Sultana Read online

  Sultana

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

  Alan Huffman

  For A. D. Huffman

  August 6, 1916–August 19, 2008

  Contents

  Foreword

  1 Midstream, April 27, 1865

  2 Getting There

  3 War

  4 The Raids

  5 Somewhere, The Little Brother

  6 Captured

  7 Cahaba

  8 Andersonville

  9 Going Off Alone

  10 Release

  11 Sold Up the River

  12 The Disaster

  13 In a Dead Man’s Pocket

  14 The Beginning of the End

  15 Home

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Alan Huffman

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  THERE WERE SIX OF THEM, FIVE YOUNG MEN AND ONE woman, dressed in brand-new desert camo and pristine combat boots, posing for a cell-phone photo at the terminal gate. They were the sort of soldiers you see everywhere in American airports these days: Guys with Oakley shades perched atop freshly shaved heads, women with hair tucked inside their caps, moving purposefully and a little furtively, separate from everyone else.

  Their expressions seemed both confident and a little edgy. No one knows what the future holds, but it is seldom as obvious or meaningful as when a person sets off for armed conflict. From that moment on, anything can happen. The soldiers were documenting a true departure, the beginning of a very personal and potentially fatal group experiment: This is us leaving Atlanta, leaving the known world behind.

  The scene has been repeated, in various incarnations, for as long as people have been going off to war. It would have been much the same for Romulus Tolbert, a soldier I was trailing, nearly a century and a half after the fact. In the fall of 1863, Tolbert was waiting with his fellow soldiers in the Indianapolis train station, in his own crisp uniform and unsullied boots, preparing to ship off to the American Civil War. He was about to step across a similar threshold, and he faced the same basic question: Will I make it back? He had no way of knowing how bad things would get, which was probably just as well.

  I came across Tolbert’s story while researching a comparatively obscure historical episode that had made the local news two decades before, when a farmer and a Memphis lawyer reported finding what they believed to be the remains of a steamboat known as the Sultana buried beneath an Arkansas soybean field. The Sultana saga was by then largely forgotten, despite its epic proportions and the fact that it branched off into a network of intriguing subplots, one of which concerned Tolbert. The interwoven stories of the Sultana disaster have a lot to say about human survival, and they are particularly attractive to those of us eating frozen yogurt in Concourse E. They show us what a full onslaught is like, with everything the Fates can throw at you.

  The Sultana disaster was remarkable primarily for its magnitude. More than seventeen hundred people died after the grossly overloaded boat exploded, burned, and sank in the flooded Mississippi River at the end of the Civil War, making it the worst maritime disaster in American history. It also represented the climax of a series of momentous trials for most of those aboard, including Tolbert, his friend John Maddox, and, among the more than two thousand recently released Union prisoners of war, two others from the same region of Indiana, J. Walter Elliott and Perry Summerville. Aside from Tolbert and Maddox, these four men had not crossed paths before the war.

  Looking back now, when their lives can be considered of a piece, it is clear that they and most of the other Sultana survivors were capable of enduring almost anything, and for an extended period of time. The bar was continually being raised. At each level they watched stronger, smarter, and seemingly luckier people disappear from the frame. It would have been nice if they could have known that the bullets piercing the air at Chickamauga would not find them, that the diseases they suffered in prison would eventually abate, and that they could wake up on a burning boat on a flooded river and somehow make it to shore, but they could not know what the future held, nor how much they could survive. Only in looking back can the results of their experiment be known.

  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. The soldiers in the Atlanta airport could (or might) have been embarking on an uneventful tour, a dramatic sidebar of the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, set to an iPod soundtrack of Drowning Pool and Ludacris songs, or they might have been on their way to getting their throats slit, live on a streaming Internet video, and it would have been much the same for the soldiers aboard the Sultana. Even before they boarded the boat, Tolbert and most of the other recently paroled prisoners had burned through their reserves of physical, mental, and emotional calories in what was essentially a phased experiment in human survival, the results of which would not be revealed for decades, until the last of them lay on their deathbeds as old men. By the time the Sultana went down, they had endured pretty much everything the world can throw at you: Violence, deprivation, sickness, humiliation, loss of friends and brothers, betrayal by their own country and in some cases their own countrymen. All that was left was the specter of a sudden and complete disaster, and soon that came, too. At no point did they know the logarithm of their survival. The dangers were diffuse. Even after the disaster, they knew only that a crowning blow had been delivered at the precise moment when they had every reason to believe they had left their troubles behind. Under the circumstances, their survival must have come as something of a surprise, and even after they made it to shore, it would have been hard to breathe a sigh of relief.

  A body and brain under extreme duress go through all sorts of chemical transformations, which influence how a person responds and, to varying degrees, what happens next. Faced with a mortal threat, an otherwise normal life can become so magnified, so pixilated that it may be hard to remember what it was like before or to imagine how it will be afterward, to even clearly recall that day in the Atlanta airport or in the Indianapolis train station when your boots were untainted by mud and blood, and when survival was just an idea for the very last time.

  Chapter One

  MIDSTREAM, APRIL 27, 1865

  J. WALTER ELLIOTT TOOK THREE DOSES OF QUININE the Sisters of Charity had given him on the boat, all at once. It was a futile gesture, but it was all he had at the time. Elliott, an army captain from southern Indiana, lay shivering on a cypress log, snagged in drift on the Arkansas side of the river. He was so exhausted that for a while he could not sit up. He was tormented by mosquitoes. In the darkness nearby, he heard a young man gurgling and moaning. The young man seemed to be losing his hold on a flooded tree.

  Elliott listened to the gurgling and moaning for hours, and not long after the source was revealed by the faint light of dawn, the young man died. By then, rescue boats were slowly pirouetting on whirlpools in the open channel, and he noticed another man a little farther away, fully out of the water, clinging to another flooded sapling, his grasp weakening, too. The man inched lower and lower until his head slipped beneath the muddy water, then unexpectedly broke the surface again, clawing at the trunk and pulling himself up, though not quite as high as before. The scene kept repeating, stuck in frustrating denouement. The man went under; the man came up; the man went under again. Elliott could not get to him because he could not swim.

  When he was finally able to stand, Elliott focused his attention on a nearly naked man who lay at his feet on a thin, sodden mattress. The man was shivering uncontrollably, as everyone wa
s. The shakes could represent the insistent quivering of life or the final shuddering of death. All of them had engaged in mortal parlay many times before, had felt their hearts in their throats at Perryville and Stones River and Chickamauga, had lain sleepless at night in the purgatory of the prisons, watching their breath fade out before them in the cold. They had been sick, wounded, or both. They had been close to giving up and could have done so in a single breath. Each time, when they thought they had endured the worst, it had reappeared ahead of them, but each time, when they thought they had reached the end, it had been delayed.

  Elliott had feared death both on the burning boat and in the river, but he was still there, rhythmically striking the nearly naked man with a switch. He was intent on keeping the man alive, and pain was the only tool at his disposal. The man, whom he did not know, feebly begged him to stop. There were others nearby, and soon the bodies of two men and of a young woman lay at Elliott’s feet, evidence of his failures. Up and down the river he saw men clinging to flooded trees, which bowed under their weight and in the tug of the currents. Some clung with death grips; others hung limply like snagged debris. For miles down the river, he could see people floating away lifelessly or barely alive, on driftwood and pieces of the boat. Somewhere among them was Romulus Tolbert, a private, also from southern Indiana, who grasped a board or a piece of driftwood (the detail would be lost in the telling). Tolbert had lost sight of his boyhood friend John Maddox, a fellow private, who until then had been with him nearly every step of the way. Tolbert and Maddox had served together in the local militia back in Indiana, had endured enemy fire and wearying marches through Georgia, and had survived the squalid Confederate prison in Alabama before boarding the Sultana on their way home.

  Private Perry Summerville, who grew up not far from Elliott, Tolbert, and Maddox in rural Indiana, and had also been in the Alabama pen, was now miles downstream, carried helplessly on the unyielding currents, floating toward Memphis between two wooden boards, one clutched between his shriveled, aching hands, the other hooked under his feet. Another refugee from the Alabama pen, George Robinson, a private from Michigan, was already beyond the city, floating senselessly on a dead mule amid bobbing barrels, discarded clothes, deathly quiet bodies, and smoldering splinters of the boat.

  From his perch on the log, Elliott watched men hanging over the sides of the distant boats, dragging survivors and bodies aboard. He heard voices echoing across the river, and here and there someone crying out deliriously or moaning so pitifully and interminably that it was a relief when the voices finally quieted and faded away. Men mimicked the calls of birds and the croaking of frogs, or sang favorite songs from childhood or the war: Come on, come on, come on, old man, and don’t be made a fool, by everyone you meet in camp, with “Mister, here’s your mule!” Beyond the man hanging on the tree Elliott saw a pirogue piloted by a misplaced Rebel soldier, nosing in and out among the trees. It was a curious sight. Elliott called out to him and pointed to the young man clinging to the tree, and the Rebel took his cue and saved him. In the distance, in a flooded field, he saw a group of men crouched together on the roof of a barn, hugging themselves against the chill, occasionally swatting stiffly at mosquitoes. It might have seemed strange, mosquitoes in the cold, raising welts amid the goose bumps, but there was no logic to anything now. The world and the mind played tricks.

  He tried to commit every detail to memory. Years from now he would struggle to make sense of it all, to put it into words, to impose order, to impress anyone who was willing to listen. Nothing would be too preposterous to believe: The hapless man rolling over on a twirling barrel, like some macabre sideshow; the man who had tied a tourniquet around the ruptured, pulsing veins of his broken legs to keep from bleeding to death, who asked to be thrown overboard to drown rather than face being burned alive; the six or seven men clinging to the back of a terrified horse as it swam down the fire-lit channel; the sister who stood on the bow of the Sultana, attempting to calm the drowning masses until the moment the flames consumed her; the woman who drifted serenely through the mayhem, buoyant as a water lily in her hoopskirt, as if in a dream—which she may well have been. They would be characters in Elliott’s stock scenes. He would use them to populate his mythopoeic tale.

  Other survivors would keep their memories to themselves. But even now, in the aftermath, all of them faced the same questions that had raced through Perry Summerville’s mind when he awoke, flying through the air above the darkened river: How did I get here, and what do I do now?

  Chapter Two

  GETTING THERE

  ON A SUMMER MORNING IN 2007, A DIESEL TOWBOAT churned the placid Ohio River as the day’s first tourists strolled the waterfront promenade of Madison, Indiana, squinting at their guidebooks, alert to any meticulously restored cottage or mercantile-store-turned-candle-shop. Madison is an old port town that looks as if it sprang full-blown from the collective mind of a well-heeled preservationist society, which is what most tourists come to see.

  A few blocks up the hill from the river, a beer truck discharged kegs at the historic Broadway Tavern and Inn, where the night before a crew from the Discovery Channel had filmed a TV segment on ghosts. The Broadway has been in continuous operation since 1834 and has never been remodeled, aside from the addition of electric heat and in-room baths, and its atmosphere of studied inertia is said to provide an attractive venue for ghosts. The steep stairs creak creepily underfoot, and the décor, despite an overlay of careworn 1980s upholstery, is appropriately antiquated. The downstairs tavern, with its massive oak bar and nicotine-stained walls, feels both historic and rowdy. It is easy to imagine newly enlisted Union soldiers and workers from the nearby International Paper Company plant feeling equally at home there.

  As the Discovery crew filmed in the inn’s dining room two local guys sat at the bar sporting barbed-wire tattoos and fashionably ripped jeans. When the director came into the bar, one of them stretched elaborately, trying unsuccessfully to catch his attention. Everyone wants something big to happen, and the guy might have gotten his break playing the role of Romulus Tolbert or John Maddox, had anyone known their stories. But the focus of the show was on the sort of apparitions who slam hotel doors. No one knew Tolbert’s and Maddox’s stories, and no one recognized the young guy’s willingness to play.

  There was a time when Tolbert and Maddox were trawling for their own recognition, and Madison was their venue, too. Tolbert was a young farmer from nearby Saluda, a quiet guy with a handsome, slightly pensive face. Maddox, whose blue eyes glimmered against an otherwise dark visage, was a friend of Tolbert’s from down the road. They had served together for three months in the local militia in 1862 but did not enter the actual Civil War—the launching pad for their series of mounting trials—until the following September. When they set out, Tolbert was twenty. Maddox was seventeen and had lied about his age to get in. It was their first trip far from home.

  Madison, Indiana, is known for its history, but few locals knew or cared about Tolbert and Maddox other than Robert Gray, a veteran of World War II who spends his free time purposefully roaming the back roads of Jefferson County in his aging Plymouth, or in whatever car his grandson, a used-car dealer, lends him to drive. Gray never tires of scouring abandoned graveyards and other places of historical interest, many of which are forgotten. His grandson, Beau, who sat at the bar the night the Discovery crew filmed, said he was proud of the old man’s love of history and his fidelity to the momentous details of forgotten lives, but like most people—no doubt including Tolbert and Maddox in 1863—he was more concerned about where his own life was leading him.

  Gray stumbled upon Tolbert’s Civil War record in the National Archives a few years back while researching a group of local soldiers, and he wanted to know more. He began asking around but found no one, including among Tolbert’s local descendants, who had much information to share. Here was a young man—for in Gray’s mind Tolbert would always be a young man, though he died at nearly eighty, as many y
ears ago—who went through an astonishing series of survival trials, yet afterward retired to the quiet life of a farmer and rarely spoke of any of his ordeals again. Tolbert had mailed home a postcard during the war, but it had been somehow lost. A trunk containing his small cache of memorabilia was likewise abandoned when his descendants moved out of his old clapboard farmhouse, which was eventually torn down. The imposing brick farmhouse where he grew up still stands, but the people who live there know nothing about him. Maddox’s family home is gone. The elderly woman who last lived in it recalled the night it burned and said she and her late husband were lucky to get out alive. The overgrown Maddox family cemetery is tucked away in a hollow along the abandoned Saluda pike. Tolbert’s dates are chiseled in stone in the well-tended graveyard of the New Bethel Church a few miles away. On the surface, that seemed to be all there was. None of the numerous local historical markers mentions Tolbert or Maddox, and a search of their names in the local historical society’s database produced no hits. Their stories remain deeply submerged, which in Tolbert’s case seems to have been by design.

  Tolbert’s great-granddaughter, Anne Woodbury, who never actually knew him but has heard, said he was reticent by nature. He scribbled a sketchy summary of his war experiences when he applied for a military pension, and he offered a few terse replies to one of his son’s persistent questions. Otherwise, he remained mum about what he went through between September 1863, when he and Maddox joined the U.S. Army, and May 1865, when he finally made it home. A casual observer would not have suspected anything remarkable about him afterward, though he had endured enough pathos and drama by the time he was twenty-one to blanche the apparitions trotted out for the Discovery Channel crew. Among his extraordinary feats of survival was one that seemed to ensure he would be forgotten, but which intrigued Robert Gray: Managing to become outwardly ordinary again. From all appearances, Saluda was the only place Tolbert ever wanted to be, and he spent two long years in an epic struggle to get back, and the rest of his life getting over what had stood in his way.