by Alan Huffman
During his captivity, while corresponding with her about books, Grigsby had found Belle engaging. In his memoir he wrote, “is it any wonder that my correspondence with this young lady began to seem to me romantic and that I began to entertain for her feelings stronger than gratitude?” Grigsby had often volunteered to cook for other prisoners in the stockade yard, and he slowly enlarged a crack in the fence, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl (how he did this without crossing the deadline he does not say). Upon his return he found not only that he had been watching the wrong house but that the object of his affections had been, at the time, perhaps fourteen years old.
In 1884, Amanda Gardner was sixty-seven and Belle was thirty-three. Grigsby found the elder Gardner much as he remembered her: A woman of culture and refinement, and an elegant conversationalist who still believed the South had been right to secede. She told him she had received numerous letters and presents from former prisoners after the war, and he copied some of the notes, which he later quoted in his book. He also wrote to his own congressional delegation later, seeking, without success, a federal grant to provide her with some financial relief. During his days of watching what he thought was Gardner’s house, Grigsby had developed an elaborate image of Belle, and under the circumstances their meeting was a bit awkward. Belle, he wrote, was gracious but reserved. Grigsby did not say whether Gardner suffered any repercussions for her support of the prisoners, but tellingly, there is no mention of her in the exhaustive, highly romanticized local history, Memories of Old Cahaba, published in 1908, even though her family was prominent and she lost a son in the war. Soon after Grigsby’s visit, Gardner moved from Selma to New York City, where she lived out her life.
The rest of the town slowly faded away. A year after the war ended, the county seat was moved from Cahaba to Selma, and with it went many residents and even several buildings that were dismantled or moved. During Reconstruction, the abandoned courthouse became a meeting place for freedmen, and a community of seventy former slave families took root. By 1900, even that community had largely disappeared, and most of the remaining buildings had fallen in, burned, or been torn down for their bricks. Gardner’s house was torn down, leaving only a mossy crape myrtle that had stood in her front yard.
TOLBERT AND MADDOX DID NOT respond to Chester Berry’s request for their recollections for his book, though the appendix includes their names (both misspelled) in small type on the list of passengers. Berry, who did more than anyone to keep the stories alive, decried the public’s passing interest in the disaster, and himself ended up being buried in an unmarked grave. The lack of interest was galling to many survivors, not only because they remembered what had happened but because for them the disaster was continuing to unfold. Among those who built entire identities around the Sultana saga, a great many continued to suffer from its physical and psychological effects.
George Safford, who crossed paths with J. Walter Elliott in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, slowly went crazy over the next forty years. After surviving the sinking of the boat, Safford had peered into more than a hundred coffins at the Memphis waterfront while looking for his father. He had never recovered from either his manifold illnesses or the horrors of what he saw that day. For him the challenges continued to mount. In February 1885, as he was leaving a hotel in Chicago, Safford slipped on ice and dislocated his shoulder, which seems to have hastened his physical decline. In March 1899, when he was working as a railroad conductor, he wrote the pension board to say that he had been rendered temporarily insane for about three months, during which he had to be confined at home. He had tried taking treatments at various spas, but to no avail, and had been briefly jailed for an unrecorded transgression. He later entered the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C. Though he was soon discharged into his wife’s care, he noted ruefully that after having enlisted in the army at eighteen, spent four months as a prisoner of war, and survived the Sultana disaster, he was penniless and mentally ill. In May 1899, a surgeon for the pension office concluded that Safford, who was then fifty-four years old, suffered from “acute, real atrophy of the brain showing dementia with homicidal tendencies. We think there is no recovery.” He died at the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Marion, Indiana, in 1902, after which his torment-ridden pension file was stamped “DROPPED” and “DEAD.”
Untold numbers of survivors suffered similar fates. Some committed suicide. Others were destroyed by depression, fits of rage, and alcoholism. Many were unable to work again. The more fortunate struggled on as best they could, even as the diseases and injuries they suffered during the war took a cumulative toll. George Young moved to Colorado, where the air was better for the asthma and bronchitis that resulted from breathing steam and smoke during the disaster, though he noted in Berry’s book that “strive as I may, I cannot repress an involuntary fright on hearing in the stillness of the night any unusual noise.” Anna Annis, whose husband and daughter died in the disaster, applied for a widow’s pension but was rejected repeatedly before finally being allotted $17 per month. She wore long sleeves year round to cover her burns. After surviving a shipwreck at sea and the Sultana disaster, she died of a stroke at eighty, in Oshkosh.
J. Walter Elliott also had trouble with the pension board as a result of the confusion over his identity. In correspondence with the board he noted that his family had feared for his life when he was listed as missing in action, again upon hearing that he had been captured and sent to Andersonville, and finally after the Sultana disaster. One sister received the erroneous Sultana report of his death aboard the boat, then traveled to her mother’s house, where a “donation party” was being held for the victorious troops. As Elliott described it, “the war was over, our country was saved, & at least one mother was there who was very happy at thought of letters from her eldest, whom she had mourned as dead, & he was on his way home, would be there soon, when up dashes a buggy and paralyzes the whole party. ‘Walter is certainly dead this time. You know he can’t swim.’” Elliott recreated the scene with what seems like slightly perverse pleasure: “Eagerly they all gather around the paper to learn the horrible details of the disaster that had snatched the chalice from the lip. Brother John, whose education on the field of Chickamauga & others got close enough to glance over the inverted page & cried out, ‘Walter is not lost. His name & command is correctly given among the reserve, and none but he could have given it.’” In fact, Elliott was at that moment at the home of an aunt of his late wife’s in Memphis, undoubtedly coughing up a storm.
Proving all that to the pension board was not easy. His brother David, who was present when he got home, wrote on behalf of his pension application to say that Elliott had been “reduced by hardships of prison life” and had “a peculiar rasping cough which he said and which I believe was caused by inhaling steam and by exposure at time of explosion of boilers and sinking of Steamboat Sultana.” During ten days at his mother’s house, he added, “his cough continued and he complained daily of the raw and inflamed feeling of throat and lungs.”
Despite his disability, Elliott rejoined his army command at Chattanooga and was stationed in Guntersville, Alabama, as commandant of the Union post and agent for the local Freedmen’s Bureau. He remained in Alabama after being discharged in April 1866, saying the climate was better for his still-congested lungs, though it certainly did not help that he was, as one acquaintance noted, “an inveterate smoker.” Elliott told the pension board that he “could not survive the rigor of a northern clime, and, like a leper, I became a voluntary exile—a citizen here during all the long dark days of reconstruction, kukluxism…” In 1866 he married again, but his second wife, like his first, soon died. He married for the third time on Christmas Eve 1870, and afterward he homesteaded a hardscrabble farm of a hundred sixty acres in the mountains near Guntersville, where he fathered six children and worked at various low-impact odd jobs, including teaching, bookkeeping, transcribing legal documents, and supervising manual laborers
. His brother David, who visited him in Alabama three times during the 1870s, recalled, “He was still troubled with cough and sore lungs, this being especially the case during my visit there in October 1875.”
Elliott worked for a while in the office of Probate Judge Thomas Street, who later allowed that while he was an efficient clerk, sometimes “any little worry would run him down. He had at times a very lank worn out expression on his face and then at other times he would seem to be all right. I remember at times he had a shortness of breath and at times he had a considerable cough.” Later, Street wrote, “His mind became affected by loss of memory, and in recording for instance, he did bad work and I had to quit him entirely.” He was forty-seven years old.
Elliott eventually got a small pension and over several years sought increases because of his worsening health. He suffered primarily from respiratory problems, but he was also frail, wobbly, and beset by rheumatism and consumption when he visited Indiana for the last time in 1882, at age forty-nine. A surgeon’s report the following year noted that he had no use of his right ring finger because of his wound at Chickamauga and that he had chronic respiratory problems as a result of his trauma during and after the sinking of the Sultana. A few years later, Elliott ran for circuit clerk but lost to a Confederate veteran named Willis Currey, who also wrote to support his pension application, confirming Elliott’s respiratory problems, adding, “I noticed in his speech that he would get his words mixed, he would use the proper words, but he would get them transposed, and he got so bad at our house that we sent him home, and stopped him from work, and he recovered from that condition temporarily, and then he grew gradually worse until he got perfectly helpless.”
Elliott, who appears to have suffered a stroke, soon required the use of a walking stick to “shuffle along.” A former student wrote, “I have seen him fall down lots of times just walking along in a plain road, and he would get up laughing…He also said he had no sense of taste or smell, the he could not smell or taste anything.” By 1891, when he was fifty-eight, Elliott was receiving a pension of $20 per month. The next year he suffered another stroke that partially paralyzed his left side. His daughter said in a deposition that the second attack came during the night when he got up to get a drink “and fell before he got to the water bucket, and laughed so that we would know that he was not hurt, and he went a few steps farther then and fell again, and I called him and he did not answer me, and we got up to see what was the matter with him.” The family at first thought he was dead, but he eventually came around. The next morning he had trouble using one hand. She added that his health rapidly deteriorated: “He was not in his right mind part of the time” and at others he paused so long between breaths “that it would scare me sometimes, and when he did get his breath he would breathe hard for a minute or two.” Toward the end, she said, she could hear his rattled breathing all through the house.
As his wife wrote, “He never had any more attacks, but he just kept getting worse and finally got to be almost helpless about six months before he died, and the last two or three days he was plumb helpless.” She told the pension board that “especially along toward the last, he got in a powerful bad fix, and would rattle in his lungs.” Elliott also lost the ability to speak. About six hours before his death, his wife wrote, “he groaned awful, I could not tell where his pain was because he could not tell me only from his groaning and rattling in his breast, it seemed to be in his throat and breast.” He died on June 3, 1895, at age sixty-two. His doctor stated that the cause of death was asphyxiation resulting from paralysis, which was brought on by “a general nervous condition of the system resulting from the diseased lung and highly inflammatory condition of the larynx and pharynx.” It had taken thirty years, but his injuries aboard the Sultana had finally killed him.
After the war, George Robinson settled into the quiet life of a cobbler in Owosso, Michigan, with a woman he married while on a wartime furlough. He worked alongside a veteran who had survived Andersonville, which perhaps lent a rarified atmosphere to the store (“You don’t like your shoes? You should be glad you even have shoes!”). By the time he was twenty-three, Robinson had experienced enough drama for a hundred lives, and he was plagued by insomnia and “general nervousness,” according to his doctor, who wrote on his behalf to the pension board. Over time, the injuries he sustained during the Sultana disaster made it impossible for him to make shoes, and he became a shoe salesman. In 1888, when he was forty-four, Robinson told the pension board he suffered from chronic diarrhea, hemorrhoids, stomach and liver trouble, vomiting spells, rheumatism, persistent bronchitis, and pain in his chest and wrist, the latter of which were injured in the explosion that killed his friend John Corliss. He added, as a postscript, “I would not pass through that terrible time I did at the destruction of Sultana for worlds again.”
By 1921, when Robinson was seventy-eight, he was suffering both from old age and from the injuries and diseases of his youth, and the two were inextricably linked. He was sometimes bedridden for weeks at a time and needed constant care. By then, his son-in-law wrote, “Most of his trouble comes from his heart.”
Perry Summerville had nerve problems, and he never regained full use of the leg he broke during his attempt to escape the Rebels. By 1920 he also required round-the-clock nursing, and in October 1927 his wife told the pension board she was “his constant attendant and nurse. He is a complete physical WRECK on account of his disability. I can’t exactly explain everything but I am at his side constantly and attend his every wants—he has bladder trouble—can’t sleep of nights—can’t wait on himself—he is an awful sufferer. Some one must be with him all of the time and I am the one.” Summerville died a year later.
The Madison Courier of March 17, 1916, reported that Tolbert suffered a paralytic stroke, and noted that he was “a civil war veteran and is one of the few living survivors of the Sultana disaster.” When his brother Samuel died the following year, Tolbert became the last of the family’s sons alive. By January 1920 he was “entirely helpless requiring two people to handle him. Has spasms every few nights,” according to his pension record. Death finally came on April 24, 1920, on his son Edmund’s birthday, three days before the anniversary of the Sultana disaster. The headline of his obituary announced: “Prominent Farmer Dies.” The same description later ran over John Maddox’s obituary on January 5, 1925, which noted of Maddox that “his entire life was spent in the neighborhood of his birth”—essentially ignoring the most momentous period, when he was “away.”
During all their life-threatening episodes, Tolbert and Maddox would no doubt have been both comforted and shocked to know that they would die of old age and be remembered only as Saluda farmers, which was apparently all they ever wanted to be. They had been through a spectacular onslaught, which changed forms and never fully abated; they had managed to make it home in the face of impossible odds; and they had kept going until there was nothing left to survive.
AFTERWORD
IN THE SPRING OF 2008, THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER spilled from its banks, much as it did in April 1865. Pushing past the Memphis waterfront at about the speed an average person runs, it presented an awesome spectacle of velocity and force. Tow-boats strained against the flexing back of what was essentially a thousand-mile muscle of water. A lone canoe embarked from the city front, carrying a group of adventure seekers who wanted to experience the river at full force. At first the canoe had trouble gaining the main current, which was laden with logs and other debris, and so strong that it repelled whatever was outside its grasp.
The overflow spread through thousands of acres of adjacent forests and fields, and at some points the actual flow was three miles wide and perhaps a hundred feet deep, riddled with dangerous digressions—riptides, rogue currents that turned back upon themselves and bullied their way upstream, and standing waves that broke upon the surface of the river itself, creating the illusion of shoals. There were whirlpools of all sizes, interrupting and venting the flow, spinning wider
and deeper until they broke in final upsurges, as if from muted explosions below. A quick dip of the hand revealed that the water was achingly cold.
People swim in the Mississippi in summer, usually in the slack water along sandbars, or perhaps all the way across on a dare, but not, by choice, in its open channel during a flood. Standing safely on the bank, it was easy to imagine the terror the Sultana passengers felt when they found themselves in the pull of bottomless water, fighting off others in the same predicament, in the middle of the night. Far more than the carefully preserved battlefields, interspersed with monuments and parades of insistent signs, the flooded river evoked its part of the Sultana saga with disturbing immediacy. The only comparable chance of observing the full power of the other trials—the violence of war and the implosive claustrophobia of imprisonment—would be to travel to Afghanistan or Iraq, or to the holding pens of Guantanamo.
In fact, most of the physical evidence of the Sultana saga is gone. The former town of Cahaba was unincorporated in 1989, after it had been reduced to a few hunting and fishing camps. All that is left of most of the nearby houses and stores, as well as the Bell Tavern Hotel, are overgrown piles of broken bricks. The gravel streets are empty, punctuated by a scattering of historical markers and picnic tables. A few derelict houses remain, sagging under the weight of flowering vines. Near the confluence of the Cahaba and Alabama rivers stand the columned ruins of the former riverfront mansion where Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and his Union counterpart sat on a balcony sharing cigars and cordials while discussing a planned prisoner exchange. The site of the stockade is today a pleasant glen of moss-draped trees, part of a state park described in brochures as “Alabama’s most famous ghost town.” A casual visitor might conclude that aside from the scenic river views there is nothing much to see, and nothing to learn other than that something was here that went away. But after reading the survivors’ accounts, even the hint of Cahaba opens a portal into a terrible known, making it possible to telescope history, to resurrect a succession of thousands of flickering, pivotal moments—many of them someone’s last—that have otherwise retreated into the past. What appears to be an insignificant depression in the ground turns out to be the site of the stockade privy, where Jesse Hawes and his friends crawled through a bog of human waste a few feet from unsuspecting, armed guards in their attempted escape. The actual prison compound, delineated by unobtrusive wooden markers, reveals how small it was. It is hard to imagine three thousand men crowded into that space, even for an afternoon.
