Samuel Washington Jenkins survived the worst maritime disaster in United States history in 1865, and now his Dayton, Tenn., daughter is the last remaining child of a survivor able to pass along the story.
The tightly packed SS Sultana, a steamer carrying about 2,100 Union soldiers — mostly former prisoners of war — up the Mississippi River after end of the Civil War, exploded several miles north of Memphis on April 27, 1865, killing about 1,800 people.
“He heard a loud noise,” Glenna Green, 90, said, relating the story her father used to tell. “He saw people falling. (Soon) he was out in the water, thrashing around, holding his head up.”
Mrs. Green, who lived most of her life in the Bakewell area, is the 18th of Mr. Jenkins’ 20 children and the only one still living. Her father was 71 when she was born.
She and her three children attended the annual meeting of the Association of Sultana Descendants and Friends on Friday and Saturday in Chattanooga.
Norman Shaw, the Knoxville founder of the organization, is not a descendant of a survivor of the Sultana but “stumbled across” information on it while researching material for the Knoxville Civil War Roundtable in 1987.
The steamship disaster is “kind of forgotten,” he said. “It’s not even well known among Civil War folks. That’s why we made the commitment to keep the story alive until the last (child of a survivor) died.”
The explosion, Mr. Shaw said, came close on the heels of the surrender of the Army of the Tennessee by Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.
Dr. S. Kittrell Rushing, interim department head and Frank McDonald professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said “there was so much going on” in the same period in history that the Sultana disaster “got lost in the shuffle.”
“It was overshadowed,” he said.
VIRTUALLY UNSCATHED
Mr. Jenkins, according to family stories, fell from the upper deck of the Sultana to the lower deck during the explosion, then climbed aboard a paddlewheel housing and floated down the Mississippi.
Eventually, he was picked up and taken to a Memphis hospital, according to grandson Maxie Green, of Soddy-Daisy. A day or so later, he was put on another steamship that dropped him in Nashville to be mustered out of the Army.
From Nashville, Mr. Green said, his grandfather walked back to Bryson City, N.C., where he had lived when he entered the Army.
Several years later, Mr. Jenkins and his first wife, with whom he had seven children, moved to Soddy, where he worked in mines, according to Mr. Green.
In the mid-1890s, he attended Chattanooga Medical College and became a doctor. For many years, Mr. Green said, his grandfather served as a doctor for Southern Railway and for the people of what is now Soddy-Daisy, delivering more than 2,000 babies.
Mrs. Green is a child of Mr. Jenkins’ second marriage, which produced 13 children. He died when she was 12.
“He was kind and loving,” she said, “and also a disciplinarian. He could really lay the switch on.”
Her father loved to tell stories about the Civil War and of the suffering he saw, Mrs. Green said.
“His experiences helped him be what he was when he was older,” she said.
YOUNG SOLDIER
Although Mr. Jenkins’ five older brothers had entered the war on the Confederate side, he was judged too young when he volunteered at 16 in 1864, Mr. Green said.
Because he wanted to fight, he went across the mountains to Maryville, Tenn., and joined the Union Army — and the Third Tennessee Cavalry — by lying about his age.
“He was a typical teenager,” Mr. Green said. “He wanted to get in the fight.”
Initially quartered around Nashville and Murfreesboro, Mr. Jenkins eventually was sent toward Florence, Ala., his grandson said. He was captured by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troops during the battle of Sulphur Trestle in September 1864 and transferred to Cahaba Prison near Selma, Ala. He was there when the war ended, then was sent to Vicksburg, Miss., for transportation north.
WORSE THAN TITANICAn estimated 1,800 passengers of the 2,300 aboard the SS Sultana perished during an explosion just north of Memphis on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865. By comparison, 1,523 people went down with the passenger liner Titanic when it collided with an iceberg and sank on April 14, 1912.
In Vicksburg, the government had contracted with several private steamship owners to ferry the freed Union soldiers. At $5 a head for enlisted men and $10 a head for officers, “it was a nice little bonanza for any of these steamships’ owners to get these men on board,” Mr. Shaw said.
The first two ships left with passenger loads of 600 and 1,300, he said, but the Sultana was overloaded by hundreds of men in spite of a quick repair on a leaky boiler while the ship was at Vicksburg.
“They crammed on as many as they could,” Dr. Rushing said.
The ship, according to the book “Cahaba Prison and the Sultana Disaster,” was rated for 376 passengers and crew. On the voyage during which it exploded, it was carrying about 2,300 people.