[ §§ ] KAIAMA GLOVER: 3:00 a.m., April 27, 1865.
As the steamboat Bostonia II heads down the Mississippi River toward Memphis, its crew sees a mysterious fire in the distance.
[ women and children screaming ] Then, in the water below, bodies... dead or barely alive, clinging to bits of timber.
MAN: There seemed to be acres of struggling humanity on the waters.
From all around me rose shrieks, cries, prayers, and groans.
The steamboat Sultana is on fire.
It's a vision of hell: some 2,000 men, women, and children are trapped in an inferno.
Many are emaciated prisoners on their way home after the Civil War.
Some 1,800 souls would perish that night.
It was one of the worst disasters in U.S. maritime history.
And no one knows what caused it.
Was it an act of sabotage by a former Confederate agent, the largest terrorist act on U.S. soil prior to 9/11?
This was an organized effort by the Confederate spies.
WES COWAN: Pressure's starting to climb.
I'm going to step back from here.
Was it the result of a corrupt Union officer who turned a blind eye to a shoddy boiler repair?
"Question: Did you consider the boiler safe?
Answer: I did not."
And could the chain of evidence reach all the way to the White House?
It turns out this guy is extremely well connected to Abraham Lincoln.
Tonight on History Detectives Special Investigations... Whoa!
the sinking of the steamboat  Sultana.
[ §§ ] History Detectives pec[ §§ ] Spec Gentlemen, we have a very exciting case here, a 150-year-old mystery: who or what sunk the steamship Sultana in 1865?
Picture this: it's night, April 27, 1865.
The Sultana is steaming up the Mississippi River.
Suddenly... a fire breaks out, and it's a raging inferno.
Four decks just -- poof!
1,800 people go into the water, and all these people die.
This is more than died on the Titanic.
I had literally never heard about this.
ZUBERI: Yeah.
GLOVER: On April 24th, the Sultana left Vicksburg, Mississippi, for a journey north to Cairo, Illinois.
Take a look at this.
This is the last known photograph of the Sultana.
This was taken at Helena, Arkansas.
And just look at all the guys that are crowded onto every deck of this steamboat.
This boat is completely packed.
Yeah.
Despite three government investigations and a variety of theories for what might've gone wrong, no one was ultimately held responsible for the deaths.
Was it an accident, was it sabotage?
The fact is, to this day, no one knows what happened.
Where do we start?
Well, you know, look, there's one group that has really kept the memory of the Sultana disaster alive, and that's the Sultana Survivors' Association.
They're meeting next week in Memphis.
I want to visit the site of the wreck to see if I can find some forensic evidence that will help us determine what caused the fire.
Good deal.
So, guys, I'm actually going to head into the archive.
Maybe the answers to some of the questions we're asking are already here in the documents we have, hiding in plain sight.
We've got a plan.
Let's get busy.
Right, let's go.
Let's make it happen.
[ §§ ] COWAN: Although the history books have paid their relatives little attention... Hello, hello, hello.
descendants of the survivors of the Sultana disaster have kept the memory alive... Nice to meet you.
generation after generation.
We've found that less than 2% of all the people we've ever mentioned it to have even heard of it.
Of course, we want to hear your personal stories from your ancestors, you know, because there may be things that haven't been talked about that we need to learn.
ZUBERI: We're hoping this group can help us piece together what happened that night.
Well, this is my great-great-grandfather, Adam Schneider, who died on the Sultana.
My great-grandfather was John Daniel Riddle.
I've got a photograph of Ann Annis, who was one of the few female survivors.
COWAN: Ann had traveled from Wisconsin to Vicksburg with her 7-year-old daughter to bring her ailing husband home from the war.
Ann's story is striking, but it's not until I meet Dorothy Gouzoules that I find what may be a lead.
Well, my great-great-uncle was Chester Berry.
He was a survivor on the Sultana, and years later he collected all the stories from other survivors he could locate, and he printed this book.
Loss of the Sultana  by Reverend C.D.
Berry.
Printed in 1892.
And there's his picture.
Chester Berry had survived the horrors of the Andersonville prison camp in Georgia, where thousands died of starvation and disease.
When he got out of there, he went on the Sultana.
Poor Uncle Chester thinks he's going home, and the ship blew up.
And so many people were killed.
The eyewitness accounts of Chester Berry and his fellow survivors contain tantalizing clues about the cause of the disaster.
MAN: It was about 2:00 on the morning of April 27th, 1865.
Every foot of the deck was covered with sleeping soldiers.
MAN: I was awakened by a terrible crash and nearly smothered with hot steam.
MAN: From all around me rose shrieks, cries, prayers, and groans.
MAN: A piece of iron glanced my head.
The Berry book makes clear that there had been some sort of explosion.
Its stories of flying shrapnel and escaping steam have given rise to a number of theories in the survivor group.
Everything I've read says the boiler exploded.
The boiler exploded, but why did it explode?
It was in a weakened condition even before it got to Vicksburg.
ZUBERI: According to some accounts, the explosion punctured the wooden deck and a rain of hot coals from the furnace quickly set it ablaze.
MAN: I saw a great hole torn through the hurricane deck and fire coming through.
The gaping hole in the deck... Is right here, right.
Gene Salecker and Jerry Potter are amateur historians who have studied the survivor accounts and written books about the disaster.
And then what happens is, with the boilers gone, there's nothing supporting these smokestacks, and the smokestacks are going to start to fall.
One falls forward, one falls back.
And the one that fell backwards falls right into the hole where the boiler has blown up.
The hail of flying shrapnel which followed sparked a second theory among survivors.
Some people believe that the explosion was due to a bomb planted by a Confederate spy.
MAN: I believe some ally of Jeff Davis put a torpedo in the coal with the intent to destroy the boat and its heroes on their way home.
COWAN: The Sultana had arrived safely in Memphis on the evening of April 26th, then crossed the river to a coal barge near Hopefield, Arkansas, a hotbed of guerrilla activity during the war.
From midnight to around 1:00 a.m. on the 27th, the Sultana crew loads 1,000 bushels of coal.
Chester Berry and other survivors believed this was a perfect opportunity for sabotage.
Anybody ever heard of a bomb or sabotage?
At the beginning, yes, they suspected sabotage.
Okay.
But for the men and women onboard that night, there was no time to figure out what had happened.
As the fire tears through the wooden boat, many face horrific choices: leap into the freezing Mississippi or burn to death.
Ann Annis clings to the rudder, now separated from her husband and daughter.
One survivor witnessed the family's final moments.
MAN: I heard a lady crying for help.
I also saw her husband with a little child on his back, struggling in the water for a moment, then sinking.
ECKESS: She was unable to help them at all, and that was the last she saw of them.
Chester Berry, his skull fractured in the explosion, resigns himself to drowning.
And then...
He heard his mother's voice say, "God save my boy."
MAN: I fiercely clutched the board and said, "Mother, by the help of God, your prayer shall be answered."
And I guess the rest is history.
He lived to write the book.
ZUBERI: You know, I like a good story, and those people have some great stories.
But they don't seem to have all the facts down.
Well, you know, look, there were three separate commissions designed to investigate the Sultana disaster.
Kaiama's been digging online.
She's emailed me that the government investigation files are at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
I'm going to head there.
Okay, cool.
I'm interested in the wreckage itself, any physical evidence about the cause of the explosion, so I'm going to go see what I can find out about the actual boat.
This thing's in the middle of the Mississippi River.
Are you scuba certified?
No, no, no.
I'm going to get out there on the water, but I'm not going to get in the water.
All right, man, I'll see you later.
All right, see you later.
[ §§ ] The National Archives in Washington, D.C., houses the War Department's records of the Civil War.
I'm searching the files from the Washburn Commission.
That's one of the three commissions that the federal government used to investigate the Sultana  disaster.
The Sultana was one of many privately owned steamboats contracted by the War Department to carry former prisoners of war home.
So the government needed to figure out what had gone wrong.
It appears that the investigators took testimony as early as the morning of April 27th, even as survivors were still being rescued.
One account leaps out.
Right here is the testimony of a guy named R.G.
Taylor.
Now, Taylor was a mechanic or a repairman in Vicksburg.
According to his testimony, while docked at Vicksburg and before it loaded the passengers, the Sultana's crew had discovered a crack in one of the boilers.
Unrepaired, it would've prevented the Sultana from steaming upriver.
The chief engineer urged Taylor to put a patch on the crack.
And Taylor says, "Well, wait a minute, this is going to take maybe two, three days."
And the chief engineer says, "Well, we don't have that much time.
You've got to get this done!"
Taylor was eventually persuaded to make a temporary repair.
Now, when you read the testimony, the commissioners say to Taylor, "Question: Did you consider the boiler safe after the job was completed?
Answer: I did not.
Question: Did you say to the chief engineer that it was not safe?
Answer: I did not.
He should have known as well as I."
So already we have a clue here as to what may have caused the explosion on the Sultana.
ZUBERI: There may be clues in the wreck itself, but where exactly does the Sultana lie?
We tracked down a specialist in maritime archaeology.
Stephen James has successfully located and recovered other shipwrecks.
We sent him an 1874 map of where the Sultana is believed to have gone down.
He showed us how the Mississippi River has changed its course over the 150 years since the disaster, leaving the wreck somewhere beneath this soybean field.
So no scuba gear necessary.
What is this thingamajig?
This thingamajig is what's called a magnetometer.
As an underwater archaeologist, I use it all over the ocean, lakes, and rivers, but this is a terrestrial model.
Still, it's the main tool for finding shipwrecks.
So, what does it do?
Well, it detects metal.
And on shipwrecks like the Sultana, we'll have the boilers, we'll have the ship's fastenings, the ship's wheels, the shafts, we'll have the engines.
Anything that's metal, this will pick up.
So you actually have to like mow this entire area with this.
Back and forth, back and forth.
And it'll take us hours to do all this.
And then we'll take it back.
Chet will take it back, and we'll analyze the data, we'll manipulate it, and what we'll produce is a magnetic contour map that shows us hot spots where these shipwreck components are buried.
All right, so can we get busy with this?
Let's go to work.
[ §§ ] COWAN: Although the patched boiler had been a focus of the Washburn investigation, no conclusion was reached.
It's a little frustrating, but as I search the files, I stumble onto something.
Survivors had told investigators that the steamship wasn't just packed, it appeared to have been dangerously overloaded.
Remember David from the descendants group?
Well, here's the testimony of his great-great-grandmother, Ann Annis.
"Great fear was felt by everybody on account of the large number of passengers and the boat being top-heavy."
On April 24th, trainload after trainload of Union veterans and former prisoners of war arrive at the Vicksburg wharf and board the Sultana.
MAN: We were driven on like so many hogs until every foot of standing room was occupied.
In fact, there were so many prisoners piled on top of the hurricane deck -- that's the uppermost deck of this layer cake steamboat -- that the deck roof started sagging, and stanchions -- big posts -- had to be put under the deck to keep the roof from collapsing.
In the end, nobody knows for sure how many people were actually put onto the Sultana, but estimates range as high as 2,400 passengers.
Now, here's the interesting thing.
The certificate of use for the Sultana called for a total of 76 cabin passengers and no more than 300 deck passengers.
Now, here's the sad part.
None of this needed to happen.
I discover that while the  Sultana was being overloaded, two other steamboats docked at Vicksburg looking for returning soldiers to carry north: first, the Lady Gay, and later that afternoon, the Pauline Carroll.
The Army official who oversaw the contracting of private steamboats to transport the soldiers was the chief quartermaster, Reuben Hatch.
But Hatch allowed the other two steamboats to depart the wharf empty.
Instead of dividing all of these soldiers up between the various steamboats, Hatch allowed thousands to be loaded onto the Sultana.
You know, there is a whistleblower in all of this, a guy named William Kerns.
He's the assistant quartermaster, so he's working for Reuben Hatch.
And he comes into the office and says to Hatch as the Sultana's being loaded, "Too many guys are going on here."
Later, Hatch himself admits hearing Kerns imploring him to put 6- to 800 prisoners on the Pauline Carroll, but he ignored him.
The question is, why?
We don't know what caused the explosion, but one thing is certain: the overcrowding is the reason so many people lost their lives.
- Hello?
- COWAN: Hey, Kaiama.
Wes, you know, I was just looking through this stuff.
This is fascinating.
Hey, great, listen, we need to find out about a guy named Reuben Hatch.
He was the quartermaster in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and he was the guy who oversaw all the loading of the troops onto the Sultana, okay?
- Okay, got it.
- Cool.
Bye.
ZUBERI: Archaeologist Chet Walker is taking to the sky to hunt for the buried steamship.
Okay, so what do we got here?
Okay, this is a small UAV, and we're going to use this to make an air photo of this field as well as a 3D model of the ground surface.
Okay, but what good is that going to do me if most of the boat is buried?
We'll be able to take the data from the magnetometer and drape it onto this data.
The magnetometer will locate items beneath the earth.
The aerial photograph will show their position in relation to each other.
So we need this in order to be able to match that -- - We'll combine the two.
- Okay.
Cool, cool.
So how do we get this out there?
So I'm going to hand it to you, and you're going to shake it back and forth three times.
- Okay.
So we ready to do this?
- Yep.
- Three times?
- Back and forth three times.
- One, two, three.
- A little quicker than that.
One, two, three.
[ motor whirs ] Whoa!
- That baby gets up pretty high.
- Sure does.
And so what'll it do?
It'll just keep on going and taking pictures and things?
Exactly.
It's in a preprogrammed flight, and it'll just go back and forth over the whole site, taking a bunch of photos.
We'll stitch all those photos together and make one big photo.
[ shutter clicking ] While we wait for the UAV results, Steve says the magnetometer may have located a large-sized piece of the ship.
Okay, our magnetic contour map tells us that there is a hot spot, a large magnetic anomaly, right in this area.
There's something large buried under the bean field here.
There are clues on the surface, too.
Like right here, we've got artifacts, so we're in the right location.
Okay, all right.
And what is that?
That is a -- it's a large nail.
We call that a hull spike.
It probably fastened outer hull planking to the ribs of the steamboat.
That's a very characteristic steamboat fastener.
And this thing here?
Uh, looks like wrought iron, probably machinery related, most likely from the Sultana.
Steve thinks plowing the field for farming has likely turned up the metal fragments.
So I'm holding pieces of the Sultana in my hand?
Yeah, it looks that way.
But, you know, that's not what's -- that didn't give us our signal.
There's something large and buried under here, but these are artifacts from the vessel.
When we finish our survey, we'll find other hot spots hopefully.
COWAN: So why would Chief Quartermaster Hatch overload the Sultana and let those other steamboats leave empty?
His past certainly makes me suspicious.
So what have you found out about Reuben Hatch?
He is a very interesting character.
At the start of the war, he's working as a quartermaster in Cairo, Illinois.
I found this article in the Chicago Tribune.
It's dated December 1861.
This is his first big job, and he's already getting into quite a bit of trouble.
What kind of trouble are we talking about?
Well, this is the port that supplies the majority of the lumber to General Grant's armies for his troops, right?
Now, Hatch as quartermaster is working with various lumber companies, buying lumber at a certain price but getting bogus receipts for a higher price and pocketing the difference.
So he's taking a kickback from the lumber company.
He is taking a kickback, and he's keeping two separate sets of books, one private and one public.
So the Secretary of War calls for an investigation.
Hatch gets wind of this and realizes he's about to be arrested, so what does he do?
Dumps the private ledgers into the Mississippi River.
Unfortunately for Hatch, the documents wash up on shore and end up getting seized as part of the investigation.
So they got the goods on him.
Okay, so he's caught red-handed now.
So the Army's set to court-martial him.
But here's the crazy thing: even though there's overwhelming evidence against him, the investigation stalls.
Really?
And Hatch is back on the job within the year.
And he keeps getting into trouble -- fraud, government graft -- but never gets disciplined.
On the contrary, he's promoted.
I don't understand it.
How does this guy, this obvious criminal, get appointed quartermaster in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he's in charge of transporting all these troops north?
GLOVER: Putting Hatch in charge of the purse strings at Vicksburg was a job rife with the opportunity for graft and corruption.
Steamboat operators were paid by the head: $5 for every enlisted man and $10 per officer.
And Reuben Hatch's chief clerk, George Denton, even testified that a runner from one of the steamboats had come into the quartermaster's office and said, "Are there any prisoners to go?
If it takes money, we've got as much as anybody."
Had Hatch taken a bribe?
His double dealing in the earlier case certainly makes me wonder.
Here's the biggest mystery.
February 1865, so we're talking two months before the Sultana disaster, two months before he's going to have this job in Vicksburg, right, he's brought before the Army Competency Review Board, and listen to what they have to say about him in their report.
"Of the 60 officers who have appeared before this board, not more than one or two can compare with Captain Hatch in degree of deficiency."
Somebody is protecting Reuben Hatch.
The question is, who?
[ §§ ] COWAN: While Kaiama investigates Hatch, my next stop is in Louisville, Kentucky, which is home to a steamboat of the kind that once operated on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
I want to talk to some of the crew and figure out if that patched boiler might have caused the explosion.
Captain, Wes Cowan.
Mark Doty.
First up is Captain Mark Doty.
He says that in April 1865, the Mississippi was in near flood conditions.
That would've made things especially challenging for the Sultana's captain.
They would've had to fire the boilers a little bit hotter to keep up with the steam that it's calling for fighting against the 8-mile-an-hour current.
So they're working the engines really hard, and there may be 2,000, as many as 3,000 passengers on this 260-foot steamboat that had a capacity of 360 passengers.
What happens?
It depends on where the weight was.
If they were up higher on the top decks, she'd get very top-heavy and unstable.
Mark says a top-heavy Sultana would've careened or rolled from side to side as she fought the current, further straining the engines.
Yeah, well, there were -- I can tell you, there were hundreds of men up on the top deck.
- Right.
- All right, very good.
- Thanks a lot.
- Nice meeting you.
Appreciate it.
Nice meeting you.
Today, the Belle of Louisville's boilers are fired by diesel fuel, not coal.
But some things haven't changed.
It's hot in here!
Wes Cowan.
Hi, Wes.
Jim McCoy, chief engineer.
How are you?
Hey, Jim.
Great.
We're in the belly of the beast here, right?
This is the Belle's  engine room.
Standing here, it looks pretty safe, but in the 1860s, this would've been a dangerous place to be.
It was very dangerous.
Things moving all the time, uninsulated piping, uninsulated boiler.
And in the 1800s, he says the boiler was by far the most hazardous piece of the engine.
Unlike today, there were a lot of boiler explosions from a variety of causes.
If you had a crack in the boiler and you had it repaired, was that pretty common?
Was a repaired crack safe?
If it was properly done.
A lot of times they would drill a hole at either end of the crack to stop the crack from moving, and then braze or peen in a material to close whatever crack or fracture they had.
Jim says without more hard evidence, it's impossible to prove the boiler caused the explosion.
But he agrees the special conditions that night could have proved fatal.
If your boat has an awful lot more people on it than it's designed for or certified for and it's generally top-heavy, then that could be also a big -- a big factor.
ZUBERI: Does the wreck itself contain the evidence we're missing?
Steve and Chet's team have combined the data from the survey onto a high-resolution image and brought it to the soybean field.
So these are the results of your surveys?
Well, this magnetic contour map, we put all the data together on top of the aerial, and it shows that we've got some major hits in the area.
Steve's certain we have found the wreck of the steamship, the hull, and possibly remains of the boilers.
One of our best hits, probably where the hull remains are, are over by this tree line here.
You can see a hit here, and that corresponds - to right over here.
- Oh, okay.
Can your results tell us the cause of the explosion?
Short answer is no.
That would take a major excavation, especially since the wreck is buried under sediment and then underwater.
Very expensive and very time consuming.
So this is important, because it does tell us where the Sultana is, but also you're telling me there's no quick answer here.
That's correct.
[ §§ ] - Hey, Wes.
Tukufu here.
- How's it going?
Look, the survey is done, and we found where the Sultana is, but there is no evidence about the cause of the explosion.
COWAN: Listen, I've got a hunch that the overcrowding may have played a bigger role than we thought.
All right, we're going to have to go down a different road.
The boat was top-heavy.
That might've stressed the boiler to the bursting point.
But we just don't have enough hard evidence.
Bottom line: I need a new lead.
All right, talk to you soon.
ZUBERI: Luckily, we do have another theory to dig into.
Some of the survivors' descendants thought that Confederate sabotage had caused the disaster.
I'm at the Memphis Public Library to see what the local newspapers were saying at that time.
Okay, listen to this headline: "Horrible Disaster on the River: Explosion and Burning of the Steamer Sultana.
Over a Thousand Lives Lost."
This is from the Memphis Daily Bulletin, and this is what they had to say two days after the explosion.
"Was it a fiendish atrocity?
A well informed machinist who was on board the Sultana says there were three distinct explosions.
And there is a horrible suspicion that the Sultana was intentionally blown up."
And furthermore, listen to this: "The probability of the explosion having been caused by the bursting of a shell in the furnace has many believers among experienced river men."
The big question is if there was a bomb, who put it there?
I want to see if there's anything more on Confederate sabotage in government files.
Somewhere in here is the 70-volume official record of the Civil War.
Okay, this is what we were looking for.
Now, The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.
So these are official documents, and this is from a report delivered on April 25, 1865, right before the explosion on the Sultana, and listen to what he has to say.
"A number of men employed by the rebel authorities to destroy government property and steamboats."
According to Union Army intelligence, an organized band of Confederate spies known as boat burners destroyed over 60 steamboats during the war, including the City of Madison at Vicksburg and the Champion at Memphis.
[ §§ ] COWAN: The official record says nothing about the Sultana being sabotaged, but we may have a lead.
While Tukufu was in the archive, I've located a relative of one of the boat burners.
Joseph Thatcher is the great-great-grandson of Thomas Courtenay.
I thought I knew a lot about the Civil War, but I've never heard of your great-great-grandfather, Thomas Courtenay.
Tell me about him.
He's wearing that Confederate overcoat there.
He came to this country in 1842 as a 20-year-old to make his fortune.
And he ended up in St. Louis as an agent selling marine and fire insurance for all the steamboats on the river.
So he knew a little about steamboats.
Oh, yes, indeed.
He was an idealist who really hated what the Lincoln government was doing at the beginning of the Civil War.
He joined General Sterling Price then in 1863.
Price was head of the Confederate troops and armies in the west, and he had a group of boat burners that were trying to set fire to steamboats.
You know, these steamboats, they would be ripe for sabotage.
- All wood.
- All wood.
Just like a floating matchbox, you know?
Right, right.
And Courtenay knew all about the hazards of boiler explosions on steamboats.
So he came up with this, the coal torpedo.
I've never, ever seen one of these.
That's right, there are only four we know of still in existence.
So it looks like it's got some remnants of pitch on here.
They used pieces of coal as patterns, cast hollow iron shells just like an artillery shell, would fill them with gunpowder.
This is the plug where they put the powder in.
Coat the outside with pitch and bits of coal and then hide them in the coal piles for Union ships.
And what happens then when it blows up?
The boiler ruptures, shrapnel flies around, and burning coal is scattered out of the fire box into the fire room.
This is such an ingenious, simple device, but I've never heard about it.
That's because most of the records were burned at the end of the war by the Confederate government when they fled Richmond.
I ask Joe if he knew about his great-great-grandfather's activities after he joined up with the rebels.
Had he been directly involved in boat burning?
Thomas Courtenay saved copies -- his own copies -- of correspondence.
First one is a letter that he wrote in December 1863.
So he's writing to His Excellency Jefferson Davis, "I propose to organize a secret service corps at once to operate on the Mississippi River and tributaries."
And by March 1864, Courtenay's authorized to go into action.
"Mr. Thomas E. Courtenay is hereby authorized to supply a band of men for secret service against the enemy."
So this is the letter from the Confederate Secretary of War authorizing your great-great-grandfather to use coal bombs to blow up steamboats on the Mississippi River.
That's right.
Well, that leads me to the next question, and I've got to ask it.
Did your great-great-grandfather use one of these coal bombs to blow up the Sultana?
As far as we know, he had nothing to do with it at all.
He was in England at this time.
The war was pretty much over.
We've gone through all of his correspondence that survives; there's no mention of the Sultana at any time, and he certainly would not have approved of this kind of an attack on prisoners being returned after the war.
However, it's possible that some rogue agent might have done it.
[ §§ ] [ phone rings ] ZUBERI: Hey, how you doing?
GLOVER: Hey, Tukufu.
So Wes and I have been digging into the sabotage angle.
Really?
I know Wes is investigating the coal torpedoes.
What did you find?
Well, by April 1865, the Union Army had a list of 19 known Confederate saboteurs.
- Boat burners?
- Yeah, all of them.
But one guy, Robert Louden, was the worst.
Do you think he had anything to do with the explosion onboard the Sultana?
I'm not sure, but I think I found someone who is.
Her name is D.H. Rule, and she's waiting to meet you.
Excellent.
I'm on my way.
ZUBERI: It's a juicy lead.
In 1864, Robert Louden was arrested for burning the steamboat  Ruth and killing 26 passengers.
A military tribunal sentenced Louden to be hanged.
But he escaped from prison and was still at large in April 1865.
The author I'm about to meet says that Louden was a man possessed by a hatred of former Union officials.
His own family had been harassed and imprisoned and exiled in their attempt to get them to reveal his location.
His wife had been put in prison, his father, they believed, had been murdered by the Union forces.
All right, so we know that he had a reason to do it, but could he have?
He had gone onto steamers multiple times with even better security than Sultana could ever claim to have and destroyed them.
This is from April 25th of 1865.
It is from the St. Louis provost marshal's office.
They put Robert Louden in New Orleans three days before Sultana  was destroyed.
And Allan Pinkerton's reports identify him as moving north.
That's New Orleans heading north, but that doesn't specifically put him at the site of the crime.
The best witness to whether he was in Memphis is Robert Louden himself.
In the spring of 2000, she read about a conversation in a St. Louis bar in 1867 between a former Union officer, William Streeter, and Robert Louden.
Although Louden had been drinking, it's a story she's inclined to believe.
There was an article by William Streeter in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
He said, "I asked him in an offhand way what he knew about the Sultana explosion.
Then he told me the story of the torpedo in the coal.
He carried it aboard the steamer and deposited it in the coal pile for the express purpose of causing her destruction."
This was the big moment for me.
I hadn't been researching Sultana.
I was researching Robert Louden and the prisons in St. Louis.
I knew who Streeter was, I knew who Louden was, and I knew that Streeter was a credible source.
This is May 6, 1888.
That's 23 years after the act and almost 20 years after the confession that's here.
Well, we only know of this article in 1888 with Streeter's statements in it.
There may have been others before.
But the guy is drunk!
Drunk or not, it's not something he'd have said just in an offhand manner.
From the moment Louden made that confession, his life was in danger in St. Louis.
And the fact that Louden left the city so very abruptly in 1867 says quite a bit.
So you're convinced that Louden blew up the Sultana?
There will always be an element of doubt, but yes, I believe he was capable of doing it, and I do believe he did it.
You know, look, a drunken confession not reported until 20 years after the fact?
You've got to admit it's possible.
It's possible, sure, but that doesn't mean it happened.
It's the only theory we have.
I don't know.
I haven't completely let go of the boiler theory.
You know, maybe the office can hook us up with a mechanical boiler guy.
They're called mechanical engineers, man.
[ §§ ] COWAN: I sent our research to Larry Lee, a former chair of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Heritage Committee.
You must be Larry.
And you must be Wes.
Good to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
So you got the case file, right?
Did indeed.
So what about that patch on the boiler?
I mean, could that have caused the explosion?
The patch is interesting, but it's not really conclusive.
Steamboat boilers were patched all the time.
There were right ways and wrong ways, and this wasn't a very good one, but doesn't necessarily tell us anything by itself.
And while Larry thinks it could have been a coal torpedo, he's convinced such an explosion would have sunk the ship almost immediately.
The coal torpedo's explosion would've been down as well as out, and likely put a hole through the boat.
Okay, so we also know that the Sultana after the explosion and fire drifted seven miles down the Mississippi River.
So there was no hole in the bottom of the hull.
Now, what was left, it burned to the water line, but that lower portion of the hull finally ran aground essentially intact.
So what you're saying is no coal torpedo.
It is unlikely.
Although others dispute whether a bomb would've punctured the hull, Larry believes the facts point in another direction.
His theory involves concerns the captain and engineer on the Belle of Louisville had shared.
One thing you forgot: the boat was very overcrowded.
And this mass of people were out on the sides and up top.
They were going to make the boat very easy to rock.
As they navigated up the river, the boat was going to rock and roll.
The boilers, mounted on the boat, did the same thing.
They're going up and down.
And when they get up with that water against it, the metal can get red hot very quickly.
Let me show you.
I've got an experiment I rigged up.
It's simple, but I think it'll show you what can happen with this.
All right, great.
Let's go take a look.
Let's go do it.
[ §§ ] Okay, Wes, there's our fire box.
That's the steamboat fire box.
That's the steamboat's fire box.
Here's a little boiler I made out of nothing but a couple of soda cans riveted together.
You've got a little pressure gauge on it.
Got a gauge so we can see what's going on.
Now, what's this silver part here?
The silver part is the area that will be right over the fire.
So that's the hottest part of the boiler.
That's correct.
That's correct.
Okay, great.
Then we just put 'er down here.
[ §§ ] Okay, pressure's starting to climb.
Climbing more.
You know what, I'm going to step back from here.
Mm-hmm.
And while it's under pressure, now when the boat starts rocking to one side, the water is off the fire box.
It rolls back... [ loud pop ] Imagine that about 10,000 times greater.
Wow.
That's what happened on the Sultana.
When the boat rolls back the other way, here comes this slug of water back onto this red-hot metal, which is weaker.
You get this blast of superheated steam, and kaboom!
When it ruptured, it would've acted kind of like a rocket - and propelled things.
- Up.
And we know that some pieces actually even went up through the pilot house.
A flooded Mississippi had put a patched boiler under terrible pressure, but Larry suspects it was the rolling of the top-heavy steamboat that dealt the Sultana its death blow.
So from your perspective, the overcrowding of the Sultana was likely a major contributing factor in the accident.
Oh, indeed it was.
Yeah, really, it blew a hole right in the side of our little fake boiler.
So the overcrowding of the boat could've actually been the cause of the explosion.
Which brings us back to the Vicksburg wharf and the chief quartermaster, Reuben Hatch.
I mean, if there's one person who's probably the most culpable in this situation, it's got to be Reuben Hatch.
COWAN: What I don't understand is how Hatch was placed in such a position of responsibility, loading the Sultana, after being accused of taking kickbacks earlier in his career.
- Hey, how are you?
- I'm okay.
What are you finding out about our buddy Reuben Hatch?
Well, it turns out that this guy, Ozias Hatch, Reuben Hatch's brother, is extremely well connected.
Not only is he the Illinois Secretary of State, he's also a very close and personal friend and advisor to Abraham Lincoln.
Ah, okay.
It turns out that Hatch raised a lot of money for Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign.
So what you're saying is that Lincoln owes him.
Absolutely.
Now, you remember that court-martial, the one that didn't happen, back in 1861?
You mean the one where Hatch threw his phony ledger books into the Ohio River, right?
Exactly.
It turns out that the reason this never went anywhere was because Ozias Hatch actually intervened on behalf of his brother with the president.
I found a letter from Ozias Hatch to Abraham Lincoln.
I actually put it there for you.
It's this letter you have right here.
"To His Excellency Abraham Lincoln... the charges made are frivolous and without the shadow of foundation in fact."
Which is ridiculous, because we know that the evidence against Hatch is overwhelming.
It's signed by two other incredibly influential Illinois politicians, one of them being Jesse DuBois, the state auditor of Illinois, and the other is the governor, Richard Yates.
So Lincoln receives this letter, then forwards that letter to this man, Major General Henry Halleck.
Henry Halleck was the man in charge of the court-martial, and he wanted to pursue the investigation against Reuben Hatch, but Lincoln adds his own personal endorsement to it.
And I was able to find that in the archives as well.
"I also personally know Captain R.B.
Hatch and never before heard anything against his character."
So, I mean, Lincoln is saying himself, "Look, I know Hatch.
He's a good guy.
Exactly.
And as a result, the court-martial was ended.
Doesn't go further.
And Reuben Hatch is back in business.
Back in business until 1863, when the man goes AWOL from the Army for three months.
But what's incredible is that he comes back, and he wants his job back as quartermaster.
Oh, come on.
He goes AWOL and he wants his job back?
- Come on!
- Yeah, he does.
But this time, someone else comes into the picture, and that's Brigadier General Montgomery Meigs.
Montgomery Meigs is the head quartermaster.
He's in charge of all the quartermasters in the U.S. Army, and he says, "No, this ends here.
Reuben Hatch is not going to be a quartermaster again."
Ozias Hatch then goes back to Abraham Lincoln and intervenes on behalf of his brother again, and Abraham Lincoln is more than happy to oblige.
He writes a letter to the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton.
Essentially, Lincoln goes to Meigs' boss and says, "Make it happen."
And that letter I was able to track down as well.
Let's see, "My dear sir, my Illinois Secretary of State, O.M.
Hatch, whom I would like to oblige, wants Captain R.B.
Hatch made a quartermaster in the regular army.
I know not whether it can be done conveniently, but if it can, I would like it.
Yours truly, A.
Lincoln."
The Secretary of War, Stanton, lets Meigs know that Reuben Hatch should get his job back.
And, in effect, Reuben Hatch is reinstated.
And once again, Hatch finds himself in a very good position.
- Wow.
- Yeah.
Now, not only is Reuben Hatch reinstated -- he doesn't just want his job back, he wants to be promoted.
And once again, through his brother, who goes to Abraham Lincoln, that happens.
Lincoln, along with Major General Ulysses Grant, prevail upon Montgomery Meigs to promote Reuben Hatch to lieutenant colonel.
And two weeks before the Sultana set sail, Abraham Lincoln recommended that Reuben Hatch be promoted to full colonel.
Wow, so in the end, you've got these two Army guys on the left who don't want Hatch anywhere near the Army, but then on the right, you have all these politicians telling Lincoln, "You need to get Reuben Hatch back in the Army."
And it goes all the way to the White House.
Great job.
Our trail of evidence has tracked all the way to the White House.
Was Lincoln in some way to blame for the Sultana disaster?
I'm on my way to see a guy named Harold Holzer.
He's a renowned Lincoln scholar, and I'm hoping he can help me with this.
I've sent him the documents which appear to show Lincoln protecting Reuben Hatch.
But first, I want him to answer another question.
Why is it that most Americans have never heard of the Sultana disaster?
Well, it occurred in a cauldron of death.
750,000 people, as we now calculate the casualty number, had died in four years.
Not to sound blasé about it, but what's another 2,000 people?
Just a few more before we close the books on the ugliest chapter in American history.
So, Harold, you've seen all these documents about Reuben Hatch.
How is it that Reuben Hatch, corrupt to the core, is protected all along the way by Abraham Lincoln?
Many modern Americans think Lincoln did nothing but sit in the White House and write brilliant speeches, meet with his cabinet, direct his generals.
In fact, he spent most of his time directing political appointments: firing Democrats, hiring Republicans, and then defending these Republicans, even if they performed poorly, against Democrats who criticized them.
Hey, in 1864 when this last letter is written, when Lincoln says, "If it's not a problem, please get my Secretary of State's brother back on the payroll," at this period, a large segment of the Republican party is saying, "We've got to dump Abraham Lincoln.
He can't run for a second term."
Anybody but Lincoln, ABL.
That's the mantra in 1864.
So how do you prevent that?
You reward people so that when they or their friends become delegates to the national convention, they've got the patronage impetus to renominate the president of the United States.
He used the patronage power to get renominated.
There's no question about it.
He's a political animal, and that's how he got to the White House.
And he's got to take care of his base.
And when the Army began to expand so rapidly after the mobilization of April 1861, that included quartermasters, civilians who went into the Army to supply it, and very often skimmed off the top as we think Reuben may have done.
That is the political culture, and even Honest Abe was part of that culture.
Lincoln had protected Reuben Hatch from court-martial in 1862.
Two years later, he helped him win his job back as quartermaster.
And just two weeks before the Sultana disaster, Lincoln had asked that Reuben Hatch be promoted to full colonel.
It's kind of hard to escape the conclusion that if Lincoln had not protected him, there is a possibility that the greatest maritime disaster in the history of our country might not ever have happened.
Had Lincoln lived, I really think this might've come back to haunt him.
This would've been something he'd have to answer, and it would've been very difficult.
So in a way, he escaped unscathed.
I want to share this with Kaiama and Tukufu.
- Hey, guys.
- Hey.
How you doing, man?
Man, this Sultana thing.
I mean, I think we got the answers.
Sultana, overcrowded.
The overcrowding almost certainly led to the explosion of the boilers.
And you know it was Reuben Hatch, our friend from earlier, he's the guy that was responsible for putting all those men on that boat.
So what do we learn from what Harold Holzer had to say?
Well, you guys are going to be interested in watching this.
It's really kind of sad and sobering.
How could Abraham Lincoln have allowed a dubious hack to have loaded down a ship with faulty boilers, overcrowding, and all of the problems that afflicted this doomed vessel?
He escaped scrutiny because he was deified in death.
He could do no wrong.
I think had he lived, this might've gone to the top, this might've been a subject of inquiry, and it would've been very difficult.
It's an episode that history has completely ignored.
Wow.
I mean, I've got to say, this is a little hard to swallow.
We have this preeminent Lincoln scholar effectively letting us know that this maritime disaster, well, implicates Abraham Lincoln.
Yeah, and that it might've come back to bite him at some point had he lived, had Lincoln lived.
You know, sometimes patronage, political power, money, they mix together, and the result is disaster.
The sad thing is, is that none of this had to happen.
This was not an act of war, this was not an act of sabotage.
All these recently released POWs from Andersonville, they were on their way home.
They'd given the flower of their youth to preserve the Union.
They deserved better.
GLOVER: What the government didn't do for them, the survivors had to do for themselves.
Survivor groups met annually, and that's where Chester Berry took down their stories.
The groups continued meeting until the last survivor died in 1937.
MAN: Would to God that I could forever blot from my memory and sight the events of that terrible disaster.
But they cling to me like a horrible nightmare, even visiting me in my dreams.
[ §§ ] Well, folks, we thought it would be appropriate to come on out here with you to where the resting place of the Sultana is.
This is the former bank of the Mississippi River right here.
And all these sort of black spots are where the magnetometer survey came up with a big hit.
Right here, this area here, is where we think the main part of the wreck still lies.
Big parts of it, we think, are right in this area.
It's important to remember, this is the final resting place for hundreds of Union POWs who thought they were going home, and that some of them are your ancestors.
This investigation meant a lot to us.
I mean, it raises a lot of important questions about American history.
COWAN: Abraham Lincoln had worked the levers of patronage, fighting to stay in power.
And that power had helped save the Union.
Turning a blind eye to Hatch had come with terrible and unforeseen results.
Nevertheless, it's the eloquent words spoken by the 16th president at Gettysburg that seem a fitting memorial to the soldiers who died on the Sultana.
So I thought it would be really appropriate to share with you some words that were read a long time ago over some other sacred ground.
"We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as final resting place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live.
But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract."
So we offer this story to you.
- MAN: Thank you very much.
- WOMAN: Thank you.
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