home and the tragedy that awaited.

Ultimately what we have here is a disjointed work that doesn't really seem to have a focus. The book is 281 pages of text yet we don't hear of the Sultana until page 168. By this point this reader was just hanging on hoping for something to improve. Unfortunately it really didn't. There is no serious discussion regarding the theory that the Confederates had something to do with the explosion. Whether or not Huffman puts any weight to the story it should be addressed if for nothing else but to put it to rest. This could have been done as an appendix if nothing else. I couldn't really get a feel for the ship or the people aboard. While I should have cared about both I found myself looking for the end rather than not wanting it to end.

I can't personally speak for the research that went into the book but scholarship seems to be lacking. The bibliography comes in at just over a scant two pages with more than half being secondary sources and websites. There are no footnotes or end notes so don't bother trying to follow up on Huffman's research. There also are no illustrations or maps which become a serious failing in a modern Civil War book.

This is a book where I think Huffman would have been better off writing it as a fictionalized account. In that way the characters he introduces could have been developed and worked their way through the entire story allowing the reader to have gotten to know them and care about them. As it is I can't recommend this to anybody with a serious interest in the Civil War. Those who like an adventure but don't really care about the war may find this worthy of reading however.

Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and The Worst maritime Disaster in American History, Alan Huffman, Smithsonian Collins Press, 300 pp., bibliography, index, 2009, $26.99.

In the past 20 years there have been six books on the Sultana, several magazine articles and one History Channel program. Huffman's effort, written in an engaging style, offers a somewhat unique point of view that both embraces and diverges from others' work. In Sultana Huffman personalizes the story in an unique way. Never fully removing himself from the story, there are frequent references to what science tells us today about starvation, exhaustion, brain functions, infected wounds, and survival in water of soldiers, prisoners of war, and victims of mechanical catastrophes. He uses the words of Civil War soldiers to illustrate his discussion and move the narrative forward. Where the soldiers are silent, Huffman advances the story with today's knowledge of the impact of personal catastrophes similar to those suffered by the soldiers.

So frequently does the author offer the soldiers' words on events that CWL wishes that an annotated list of characters were in the book. Huffman's brings the reader to the engaging characters and then moves on leaving the reader wondering id this particularly interestinf individual will be in the story again. Some are and some aren't. Not all the soldiers Huffman introduces are on the Sultana but still leave their remarkable stories with the reader. Several Indiana soldiers often come to the fore, then step aside, intermittently return thereafter until the Sultana docks and begins to accept Federal former POWs as passengers.

There is just enough discussion of the Sultana as a vessel to move the narrative forward. CWL wishes that the ship itself would have been developed by Huffman as he had developed the soldiers. Also missing is any discussion of the possibility of Confederate sabotage of the vessel. North and South Magazine a few years ago published the story of the successful construction by Rebels of hollow coal filled with gunpowder. The North and South author, successfully in CWL's mind, found the possibility of Confederate saboteurs at both the explosion of a ship at Grant's Headquarters in City Point, Virginia and at the Memphis, Tennessee docks where the Federals embarked on the short fateful voyage. Also unfortunately the book has neither illustrations nor maps. It is certainly not the definitive (and CWL doesn't like that word at any time) telling of the Sultana. Huffman's accomplishment is that the soldiers are at the center of the story. Their experiences are those of brave men, who endured and who did not endure, who passed through the rapture of war.

Parts of this book are gripping, mainly the part which actually deals with the disaster which takes a while to get to. Tracking specific individuals a novel idea and some background on their overall condition and what they brought with them to the decks of that doomed boat helped but it took a long time to get there. I would have liked at least a map showing where they were and the route of their travels. Better still, some illustrations! The Civil War produced a wealth of information which the author obviously had access to. Descriptions of photos and artifacts presented the reader with some frustration. I wanted to turn to the pages with photos of those poor unfortunates or see the surviving diary but only had the author's description of them.. .

The author has a wonderful writing style, so graphically describing events and places as to make the mental images they conjure seem more like my own memories of the events, as if I had endured the unendurable at Andersonville or swam the Mississippi trying to escape from the doomed Sultana. Equally or more impressive, however, is the incredibly exhaustive research that the author conducted in order to have such a detailed story to apply his writing style to. The book follows three Union soldiers from Indiana, which gives it a much more personal perspective than a simple description of events could.

This story would be well known and familiar to every school kid in America if had not happened at the end of a war the country was ready to forget, and overshadowed by the assassination of Lincoln less than two weeks before. This book is a great read and does justice to an event that has never been given its proper place in history.

This is a fascinating tale, well-researched and presented in a style that keeps the reader engaged. I'm normally a fiction reader, and generally shy away from Civil War history, but this is a great story, well told. I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoys a great story, fictional or otherwise...