Publisher's Weekly Review
The explosion and wreck of the Mississippi riverboat Sultana in 1865, which killed 1,700 passengers, mostly Union soldiers recently released from Confederate POW camps, is but the capstone of this engrossing survey of the many varieties of suffering in the Civil War. Journalist Huffman (Mississippi in Africa) doesn't even get aboard the Sultana until the last third of the saga. Before that, he fills in the backstories of four Yankee survivors as they fight in the battle of Chickamauga, go raiding with Sherman's cavalry and finally get captured and sent to the infamous Southern prison camps at Andersonville, Ga., and Cahaba, Ala. There they endure the torments of starvation, exposure, festering and maggoty wounds, predatory criminal gangs, lice and diarrhea-a scourge, Huffman notes, that was far deadlier to soldiers than bullets. Making skillful use of war diaries and memoirs, the author makes these quieter ordeals just as moving as the Sultana's doomed voyage, with its "hellish scene[s] of hundreds of screaming people being burned alive" or drowning each other in panic. Huffman fits the climactic disaster into a meticulously researched, harrowing look at the sorrow and the pity that was the Civil War. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The little-known story of a deadly steamship explosion at the end of the Civil War. On April 27, 1865, the Sultana was moving along the Mississippi River, writes freelance journalist Huffman (Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia, 2004, etc.). At 2 a.m., near Mound City, Ark., three of its boilers exploded and the ship sank. Some 1,700 passengers died, many of them Union soldiers recently liberated from Confederate prisons. Occurring less than three weeks after Lee's surrender and Lincoln's assassination, the disaster was lost among larger developments in American history and is known today mainly to Civil War enthusiasts. Huffman rescues the Sultana tragedy from obscurity and brings the people and events surrounding it to vibrant life. He focuses mainly on the stories of three soldiers: Romulus Tolbert and John Maddox, farmers and friends from Indiana, and J. Walter Elliott, who later wrote about his experiences. The author's descriptions of their travails during the Civil War, especially in Confederate prisonsElliott was incarcerated in Georgia's infamous Andersonvilleare unflinching and powerful. So is his account of the confusion and corruption that resulted from Tolbert, Maddox and Elliott crowding onto the Sultana with about 2,400 other paroled prisoners, more than six times the number the ship could safely hold. Steamboat owners, paid by the head, bribed army officials to squeeze as many soldiers as possible on each vessel; these thin, weak and sickly passengers were "in no condition for a major survival challenge." Huffman chronicles the explosion and its aftermath in startling detail with a wealth of striking images. "After the scalded swimmers were pulled from the water," he writes, "they were sprinkled with flour to relieve their pain." A short but moving history that effectively captures both the disaster and the soldiers' ordeal. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Who survives catastrophe and why, is Huffman's theme in this book recounting the sinking of the steamboat Sultana in April 1865, about which several accounts are in print, among them Gene Eric Salecker's Disaster on the Mississippi (1996). The incident was a double tragedy, for most of the 1,700 or so victims in the deadliest maritime accident in American history were Union soldiers who had come through their ordeals in Confederate prison camps. Several men form the outline to Huffman's narrative, which flows smoothly from their enlistments to the military actions in which they were involved. Throughout the work, hazards faced by a Civil War soldier in general, or the particular combat injuries or illnesses suffered by these men, bring forth Huffman's observations of what, be it luck or indomitable will, separates he who lives from he who perishes. With impressive historical imagination that builds on visits to relevant locations and assembles his subjects' biographies from fragmentary records, Huffman ably re-creates their ultimate endurance test in the story of the Sultana.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2009 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Journalist Huffman (Mississippi in Africa) here chronicles the lives of three Union troopers in the Civil War, Romulus Tolbert, John C. Maddox, and J. Walter Elliott. Elliott recorded the threesome's impressions of the war, including their daily fight to stay alive in multiple Confederate holding pens throughout the Deep South, covered by Huffman in his long prelude to the maritime disaster of the subtitle. On April 27, 1865, upriver from Memphis, the paddle-wheeler Sultana's boilers exploded, and she sank, taking with her an estimated 1700 out of 2400 passengers, mostly Federal soldiers recently released from rebel POW camps and on their way home. Huffman's graphic accounts here are stories of both cowardice and selflessness, but certainly not recommended for the squeamish. The author rightly attributes this maritime catastrophe to corner-cutting and bribery involving steamboat captains, their agents, and the Union military in Vicksburg, all committed to getting as many of the newly freed troops aboard the Sultana as possible. There were tribunals and inquiries, but scarcely anyone was punished for overloading the vessel. Huffman's final chapter traces the later lives of survivors Tolbert, Maddox, and Elliott, showing how their earlier afflictions incurred during the war, captivity, and the Sultana debacle directly led to their incapacitation and ultimate deaths. His afterword is both a fascinating discussion of his historical methodology and his perspectives regarding both the triumphs and the long-term tragedy of human survival. Huffman succeeds in establishing the Sultana's rightful place in Civil War historiography. Recommended for all Civil War and U.S. maritime collections and for all large libraries. (Bibliography, acknowledgments, and index not seen.)-John Carver Edwards, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
