The Sultana Tragedy: America's Greatest Maritime Disaster (review)

BOOK REVIEWS357 a commitment to abolish slavery. Rebel morale, meanwhile, suffered from "ideological and structural weaknesses, and they were the key to Confederate defeat." These weaknesses stemmed from the fact that the Southern nation was "created as a means to defend slavery" (124). Joseph T. Glatthaar points to the "critical contribution of blacks to the defeat of the Confederacy" (137)—both as Union soldiers and in undermining the Rebel homefront. Blacks who escaped to Federal lines, for example, weakened the labor force supporting the Confederate armies. The essays by McPherson, Jones, Gallagher, and Mitchell would all have been enhanced if the authors had focused on the basic questions: Who? What? When? Where? Could the constant defeats the Rebels suffered in the west have weakened their commitment to the Confederate cause more than did any contradiction between fighting for the freedom to keep slaves? Slavery, as McPherson points out, did not weaken the American cause in the war for independence. The Confederate strategy of defending territory failed in the west, not in the east. Was it appropriate for the west? If not, why not? If so, why did it fail? Which Confederate generals commanding which armies in which battles lost the war? The answers to these questions—adumbrated by both McPherson and Gallagher—is that the war was lost by the Confederacy in the west. The war in Virginia produced a stalemate. Fortunately, historians at long last are turning to the western theater, and we are now beginning to get the detailed studies that should facilitate our understanding of the war's most important armies, battles, campaigns, and generals. Perhaps a future Civil War Institute will take up the questions of where and how the Confederacy lost. Richard M. McMurry Decatur, Georgia The Sultana Tragedy: America's Greatest Maritime Disaster. By Jerry O. Potter. (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 1992. Pp. xii, 300. $19.95.) While this book's subtitle makes a strong claim, it is nonetheless accurate. No one can certainly determine exactly how many died on April 27, 1865, when the boilers of the Mississippi River steamboat Sultana exploded near Memphis, Tennessee. Still the most conservative estimates of the death toll among the human cargo, most recently released Union prisoners of war, are unsurpassed in the nation's history. Coming at the end of the country's bloodiest war and simultaneously with the excitement over the assassination of President Lincoln, this disaster, happening in the western theater, received minimal attention from contemporary 358civil war history chroniclers and was soon forgotten by eastern-oriented historians of the Civil War. Belatedly, since 1962, three books have centered in whole or part on the Sultana's spectacular end. Of them, Potter's is clearly the best. The author, a Memphis lawyer, has exhaustively researched his topic. To the published recollections of survivors, he has added material from newspapers, legal sources, and military records. He has used them to write an adequate narrative of the backgrounds of the boat itself and of the prison camps from which many of its passengers had recently come. Especially strong is the description of the complicated situation at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where the prisoners were held in parole camp and then shipped to the North. The account of the doomed boat's last voyage and fiery end is full of predictable human interest. There is some attempt to characterize and to tell the stories of particular individuals. Lurid horror abounds. Also interesting is the information on the aftermath for survivors. Undoubtedly the most valuable aspect of the book for students of the Civil War in general is the revelation of the generally ignored operations of such support personnel as quartermasters. Potter shows officers capable of overloading a vessel beyond any possible reasonable level because of inattention, ignorance, and almost surely because of corrupt payoffs. (Moreover, he shows a system that provided not even minimal medical attention for passengers, many of whom were enfeebled by long imprisonment .) Despite the confusing outcomes of military investigations probably deliberately botched, Potter is able to uncover useful information about the backgrounds of participants that enables readers to understand what most likely occurred. Satisfying to the modern appetite for high-level scandal is the...