apr 27, 1865 - The Sultana Disaster: Rebel agent Robert Louden confessed to planting a coal torpedo in the SS Sultana boiler room

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Sultana was a commercial side-wheel steamboat which exploded and sank on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865, killing 1,168 people in the worst maritime disaster in United States history.

Sultana Aftermath, 1865
Within hours of the disaster, Gen. C. C. Washburn, commanding officer at Memphis, appointed a military commission to investigate the tragedy. Three inquiries followed to investigate post-war suspicions that a Confederate bomb had been aboard and reviewing the state of poorly repaired boilers and the impact that overcrowding had in the disaster. The official cause of the explosion was determined to be mismanagement of water levels in the boilers, the ship's listing back and forth in the water due to severe overcrowding, and the faulty repairs made to the boilers days before the disaster. Capt. Frederick Speed was the only official found guilty of any impropriety and was court-martialed. However, the findings were later reversed and no one ever faced official charges.

Finally, two years after the war, a rebel agent named Robert Louden confessed that a boiler explosion aboard the riverboat SS Sultana on April 27, 1865 was the result of a coal torpedo that he himself had put aboard. The blast and subsequent fire, which took place on the Mississippi River near Marion, Arkansas several days after the South’s surrender, claimed the lives of more than 1,700 passengers. Many of those that perished were Union troops that had been only recently freed from rebel POW camps. It has been called the worst maritime disaster in American history. [2] Investigators refuted Louden’s claim, maintaining that the blast was the result of excessive steam build up brought on by overcrowding of the ship. [3]

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