Most Americans likely associate maritime tragedies with ocean liner disasters such as the Titanic and the Lusitania, or with violent storms like those documented in The Perfect Storm and The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. But the worst maritime disaster in American history, and the fourth deadliest ever recorded, was the explosion on board the steamboat Sultana on April 27, 1865, when approximately 1800 people, the vast majority recently freed Union Army prisoners of war, lost their lives on the Mississippi River near Memphis.

Before the proliferation of railroads, the easiest and fastest way to transport goods and people was over water. Shallow waters remained problematic obstacles into the early nineteenth century, but technological advances, chief among them vessels equipped with boiler-produced steam propulsion, allowed both for further navigation of shallows and for upriver navigation against strong currents. Rapid additional exploitation of the nation’s waterways ensued, catalyzing the westward expansion and economic development of the United States.

Although steam power was an exciting technology that appeared to offer limitless possibilities, boiler construction, manufacture, maintenance, and operation were hardly perfected when steamboats began appearing in American waters. Combined with a lack of government or industry oversight, inspection, or regulation, such mechanical uncertainty meant that steamboat fires and boiler explosions were common occurrences. Historian John Burke has estimated that 233 boiler explosions occurred on steamboats between 1816 and 1848. Between 1825 and 1830, forty-two explosions killed 273 people in the United States, and between 1810 and 1840, nearly 4000 fatalities occurred on the Mississippi River alone.

The deaths of more than 300 people from steamboat boiler explosions in the spring of 1838 finally spurred Congress to issue the first national public safety regulatory act. But even though the Steamboat Act of 1838 required ships to be registered, provide safety equipment, and undergo periodic inspection, steamboat boilers continued to explode at an alarming rate. Between 1841 and 1848, seventy more boiler explosions caused 625 deaths, and in just the eight months prior to the passage of the next national safety legislation in 1852, 700 people died in boiler accidents. The Steamboat Act of 1852 finally set standards for boiler construction and operation, including the hydrostatic testing of boilers and provision of steam safety valves, as well as licensing requirements for steamboat pilots and engineers. These provisions made things somewhat safer, and yet steamboats still caught fire and blew up with some frequency, leaving travelers feeling vulnerable and powerless in the face of such fickle machines.

Historian Walter Johnson has claimed that boiler explosions “were the nineteenth century’s first confrontation with industrial mayhem.” While most mourned and winced at the mechanized chaos, others eagerly exploited people’s fascination with death and destruction. A disaster porn print industry arose to titillate Americans and morbidly monetize the grim tragedies. Lloyd’s Steamboat Directory, and Disasters on the Western Waters, filled with gruesome and graphic descriptions of human physical suffering and death, including a showcase of 32 woodcuts, was one of the best-selling books of the 1850s.

Part of the fascination with such horror was the fact that these terrible accidents cut across lines of class, race, sex, and geography. Between 1831 and 1838 three Congressmen and a Senator died in steamboat explosions on the Red River, the Ohio River, and the Atlantic Ocean. A boiler explosion aboard the Hudson River steamer Henry Clay in 1852 claimed the lives of Stephen Allen, the former mayor of New York City, and of Andrew Jackson Downing, the father of American landscape architecture and park planning. Transatlantic academic fugitive revolutionary Karl/Charles Follen, who introduced German language study, Christmas trees, and gymnastics into American society before being dismissed from Harvard for his radical abolitionist activities, died in 1840 in a fire aboard the New York-Boston steamer Lexington. Mark Twain’s brother, Henry Clemens, died from injuries sustained from a boiler explosion on the Mississippi River steamer Pennsylvania in 1858.

With hindsight, it seems strange that a major military-related steamboat explosion had not occurred until the Sultana tragedy. The end of the Civil War presented many new challenges to the victorious Union, among them a daunting number of nightmarish logistical tasks necessary for returning the country back to normal. One of the first was repatriating tens of thousands of Union soldiers from southern battlefields, encampments, and prisons back to their homes and families in the North, where they could be formally demobilized, discharged, and — with luck — reintegrated into civilian society. The Mississippi River, the country’s major north-south transportation artery and with connections to almost the entire nation by via its massive river basin, was naturally viewed as the best avenue for troop transport and dispersal.

In the months after Appomattox, Union soldiers in the Deep South made their ways by foot, horse, train, and boat from their southern postings, and from notorious prisons such as Andersonville and Cahaba from which they had been paroled, towards Mississippi River ports such as New Orleans, Memphis, and Vicksburg, in the hopes of being able to board a northbound ship. The American government lacked the marine resources to execute the return of tens of thousands of men, and so it turned to the private sector for assistance, paying independent steamship operators as much $10 for each soldier they transported back north. The operators of the Sultana hoped to capitalize on such an opportunity.

The Sultana was a private Mississippi River side-wheel steamboat with a maximum capacity of 375, and was captained by J. Cass Mason as it headed south from St. Louis in mid-April 1865. By the time it reached the Union army outpost at Vicksburg, it already had 180 people onboard, but the profits to be realized by both the owners of the Sultana and by army officials, who received kickbacks for providing “passengers,” were too great to pass up. In Vicksburg, approximately 2200 more persons were packed onto the ship.

When the Sultana docked in Vicksburg, one of its boilers had already begun leaking dangerously. A proper repair would have taken several days, but Captain Mason, afraid of losing his lucrative cargo of soldiers to other steamboat competitors, ordered the precariously leaking boiler simply to be patched. On April 24, the overcrowded vessel left Vicksburg, headed upriver for Cairo, Illinois. Carrying more than six times its design capacity, the ship struggled mightily upstream against the Mississippi’s famously strong currents, which had been exacerbated by a heavy spring snowmelt. On April 27, the Sultana had gotten just north of Memphis when the patched boiler exploded. The resulting fire caused the ship’s other boilers to explode, and approximately 1800 passengers died from the explosions, fire, hypothermia, or drowning.

Nearly the same number of American troops perished in the Sultana disaster as did in the entire Spanish-American War, the War of 1812, or the current ongoing war in Afghanistan. The disaster has been the subject of stories by NPR, Smithsonian magazine, and National Geographic, not to mention countless academic articles. PBS’s History Detectives dedicated an episode to debunking the rumors of potential Confederate sabotage via a bomb disguised as a piece of coal. The Sultana Disaster Museum is located in Marion, Arkansas, and reunions of the descendants of survivors continue to occur.

Yet the wreck of the Sultana remains unfamiliar to the general public, an elision that has several probable causes. April 1865 was filled with “exciting” events – the end of the Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the capture and death of John Wilkes Booth. The Sultana accident did not have the luxury of occurring in a relatively slow month for news, like the Titanic sinking did nearly 47 years later. Moreover, unlike the Titanic or the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Sultana itself had little beyond the death toll to draw the public’s fascination. The vessel was neither state of the art nor did it carry famous people. The Union troops onboard were only enlisted men, chiefly recent parolees from Confederate prison camps. Additionally, Americans were tired of war and wanted to move past it rather than deal with yet another tragedy. Moreover, the years of war had deadened people to loss. The Sultana was seen just another event of suffering and loss, with a death total akin to a minor Civil War battle. Unless there was a specific personal connection to a victim, there was just detached numbness.

But another theory for the rapid disappearance of the Sultana from American historical memory might, ironically, be related to the fact that the Sultana was an utterly preventable tragedy, grounded in greed, bribery, war profiteering, and obvious criminal negligence. Everybody thinks their lives and personal safety are worth more than $10. Few want to imagine that they could ever be put in such a hapless situation, where their destinies are subject to the whims of profit-seeking operators of an often hazardous industry where corners routinely get cut for financial gain. No one wants to confront their utter powerlessness amidst the chaos of a scorched postwar environment and a seemingly unsympathetic world.