Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (5 page)

“I’m really torn about all of this,” I confide to Vicky as we walk back to her car. “I’ve always considered Washington a heroic soul—”

“I think he was heroic, too!” she interjects.

“—and I’m not out to bash his reputation.” This was a man renowned for valor under fire, emerging from a single battle in the French and Indian War with two horses shot out from under him and four bullet holes through his coat. As a general during the Revolution,
he was no less audacious, repeatedly putting himself in harm’s way and suffering through many of the same deprivations as his soldiers. Through word and action he rallied an inexperienced, despondent army teetering on the brink of collapse, and prevented a mutiny after the Revolution when those same troops were treated shoddily by Congress. And although ambitious, he was not ruthlessly so. He could easily have held on to and expanded his power as president, but, among other noble acts, he decided against running for a third term to set an example to his successors.

“I knew—I think we all know—he owned slaves,” I continue, still trying to untangle my knotted thoughts on the matter. “But that was in the abstract. Seeing where Judge lived and died, and learning about her story has made his role as a slave owner all the more real.”

Washington himself was conflicted. As aggressive as his efforts to retain Judge were, Martha was closer to the young slave and, by all accounts, led the charge to have her returned. On the larger issue of slavery, Washington deserves credit at least for evolving. He was born into a slaveholding family and personally inherited ten slaves at the age of eleven. Never an impassioned advocate for the institution, he later believed it should be ended entirely. A year before he died he changed his will so that all of his personal slaves would be freed. “I never mean,” Washington wrote to a friend in 1786, “to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure and imperceptible degrees.”

Vicky has to pick up her daughter, and after we say good-bye, I head to downtown Portsmouth by myself to find where the
Nancy
would have docked more than two hundred years ago.

There’s no record of Judge’s first thoughts upon landing here, and I can’t even imagine the mix of terror and exhilaration she must have felt setting foot in New Hampshire for the first time, neither enslaved nor entirely free.

“What I don’t understand,” I asked Vicky before she left, “is why there isn’t a memorial or even a small plaque honoring Ona Judge
anywhere in New Hampshire, when she’s
the very personification
of the state’s motto and its love of independence. Is it simple racism or sexism?”

“I don’t think that’s it entirely,” Vicky said. “The town of Milford recently erected a full-sized statue to Harriet Wilson, who wrote
Our Nig
, the first novel by an African American woman. But what makes Ona different is that she was a slave and, therefore, a reminder that New Hampshire was a slave state for quite a long time—until 1857, actually. There are some aspects of our history, I think, we’d just rather ignore.”

I figured this might be the case months ago while preparing my full itinerary. When I first started phoning around Portsmouth to inquire about George Washington’s slave, I received the same reply in so many words as when I called other cities about unpleasant periods from their past. I heard it when I asked the Cincinnati Zoo about the exhibition of live Native Americans there in 1887; the Owensboro, Kentucky, chamber of commerce about America’s last public execution next to the old courthouse on August 14, 1936 (the circuslike atmosphere at the hanging mortified the nation); and the Sonoma Developmental Center in Northern California about the forced sterilizations conducted there on thousands of men and women labeled “subhuman” in the 1920s through 1950s. “That’s just not something,” I was told time and time again, “we really want to remember.”

PICKING ONE NAME
at random from among the more than two thousand Civil War soldiers sailing north on the Mississippi aboard the doomed
Sultana
in late April 1865, local historian Jerry Potter begins telling me about Samuel Jenkins. Jerry and I are trudging
down a thick, muddy trail that cuts through a panoramic expanse of farmland in Mound City, Arkansas, where Jerry believes the charred, scattered remains of the
Sultana
lie buried.

A teenager from North Carolina, Samuel Jenkins had yearned to emulate his two older brothers and fight in the Civil War. For which side didn’t much seem to matter; when the Confederacy rejected him for being too young, Jenkins volunteered for the Union Army’s Third Tennessee Cavalry, and the undermanned regiment gladly accepted him. (Although Tennessee had seceded, pro-Union communities in the state’s eastern half mustered up troops to serve with federal divisions.) Jenkins was captured in September 1864 at the battle of Sulphur Creek Trestle and shipped off to the Castle Morgan prison in Cahaba, Alabama, where he remained until the South surrendered. On April 24, 1865, he boarded the
Sultana
in Vicksburg, Mississippi, along with hundreds of other troops who’d endured both the hellfire of battle and the torments of a Confederate POW camp. Most would not survive the boat ride home.

“I’ve gotten to know Jenkins’s daughter, Glenda Green,” Jerry says.

“His daughter?” I ask, astonished that anyone alive today had a parent living 150 years ago.

“Jenkins was in his early seventies when Glenda was born—these were
men
back then,” Jerry adds with a wry smile, “and she told me a story about sitting with him by the fireplace when he was eighty or so. Out of nowhere he says to her, ‘It’s been well over sixty years now, and not a day’s gone by that I don’t hear those boys screaming in the water.’ ” We stop for a moment.

“Now, think of that,” Jerry says, turning to face me. “He lived with that memory every day for his entire life. Every—single—day.”

We’ve only walked about half a mile, but with the humidity we’re both drenched. Jerry points out coyote and raccoon tracks as we continue slogging through the sticky mud, or “gumbo,” as the locals call it. I look down at my boots, and with layers of mud caked around them they’re clownishly large. Each step feels heavier than the last.

“There sure are a lot of butterflies,” I mention as blue, white, black, and orange wings flit around us.

Jerry nods. “It’s really quite beautiful out here.” We pause again as he pulls out a map. “The river used to be here, right where we’re standing. It’s shifted over the years.”

Acres of dense green soybean fields surround us.

“So this is where they all died?” I ask, trying to re-create the scene from almost a century and a half ago.

“Not all. Many of the bodies drifted downstream, a few as far as Vicksburg, and some were pulled out of trees. What little remained of the
Sultana
ended up here, too,” he says, directing my attention to a massive ridge a hundred or so feet away.

Launched on January 3, 1863, the
Sultana
was a gleaming, state-of-the-art steamer originally built to haul cotton and other merchandise for trade up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. But during the Civil War it transported an even more lucrative cargo: Union soldiers. The
Sultana
’s captain, J. Cass Mason, contracted with the federal government to move troops, earning up to $10 a man.

When the
Sultana
left New Orleans on April 21, 1865, for St. Louis, the seventeen-hundred-ton boat was carrying about ninety passengers and crew, a mere quarter of its legal limit. Just south of Mississippi, Captain Mason was alerted that one of the boilers was leaking. During a stop in Vicksburg he assessed the damage and determined that it needed to be replaced entirely, a three-day task. Mason was anxious to keep heading upriver and ordered his engineers to weld a patch over the defective seam. They could install a new boiler in St. Louis.

By the time they shoved off from Vicksburg, an additional two thousand people, most of them Union troops released from Cahaba and Andersonville, another POW camp, had boarded the 260-foot-long boat along with several hundred head of cattle, horses, and Army mules. While the
Sultana
docked in Helena, Arkansas, on April 26, a photographer noticed the massive steamer bulging with soldiers and began setting up his tripod to capture the image. Word quickly spread on board, and as men rushed sternside to be included in the picture, the boat nearly capsized.

Later that night, at about eleven o’clock, the
Sultana
departed from Memphis with an additional 300 passengers and then made a brief stop in Hopefield, Arkansas, to load up 1,000 bushels of coal. A boat meant to carry only 376 people was now crammed with 2,400.

Most of the passengers settled down to rest, but for many sleep was elusive. Huddled on the decks under thin and tattered blankets, some men shivered uncontrollably in the cold, drizzling rain, while those delirious with joy at the prospect of freedom danced and sang in the dark. “We were all talking of home and friends and the many good things we would eat,” an Indiana lieutenant named William Dixon recalled. “We had no thought but that we would be at home in a few days feasting with our loved ones once more.”

Around midnight, Nathan Wintringer informed his second engineer, Samuel Clemens (no relation to Mark Twain), that the boilers were running smoothly.

At 2:00
A.M.
, almost exactly, they exploded.

Those closest to the eighteen-foot boilers were instantly scalded to death or blown mangled and lifeless into the Mississippi. “The wildest confusion followed,” one soldier recollected. “Some sprang into the river at once, others were killed, and I could hear the groans of the dying above the roar of the flames.”

Within minutes the entire boat was consumed by fire, leaving those who couldn’t swim with a grotesque choice—burn or drown. “Women and little children in their night clothes, brave men who have stood undaunted on many a battle field,” recalled survivor J. Walter Elliott, “suddenly [saw] the impending death by fire, and wringing their hands, tossing their arms wildly in the air, with cries most heartrending, they rush[ed] pell-mell over the guard and into the dark, cold waters of the river.”

“Some were swearing a ‘blue streak,’ ” another survivor later wrote about the final moments of soldiers who jumped to their death. “Some would curse Abe Lincoln, Jeff Davis, General Grant—any and everybody prominently connected with the war. Some were crying like children.… Some prayed very loud, and most passionately; others were getting off very formal and graceful prayers, all in dead earnest.”

Men thrashed in the water, fighting one another over floating debris—wooden doors, bales of hay, mule carcasses, barrels, anything—to cling to. Those who couldn’t swim frantically grasped onto and dragged down those who could. And many, after surviving the blast, the fire, the suffocating smoke, the violent clashes in the icy river, eventually succumbed to hypothermia, their bodies already weakened by war and imprisonment.

Confirming exactly how many died is impossible. The government’s official tally was 1,547 fatalities, which is about 30 more than were lost on the
Titanic
. But the consensus among contemporary historians is that 1,800 perished, making it America’s worst maritime disaster. Out of the 760 passengers who made it ashore, approximately 300 later died of burn wounds or from their prolonged immersion in the freezing Mississippi.

“None of this had to be,” Jerry says as we stand looking over the now serene farmland, a place he’s visited countless times. “It was all so unnecessary.” He relates the events of April 27, 1865, with genuine emotion, clearly affected by what happened here. “What really gets me are the mothers who were waiting for their boys to return, after everything they had been through, after all those years. And they were so close.”

“What did Samuel Jenkins do after making it home?”

“Because of what he had seen that night he dedicated his life to medicine. He became a doctor.”

I ask Jerry how a tragedy such as this can be so overlooked, especially considering that more people died on the
Sultana
than on the
Titanic
, which inspired hundreds of books, numerous documentaries, and one of the highest-grossing movies ever made. And the
Sultana
didn’t just fade from view over time; it was forgotten almost immediately. “Only a few days ago 1,500 lives were sacrificed to fire and water, almost within sight of the city,” a Memphis journalist lamented. “Yet, even now, the disaster is scarcely mentioned—some new excitement has taken its place.”

“Apathy was part of it,” Jerry says. “Four years of battle after
battle—sometimes with tens of thousands killed and wounded in just days—had cauterized the nation, emotionally, to the carnage of war. It was just too much to bear.”

But the main reason the story vanished so quickly was timing. “Lincoln had been assassinated just two weeks before,” Jerry reminds me. While grieving for the slain president, the country was also riveted by the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth, who was finally cornered and shot dead on April 26. Terrible though it was, the
Sultana
got eclipsed by other events.

Many national tragedies have been similarly overshadowed. Three years before the
Sultana
blew up, an explosion at the Allegheny Arsenal in Pittsburgh killed 78 workers, mostly women. It was the worst loss of civilian life during the Civil War but was nevertheless relegated to a historical footnote because it occurred on September 17, 1862, which was also the date of Antietam, the war’s bloodiest one-day battle. On October 8, 1871, a firestorm swept through rural Peshtigo, Wisconsin, incinerating upward of 2,500 men, women, and children. Peshtigo almost certainly would be better remembered had Chicago not suffered its “Great Fire,” which left 200 to 300 people dead, that very same day. And more recently, when American Airlines Flight 587 plummeted from the sky into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, New York, killing all 260 on board and 5 on the ground, it was our country’s second-deadliest airline disaster. But because it happened on November 12, 2001, when the nation was petrified by anthrax-laced mail and a possible second wave of strikes following the September 11 attacks, there was almost relief that the crash was due to pilot error and not sabotage.