"The Prisoner of War Disaster Overshadowed by..." Topic

… Lincoln's Death.

"Abraham Lincoln's near-apotheosis from man to national myth began soon after his April 15, 1865 death at the hands of a disgruntled actor. Just a day later, on Easter Sunday, preachers and priests compared his death to Jesus' in pulpits around the nation. Millions of Americans paid homage to him in the ensuing weeks as his body was carried nearly 1,700 miles from Washington D.C. to its final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. Reporters for the nation's largest newspapers breathlessly covered the funeral train procession. Right around the time Lincoln's body was heading to Buffalo, NY, a colossal disaster erupted between podunk Arkansas and Tennessee.

Editors barely noticed.

In the early morning of April 27, 1865, as the steamboat Sultana glided seven miles north of Memphis, passengers suddenly awoke to chaos: fire seemingly everywhere, a flash flood of erupted boilers' super-heated water and steam, fire bricks and nails blown down decks and turned into deadly shrapnel. Survivor J. Walter Elliott recounted the ensuing scene as a "holocaust" marked by women, children and veterans alike rushing from the rapidly expanding inferno "wringing their hands, tossing their arms wildly in the air, with cries most heart-rending, they rush pell-mell over the guard into the dark, cold waters…" In the chaos, he saw a sitting old man, "bruised, cut, scalded in various places, both ankles broken and bones protruding. With his suspenders he had improvised tourniquets for both legs," Elliott recalled. The man asked for help, but Elliott—like so many other Americans of the era—never learned to swim. And a hypothermia-inducing Mississippi River isn't the best place to start…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Yes, a bigger disaster in terms of lives lost than the Titanic. Voyage started from Vicksburg, only about 45 miles west of where I live.

Jim

Poor guys.
Survive Andersonville and then finished this way…

Amicalement
Armand