The Sultana Disaster: The Deadliest Maritime Tragedy America Forgot

In the early hours of April 27, 1865, a steamboat packed with nearly two thousand exhausted Union soldiers drifted northward on the Mississippi River. The American Civil War had ended and these soldiers who had survived battlefields, diseases, and some of the Confederacy's most notorious prison camps were finally going home. Shortly after 2 a.m., the vessel's boilers exploded with tremendous force…