Cowan’s Auctions (cowanauctions.com)

Sultana tintype

A Tragic Image Earns Big

The Artifact

A tintype of the ill-fated steamship Sultana

Condition

The image, which is set in a paper mat, is in good condition. The frame (not pictured) has some damage.

Details

On the night of April 24, 1865—just over two weeks after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House—the steamship Sultana left port at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and headed north. Around 2,100 people—including some 1,400 released Union prisoners of war making the first leg of the voyage home—crowded onboard the wooden vessel, which had a legal capacity of 376. Two days later, a photographer took this image of Sultana, its decks swollen with passengers. At 2 a.m. the next day, when Sultana was seven miles north of Memphis, one of the vessel’s boilers exploded, with two others quickly following suit. An enormous blast of steam tore through the ship, destroying the pilothouse. The smokestacks soon tumbled over, starting a fire that engulfed Sultana. Those not killed by the explosion or the flames jumped into the icy waters of the Mississippi, where many of them died from hypothermia or drowned. Only slightly over 700 of Sultana’s passengers survived.

Quotable

Sultana survivor Chester Berry, a 20-year-old soldier in the 20th Michigan Infantry who was headed home from Andersonville Prison, wrote of the scene as the ship exploded and began to sink: “[W]hen the terrific explosion took place … I was awakened from a sound sleep…. I sprang to the bow of the boat, and turning I looked back upon one of the most terrible scenes I ever beheld. The upper decks … were a complete wreck…. I went back to where I had lain and found my bunk mate … scalded to death, I then secured a piece of cabin door casing, about three or four inches wide and about four feet long, then going back to the bow of the boat I came to the conclusion I did not want to take to the water just then, for it was literally black with human beings, many of whom were sinking and taking others with them. Being a good swimmer, and having board enough to save me, even if I were not, I concluded to wait till the rush was over.” Berry would die in 1926 at age 82.

Value

$9,600 (price realized at Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati, Ohio, in June 2016). “This is a rare whole plate tintype of the Sultana,” noted Wes Cowan, founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions, at the time of the sale. “The vessel’s loss represented the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history, more costly than the sinking of the Titanic and producing almost the equivalent amount of casualties incurred at the Battle of Shiloh.”