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Surviving The Civil War, Prison, And The Worst Maritime Disaster In American History
Collins
April 2009
On Sale: April 1, 2009
320 pages
ISBN: 0061470546
EAN: 9780061470547
Hardcover
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Historical
A powerful account of a surprisingly forgotten tragedy of
the Civil War A stunning wartime account of human endurance
and adventure, and an exploration of just how much the human
body and mind can take, Sultana follows several young Union
soldiers through the Civil War and what was, for them, its
unimaginably disastrous aftermath. We see them enlist and
then almost immediately be plunged into a cascading series
of wartime horrors: Battle, trauma, prison camp, and,
finally, the sinking of the Sultana, the steamboat that was
taking them back home. On an April night in 1865, the Sultana slowly moved up the
dark Mississippi, its overtaxed engines straining under the
weight of a human cargo that included an estimated
twenty-four hundred passengers—more than six times the
number it was designed to carry. Most were weak, emaciated
Union soldiers, recently paroled from Confederate prison
camps, on their way home after enduring the violence of war. At two a.m., three of Sultana's four boilers exploded.
Within twenty minutes, it went down in fire and water,
taking an estimated seventeen hundred lives. The sinking of
the Sultana remains the worst maritime disaster in American
history, yet due to a confluence of contemporary events
(Lincoln had recently been assassinated and the war had
ended), it soon faded into relative obscurity. Now Alan Huffman presents this harrowing story against the
backdrop of the endless suffering already endured by its
survivors. Using contemporary research as well as digging
deep into archives and family keepsakes, Huffman paints a
gripping portrait of the young men who made it home alive.
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