Lost to Time Page 14

  Unfortunately, others behaved much differently than the Sultana’s captain. As Private John Walker of the 50th Ohio Infantry later recollected: “I thought the sights on the battle-fields terrible, and they were, but they were not to be compared with the sights of that night when the animal nature of man came to the surface in the desperate struggle to save himself regardless of the life of others.”

  Survivors witnessed incident after incident in which men, desperate to survive, engaged in life-or-death struggles for possession of passing logs, mattresses, or anything that would keep them afloat. Many recalled how as many as 150 frantic souls fought for a place in the Sultana’s one lifeboat, once it had been tossed into the water. They remembered with horror how the small boat become so overcrowded with struggling passengers that it sank to the bottom, taking with it an untold number of them.

  Perhaps nothing better illustrated the dark side of human nature than the experiences of a female passenger known only as Mrs. Perry. Shortly after the explosion, Mrs. Perry found herself in the river clinging tightly to a door along with six soldiers. Suddenly one of the soldiers, noting that the woman was wearing a life belt, attacked her and tried to tear the belt from her waist. Shoved underwater, Mrs. Perry resurfaced, managed to break away from her attacker, and once again grabbed hold of the door. But the soldier would not give up. Again he came at her, once again shoving her under the cold water.

  Mrs. Perry was now close to drowning. But with the little breath that was left in her, she forced herself to the surface, where she spotted a second door floating not far away. Somehow she managed to swim to this door, only to find a soldier clinging to it and shouting for her to stay away. When Mrs. Perry grabbed hold of the door, this soldier also attacked her and for the third time she found herself thrust into the river. Even the amazing Mrs. Perry was ready to give up when miraculously the first door came floating by and she was able to grab hold of it. Fortunately for the courageous woman, this time her first attacker was nowhere to be seen among the others soldiers still clinging to the door.

  Mrs. Perry was indeed fortunate. So too were James and Jesse Millsaps. When the explosion rocked the Sultana, the two brothers, who had fought side by side in the same unit during the war, became separated. Each found himself clinging to the end of a log, which he shared with another person at the opposite end. Because of the darkness, the other person could not be seen. It was not until they were rescued that the Millsaps brothers discovered that they had been clinging to the same log.

  A number of those struggling to save their lives in the water had a special concern. Among the cargo that the Sultana had taken aboard was a live alligator transported in a large wooden crate. Not realizing that the animal had been killed so that the crate could be used to float upon, several of those struggling in the Mississippi were genuinely fearful that every splash they heard was the alligator ready to devour them. “Everyone that was on the Sultana knew something about the monstrous alligator that was on the boat,” Benjamin Davis recalled. “While the boat was burning the alligator troubled me almost as much as the fire.” Ira B. Horner had the same concern. “Although I felt that I would not drown,” he wrote, “at the same time I did not feel comfortable from the fact that there was an alligator . . . keeping me company.”

  Unlike Horner, most of those who had somehow survived the explosion were hardly certain that they would not drown. Even those who managed to gain hold of some object to keep them from drowning had no idea if they would live to see another day.

  J. Walter Elliott and another soldier had spent the night floating on a mattress that eventually carried them to a tree rising out of the waters that lapped the Arkansas shore. There, in the tree, they spent the longest night of their lives.

  Minutes seemed hours . . . There was no sound to break the oppressive silence save the splashing of the cruel waters and the gurgling moan of a poor fellow who had clasped his broken, scalded arms over a [branch] and drifted, with his mouth just above the water, and lodged near us, dying. An occasional feeble cry of distress near by on the other river side, was answered by voices up the bank. Oh, would morning never dawn on night so hideous?

  DAWN FINALLY DID BREAK, and with it came the full realization of the enormity of what had taken place. The bodies of more than 1,700 soldiers were scattered up and down the river. The remains of the shattered and burned-out Sultana lay sunken in the riverbed off the tiny settlement of Mound City, Arkansas. As Ensign James H. Berry of the Union ironclad gunboat Essex sadly noted, “The cries of sufferers had ceased and all who had not been rescued had gone down.”

  Amazingly, there were hundreds who had survived, most of them clinging to trees and bushes on the riverbanks and on small, flooded Mississippi islands. Rescuers who came upon them had a strange story to tell. Many of those who they found in the trees or perched upon rocks on the Mississippi shore had spent the latter part of the long night cheering themselves and their fellow survivors on by singing familiar songs or by imitating the sounds of the birds and frogs whose voices rose above that of the waves. All were grateful to be alive. As Ohio infantryman Alexander Brown later declared, “Now, when I hear persons talking about being hard up, I think of my condition at that time—up in a tree in the middle of the Mississippi River. A thousand miles from home, not one penny to my name, nor a pocket to put it in.”

  THE IRONCLAD USS ESSEX was enlisted in the search-and-rescue of survivors from the Sultana disaster.

  The coming of day also brought with it stories of heroic rescues that had taken place in the dark hours after the explosion. Survivors told of how, little more than an hour after the blast, the captain, crew, and passengers of the Bostonia II, a steamboat headed down the Mississippi to Memphis, had saved more than 150 lives by throwing the vessel’s lines, along with planks, chairs, and anything else that would float, into the water, and how the Bostonia II’s lifeboats had made repeated trips to collect those who were still alive.

  Throughout the night, small boats from the various U.S. military vessels that operated on the Mississippi, including the Tyler and the Essex, searched the disaster site, picking up survivors. They were joined by the Mississippi steamboats the Jenny Lind and the Arkansas. Each rescue had its own story.

  “One poor boy clutched to the limb of a tree so tightly that we could not force him to let go his hold,” reported an officer aboard the Tyler. “We took him and the limb aboard together.”

  Ironically, a number of the Union soldiers who were saved were rescued by former members of the Confederate troops. Among the former Confederates was eighteen-year-old DeWitt Clinton Spikes, who, along with his parents, three sisters, two brothers, and niece, had booked passage on the Sultana in New Orleans before the steamboat had made its way to Vicksburg. In the chaos following the explosion, Spikes had lost sight of his family. Saved by one of the rescue vessels, he was taken ashore at Mound City. Within minutes, however, he began helping in the rescue effort, all the while searching for his loved ones. He never found them, but before the night was over Spikes personally saved fourteen people and assisted in the rescue of twenty-five others. Another former Confederate soldier, J. G. Berry, along with his friend George Malone, played a key role in rescuing as many as one hundred people, almost all of them Union soldiers. Confederate officer Frank Barton was also credited with saving the lives of several soldiers, men who, not that long ago, had been his bitter enemies.

  The last boat carrying survivors reached Memphis at about noon on April 28. Almost all of those rescued were taken to various Memphis hospitals or to the city’s Soldiers’ Home. Soon these facilities became filled with people searching for friends or relatives who had been aboard the ill-fated steamboat. Among them was Arthur Jones, who, in a letter to his brother, wrote:

  We are still in hopes that more of our boys will yet be found, but it is very doubtful. Those of us who are left can only mourn their loss, and deeply sympathize with their friends and relatives. It will indeed be a great blow to those who were
daily expecting their boys, fathers, and husbands home, many of them having been absent for years . . . . After all their suffering in Southern prisons, getting safely within our lines, on our route homeward . . . to have this terrible calamity, hurling so many into eternity, it makes me shudder as I write. No tongue can tell or pen describe the suffering that was on that boat on the morning of the 27th.

  Just as the exact number of people who were loaded upon the Sultana will remain a mystery, the exact number of those who died in her sinking will never be known. One of the earliest official reports of the disaster placed the number of fatalities at 1,238. Later, the U.S. Customs Service placed the death toll at 1,547. Both figures are much too low. Given that there may have been as many as 2,500 people aboard the vessel, that bodies continued to be found for months—some as far away as Vicksburg—and that at least 300 of the 800 who were rescued later died in hospitals, the final death count, in all probability, was over 1,800: all but 100 of them Union soldiers.

  Soon after the disaster, three separate military investigations into the tragedy were conducted. Hoping to save face, the army did not publicize the investigations and held them as secretly as they could. In the end, it was officially proclaimed that overloading was not the cause of the disaster. Nor was the temporary patch that had been placed on one of the boat’s boilers found to be a contributing factor to the explosion. Instead, the army ruled that the cause of the disaster was mismanagement of the water levels in the Sultana’s four interconnected boilers, particularly when water shifted from one boiler to another whenever the vessel leaned sharply one way or another while rounding a bend in the river, leading to overheating.

  Only one individual was charged with misconduct regarding the tragedy. He was Union officer Captain Frederic Speed, the assistant adjutant general at Vicksburg. Brought before a military court, Speed was accused with knowingly overloading the Sultana and with accepting bribes in the process. Found guilty, he was sentenced to be dishonorably discharged from the army. Some six months later, however, a judge advocate general overturned the conviction, and Speed was honorably mustered out of the service. With the overturning of his conviction, all official inquiries into the Sultana tragedy came to an end. No one was ever held responsible for the calamity.

  AN APRIL 20, 1865, War Department poster offered a 100,000 reward for the capture of Booth and his accomplices.

  It is understandable why the army was determined not to publicize the violent death of such a staggering number of its soldiers, particularly men who had suffered so greatly in Confederate prison camps. But what about the nation’s press? Certainly so enormous a tragedy should have filled the country’s newspapers. Yet it didn’t.

  In part, the story was buried in the back pages for one of the same reasons that the army had conducted its investigations so quietly. After five years of civil war, the nation had grown accustomed to horrendous loss of life and was anxious to put such news behind it. As a reporter for the Memphis Argus wrote only eleven days after the disaster,

  We have, as a people, become so accustomed to suffering of horrors during the past few years that they soon seem to lose their appalling features, and are forgotten. Only a few days ago more than 1,500 lives were sacrificed to fire and water, almost within sight of the city. Yet, even now, the disaster is scarcely mentioned—some new excitement has taken its place.

  Another reason for the scant coverage had to do with other momentous events that were taking place at the time of the calamity. Details about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination thirteen days before the Sultana explosion still filled the nation’s newspapers. So too did coverage of the many funerals and memorial services honoring the fallen president. And readers demanded every detail the newspapers could provide about the capture and killing of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

  There were more subtle reasons as well for the lack of attention given to the Sultana. The tragedy had taken place in the West at a time when the nation’s major and most influential newspapers were located in the East. Almost all the victims of the tragedy were from places far away from the East. As former Pennsylvania congressman John Covode wrote after looking into the disaster, “No troops belonging to States East of Ohio were lost.” He might have added that almost none of the victims were either wealthy or well known. Had they been, their deaths would certainly have engendered greater newspaper coverage, even in the East.

  So the nation’s greatest maritime disaster slipped into obscurity. And there, for the most part, it has remained lost to time.

  EIGHT

  AMERICA’S FIRST SUBWAY

  Secrets under Broadway (1870)

  When the New York City Interborough Rapid Transit subway, commonly known as the IRT, was officially opened on October 27, 1904, it changed the nature of the nation’s largest metropolis and was accompanied by one of the greatest celebrations the city had ever known. But few of those who engaged in that celebration were aware of the fact that the IRT was not the first subway built in New York, and most people today don’t know about it. The amazing story of the construction of the city’s first underground railway has been largely lost to history. At its heart is the tale of one man’s determination to save the city he loved and to revolutionize the way people moved about within it. It is a story made even more remarkable by the fact that the subway he constructed was built almost entirely in secret.

  By the time this secret subway was built, New York had become the envy of other metropolises around the world. As early as 1842, the editor of the daily New York Aurora, a twenty-two-year-old with a future named Walt Whitman, wrote, “Who does not know that our city is the great place of the Western Continent, the heart, the brain, the focus, the main spring, the pinnacle, the extremity, the no more beyond of the New World.”

  AN 1868 LITHOGRAPH of a proposed rail arcade—an elevated railroad—was offered as one solution to the overcrowding in New York City’s streets.

  By the 1860s, New York had become a commercial, financial, and industrial giant, home to more than 800,000 people. Thousands of others poured into the city each year to take advantage of the growing metropolis’s marvelous restaurants, department stores and shops, music halls, and theaters. Nowhere in the nation were there more libraries, museums, or other cultural institutions. It was, in many ways, indeed what young Walt Whitman claimed it to be.

  But New York also had a tremendous problem. Its streets were so congested with traffic that the city was coming to a standstill. Every day, hundreds of horse-drawn, buslike vehicles called omnibuses clogged the streets, a situation made worse by the way their drivers raced recklessly from one side of the street to the other, competing for passengers. It was not only a dangerous situation, but a frustrating one as well. “You cannot accomplish anything in the way of business without devoting a whole day to it,” wrote author Mark Twain. “You cannot ride [to your destination] unless you are willing to go in a packed omnibus that labors, and plunges, and struggles along at the rate of three miles in four hours and a half.”

  A CHAOTIC NEW YORK CITY street ca. 1870.

  Adding to the mayhem were hundreds of horse-drawn delivery wagons and private carriages. The health hazards caused by the traffic were not slight. Several New York doctors speculated that many of the nervous disorders suffered by the city’s residents were caused by the constant clatter of horse hooves and wooden wagon wheels. What was not speculative was the very real danger caused by the tons of manure that the animals dropped on the streets every day. Obviously a solution was needed, a fact stated forcefully on October 8, 1864, by the New York Herald, when it described the experience of riding in city public transportation:

  The driver swears at the passengers and the passengers harangue the driver through the strap-hole—a position in which even Demosthenes could not be eloquent. Respectable clergymen in white chokers are obliged to listen to loud oaths. Ladies are disgusted, frightened and insulted. Children are alarmed and lift up their voices and weep. . . . Thus the omnibus rolls
along, a perfect Bedlam on wheels. . . . The cars are quieter than the omnibuses, but much more crowded. People are packed into them like sardines in a box, with perspiration for oil. The seats being more than filled, the passengers are placed in rows down the middle, where they hang on by the straps, like smoked hams in a corner grocery. To enter or exit is exceedingly difficult. Silks and broadcloth are ruined in the attempt. As in the omnibuses pickpockets take advantage of the confusion to ply their vocation. . . . The foul, close, heated air is poisonous. A healthy person cannot ride a dozen blocks without a headache. . . . it must be evident to everybody that neither the cars nor the stages supply accommodations enough for the public, and that such accommodations as they do supply are not of the right sort. Both the cars and the omnibuses might be very comfortable and convenient if they were better managed, but something more is needed to supply the popular and increasing demand for city conveyances.

  It was a statement with which Alfred Ely Beach could not have agreed more. No one loved New York more than he, but every day as he looked down upon Broadway from his office he shook his head in dismay. Something had to be done to solve the city’s horrific traffic problems. Someone had to come up with an idea for an efficient transit system. Beach was confident enough to believe that he might just be the person to do it.

  BEACH WAS ONLY THIRTY-NINE IN OCTOBER 1864, but he had already led a remarkable life. In July 1846, thanks to money he received from his wealthy father, he and a former classmate, Orson D. Munn, purchased a small weekly journal called Scientific American.