Sultana was a commercial side-wheel steamboat which exploded and sank on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865, killing 1,164 people in what remains the worst maritime disaster in United States history.

Constructed of wood in 1863 by the John Litherbury Boatyard[1] in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sultana was intended for the lower Mississippi cotton trade.

For two years, she ran a regular route between St. Louis and New Orleans and was frequently commissioned to carry troops during the American Civil War.

The disaster was overshadowed in the press by events surrounding the end of the Civil War, including the killing of President Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth just the day before.

Low water levels could cause hot spots leading to metal fatigue, significantly increasing the risk of an explosion.

[4]: 12  On the morning of April 15, she was tied up at Cairo, Illinois, when word reached the city that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had been shot in Washington, D.C.

Immediately, Captain Mason grabbed an armload of Cairo newspapers and headed south to spread the news, knowing that telegraphic communication with the southern states had been almost totally cut off because of the recently-ended American Civil War.

Although the mechanic wanted to cut out and replace a ruptured seam, Mason knew such a job would take a few days and cost him his precious load of prisoners.

Instead, Mason and his chief engineer, Nathan Wintringer, convinced the mechanic to make temporary repairs, hammering back the bulged boiler plate and riveting a patch of lesser thickness over the seam.

[4]: 40 Although Hatch had suggested that Mason might get as many as 1,000 released Union prisoners, a mix-up with the parole camp books and suspicion of bribery from other steamboat captains caused the Union officer in charge of the loading, Captain George Augustus Williams, to place every man at the parole camp on board Sultana, believing the number to be less than 1,500.

[4]: 72  Sultana subsequently arrived at Memphis, Tennessee, around 7:00 PM, and the crew began unloading 120 tons (109 tonnes) of sugar from the hold.

[4]: 74–79 At around 2 a.m. on April 27, 1865, when Sultana was about seven miles (11 km) north of Memphis, its boilers suddenly and violently exploded, killing many people instantly.

2), built in 1860 but coming downriver on her maiden voyage after being refurbished,[6] arrived at about 2:30 AM, a half hour after the explosion, and rescued scores of survivors.

[4]: 129  Eventually, the hulk of Sultana drifted about six miles (10 km) to the west bank of the river, burned to the waterline and sank at around 7:00 AM near Mound City and present-day Marion, Arkansas, about five hours after the explosion.

Because Union forces had captured Memphis in 1862 and turned it into a supply and recuperation city, numerous local hospitals treated the roughly 760 survivors with the latest medical equipment and trained personnel.

The Chicago Opera Troupe, a minstrel group that had traveled upriver on Sultana before getting off at Memphis, staged a benefit performance, while the crew of the gunboat Essex raised US$1,000 (equivalent to $19,904 in 2023).

Both groups met as close to the April 27 anniversary date as possible, corresponded with each other, and shared the title National Sultana Survivors' Association.

[15][full citation needed] The official cause of the Sultana disaster was determined to be the mismanagement of water levels in the boilers, exacerbated by the fact that the vessel was severely overcrowded and top-heavy.

When the boat tipped the other way, water rushing back into the empty boiler would hit the hot spots and flash instantly to steam, creating a sudden surge in pressure.

The official inquiry found that the boilers exploded because of the combined effects of careening, low water levels, and the faulty repair made a few days earlier.

[16] A 2015 investigation into the cause of the disaster by Pat Jennings, principal engineer of Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, which came into existence in 1866 because of the Sultana explosion, determined that three main factors led to the disaster: In 1888, a St. Louis resident named William Streetor claimed that his former business partner, Robert Louden, made a confession of having sabotaged Sultana by the use of a coal torpedo while they were drinking in a saloon.

[19][20] Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay, the inventor of the coal torpedo, was a former resident of St. Louis and was involved in similar acts of sabotage against Union shipping interests.

[23] An episode of the PBS series History Detectives that aired on July 2, 2014, reviewed the known evidence, thoroughly disputed a theory of sabotage, and then focused on the question of why Sultana was allowed to be crowded to several times its normal capacity before departure.

Although brought up on courts-martial charges, Hatch managed to get letters of recommendation from no less reputable personages than President Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant.

The letters reside in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. After the disaster, Reuben Benton Hatch refused three separate subpoenas to appear before Captain Speed's trial and give testimony.

However, the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army overturned the guilty verdict because Speed had been at the parole camp all day and had not personally placed a single soldier on board Sultana.

Captain Mason of Sultana, who was ultimately responsible for dangerously overloading his vessel and ordering the faulty repairs to her leaky boiler, had died in the disaster.

Blackened wooden deck planks and timbers were found about 32 feet (10 m) under a soybean field on the Arkansas side, about 4 miles (6 km) from Memphis.