Annual Sultana festival will spotlight Civil War maritime disaster, plans for a new museum

The Sultana, a day before disaster (Library of Congress)

The greatest maritime disaster in U.S. history will be remembered Saturday in the Arkansas town near where the Sultana exploded and burned, with speakers focusing on why and how it happened and plans for a new museum about the Civil War tragedy.

The free 3rd Annual Sultana Heritage Festival in Marion will include a series of speakers from 9:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Trinity in the Fields Anglican Church.

The steamboat, chugging north on the Mississippi River, exploded and caught fire on April 27, 1865, killing hundreds. Many of those on board were released Union prisoners, including gaunt soldiers who were held in Andersonville. They were heading home at war’s end. Marion was the closest community to where the overcrowded 260-foot sidewheeler came to rest and residents helped rescue those thrown into the chilly water.

Gene Salecker: How many actually died?

While estimates have varied over the years, many histories list 1,800 killed passengers and crew members. Military historian and Sultana artifacts collector Gene Salecker has argued that number is much too high.

Salecker with a Sultana model in Marion

Salecker told the Picket he has checked government lists, adjustant general reports, pension and burial records, along with obituaries, newspaper accounts and genealogies.

He found a total of 2,137 on the Sultana, with 953 surviving – meaning an estimated 1,184 soldiers, crew members, civilians and guards died.

“If the Sultana disaster was a Civil War battle, it would rank number 12 among the most costliest battles in the Civil War -- and most of the battles were two and three day affairs,” he said. “The Sultana disaster lasted about five hours. By the way, we used to think that about 200 people died in Memphis hospitals after being rescued. I have found only 31.”

Louis Intres: Drumming up interest in permanent museum

The adjunct professor and Sultana expert was hired by the city to serve as museum development director and raise about $3 million for a new venue. Officials hope to draw visitors from all over the country, including from Memphis, Tennessee, across the Mississippi River.

Currently, the story of the steamboat is told in small museum staffed by volunteers. Intres will give an update on the plans, which he described in a Picket interview last year,

Intres told the Picket on the eve of the festival that he will begin work full time on the project beginning May 1, now that he is ending his teaching career in the history department at Arkansas State University.

He said a city advertising and promotion committee has committed $845,000 for the construction of a new venue and operation of the current museum.

Intres wrote: “I have also just completed a professionally designed promotional package for national distribution to targeted benefactors, foundations, trusts, and private philanthropies.  Lastly, I have begun to identify and recruit members of various segments of the national economy who have an interest in U.S. history, philanthropy and a history in supporting museums, libraries and large public educational attractions like ours. Thus far, several people have indicated a real interest in becoming a part of our national fund-raising effort.  Lastly, my committee and I are beginning to arrange appointments with private, state, and federal agency personnel for support and funding opportunities.”

Meanwhile, the city of Marion is giving the temporary museum a face-lift with a remodeling, Intres said.

Judge John Fogleman: Townspeople came to rescue

The circuit judge told the Picket he will portraying his great-great grandfather, John Fogleman, who along with his sons, Dallas and Leroy, and three neighbors helped get those who remained on the Sultana safely to the Arkansas shore.

“I will also be covering the efforts of another great-great grandfather, Franklin Hardin Barton, in helping the victims of the Sultana.”

The judge also will discuss the Federal burning of the Arkansas villages of Mound City and Hopefield in responses to Confederate guerrilla activities and the trial of a man accused of instigating the hanging of an abolitionist.

Jerry Potter: Why did the disaster happen?

Potter, a Memphis lawyer and Sultana expert, has written about a kickback scheme between the vessel's financially-strapped captain, J. Cass Mason, the steamer's captain and master, and an Army quartermaster, Lt. Col. Reuben B. Hatch. The Sultana was way above passenger capacity at the time of the explosion.

In the end, no one was formally held accountable for putting too many men on the Sultana and sailing despite documented concerns about the safety of one of the boat's boilers. The Picket has reached out to Potter for comment on what he hopes to cover in his talk.

Current Sultana museum (Gene Salecker)

Jimmy Ogle: Memphis before, during and after the war

The tour guide told the Picket he will briefly cover early explorers and settler, then the development of the steamboat landing and cobblestone wharf. The opening of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad in the middle of the 19th century “led to Memphis to being an important center of transportation prior to the Civil War, and then a target for quick Union occupation.”

Ogle also will touch on the naval battle for Memphis, wartime occupation, immigration of formerly enslaved persons, yellow fever epidemics and the city’s first major bridge (1892).

Marion Chamber of Commerce President Tracy Brick told the Evening Times newspaper that the speaker series set for Saturday “is going to be factual enough so that someone who is a real historian will enjoy it, but also entertaining enough for the person who lives in town who wants to learn more about the Sultana. So I think we have something where we can reach a pretty broad audience.”

Strike up the bands! Sounds of brass will waft over Gettysburg during annual festival

(Photos courtesy of Gettysburg Brass Band Festival)

Perhaps there is no more appropriate place for a U.S. brass band festival to take place than Gettysburg, Pa., where history and the arts intersect.

Lawn chairs, a blanket and a yearning for Americana are all that is required for those who attend the Gettysburg Brass Band Festival, which got its start 19 years ago.

“You will have all types of music played, from traditional marches and overtures, to jazz, patriotic songs and popular songs arranged for brass bands,” said Ben Jones, a member of the June 9-11 festival’s steering committee. The event is free.

Fourteen bands will perform around town and at Gettysburg National Military Park. 

Among them are the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets, Spires Brass Band, the Rockville Brass Band and the Atlantic Brass Band. Most of the performances are at the historic Lutheran Theological Seminary.

The Wildcat Regiment Band (above), representing the 105^th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, will perform at 2 p.m. June 11 on the lawn of the park’s visitor center. The band will have a “Grand Concert” at 6 p.m. at the Pennsylvania Monument.

“They have been here every year. They are very popular and an excellent playing band,” said Jones, a retired school band director who performs with his own band, Gettysburg Brass. “Those old horns are a challenge. They dress in military style from the period.”

Jones and other members of the volunteer-driven nonprofit group tout the festival’s contribution to the town’s culture and tourism.

Benfield Brass Band debuted at the Gettysburg festival

But there’s another benefit. Nearly all those in the brass bands are well out of high school.

“If you look at our mission statement, we have a ‘life after high school’ emphasis and we want to show students in high school bands there are opportunities to play after high school,” said Jones. “For the most part they volunteer because they love to play.”

Most of the groups who come to Gettysburg follow the British-style brass band model.

Jones told the Picket the musical form represents 19th-century town bands. Musicians often joined regimental bands during the Civil War.

A traditional British-style band uses cornets, which put out a mellow sound, instead of the trumpet, which makes a brighter sound. Tenor horns, trombones, flugelhorns, Eb and Bb tubas and euphoniums are featured, along with percussion.

The typical band will feature 25 to 30 musicians. The Hanover Lancers will bring about 60.

“I am a tuba player and I love the sound of brass bands,” said Jones. “It is such a gorgeous sound with a cornet.”

While the trumpet has surpassed the cornet in popularity in the past decades, he notes interest in the British-style brass band growing since the 1980s.

Last year, about 3,000 people, a mix of local residents and some visitors, attended the concerts, which featured more than 400 musicians.

Gettysburg is known for its active and varied arts scene. A local conservancy is having a barn art sale and show downtown the same weekend and the “History Meets the Arts” show will be held at Gettysburg College.

One of the brass band festival highlights is the playing of Taps at sundown at different locations on the battlefield (such as Little Round Top and Devil’s Den) and the cupola of Schmucker Hall on the seminary campus.

Jones said: “We have received comments from tourists who happened to be here… it is going dark and all of a sudden a bugler appears and sounds Taps. It is a very moving experience for them, and the bugler.”

Burning of Darien: Festival will recall one of war's most controversial moments

Scene from the movie "Glory"

By summer 1863, coastal towns in the Deep South knew that where the Union army was going, emancipation of slaves was soon to follow.

That fact permeated society in Darien, Ga., where rice was king and slave labor served it. Most of the town’s 500 souls had fled before June 11, frightened by the Federal blockade and the deployment of African-American troops on nearby St. Simons Island.

On that day, the town, its buildings perched on tabby foundations, was vacant.

It held little strategic value to the Union, but Col. James Montgomery, commanding the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, supposedly believed it was a safe haven for blockade runners.

Montgomery -- virulently opposed to slavery -- apparently had another reason for shelling, looting and burning Darien, leaving only a few buildings standing among the charred ruins.

“There was not much justice for burning Darien,” said Steven Smith, site manager for Fort King George Historic Site in Darien. “He wanted to make a political statement. Here was a town built on the backs of slaves.”

Darien’s destruction by two black regiments caused a howl of protest across the South and even in newspapers in the North. Those favoring emancipation were split on whether the act was barbarity or a necessary evil as it became clearer to many that the Civil War was about slavery.

Smith is among local leaders who launched a “Burning of Darien” website and Facebook page as a way to elevate knowledge of the incident and increase tourism in McIntosh County, long one of the poorest in Georgia.

Lectures about the 150^th anniversary and the recent opening of a related museum culminate this Saturday (June 15, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.) with a daylong festival and living history in the city better known these days for its seafood fleet and as a gateway to the Golden Isles and retirement communities.

Among re-enactors that will be on hand is a Charleston, S.C., contingent that portrays the famed  54^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, which also participated in the burning of Darien.

The incident is featured in the 1989 movie “Glory.”

Col. James Montgomery

Montgomery ordered Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the 54^th  Massachusetts to participate. While Shaw didn’t mind the looting to help resupply his troops, he opposed setting the town to torch. He apparently relented under threat of court-martial.

In a letter to his wife, Annie, a couple months before he died during his regiment’s assault on Battery Wagner near Charleston, Shaw gave this description of Montgomery:

“The reasons he gave me for destroying Darien were, that the Southerners must be made to feel that this was a real war, and that they were to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews of old.”

At the same time, the colonel said Montgomery was a “conscientious man” and believed he was faithfully executing his duty.

Shaw further wrote his wife, “Besides my own distaste for this barbarous sort of warfare, I am not sure that it will not harm very much the reputation of black troops and of those connected with them.”

After the war, the Shaw family worked diligently to exonerate their loved one’s reputation by saying he did not order Darien’s burning.

Col. Robert G. Shaw

Montgomery was an extreme character, even among abolitionists, according to historian Colin Woodward, archivist for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Center for Arkansas History and Culture.

Historians debate whether Montgomery was acting under orders of Gen. David Hunter, commander of the Union’s department in the region. Hunter is known for an unauthorized 1862 edit emancipating slaves.

But it’s clear where Montgomery, a Kansas Jayhawker, stood on slavery.

“He had this religious Old Testament idea of an eye for eye and I hate slavery and I will do whatever it takes, even if this town is undefended,” Woodward told the Picket. “It’s almost like if John Brown had not been hanged and went into the army. That’s how this guy operated.”

Woodward, who also authors the Southern Historian blog, said the burning of Darien foreshadowed further Union efforts to take the war to the Southern people, and not just at the battle lines.

“I call Montgomery a Sherman in miniature,” Woodward said. “This is how the Union is going to prosecute the war further out.”

Buddy Sullivan, a historian in coastal Georgia, has given lectures about Darien and he is quick to point out that the raid occurred well before Sherman’s March to the Sea.

He told the Picket that the Burning of Darien initiative might help get more tourists off Interstate 95, which cuts through McIntosh County, off the road and into its communities.

Darien in recent years has gotten on the “train of progress” in promoting itself for eco-heritage tourism,” Sullivan said. This year’s events are a way to reach people “who haven’t even heard of this place.”

Buddy Sullivan

“This area has a lot of natural beauty and history,” Sullivan said. “We want people to come back and take a second look.”

Organizers of events have attempted to have an expanded view of the burning of Darien, to include the story of slavery.

“We are trying to draw a more diverse element,” said Sullivan. “We don’t just want Civil War buffs. It may be unpleasant history for some, but it is history.”

The 2nd South Carolina Volunteers was largely comprised of freed slaves, while the 54^th Massachusetts had many freedmen and business professionals.

Steven Smith told the Picket the 54^th Massachusetts was in the area to recruit freed slaves, destroy Southern crops and take out Confederate assault works.

Darien was slow to rebound from the war, and a now-gone timber industry for decades replaced the rice-based economy.

Like Sullivan, Smith said eco-heritage tourism is beginning to take off.

“It is a pretty town, a quintessential Southern town, with live oaks,” he said. “It is a perfect town for recreational boating.”

The Burning of Darien has provided educational opportunities and this week a museum opened at the town’s Trailhead Center.

Colin Woodward

Scholars have long debated the significance of the event and what it meant to the reputation of African-American troops, led by white officers. Hence, Shaw’s concerns about the image of his troops following the “wanton destruction.”

Historian Keith Wilson, in an article about Union officers who waged war in the region, has said when it came to Darien, “condemnation was not a universal response” in the North.

Woodward said there was varying reactions to the event.

“In the abolitionist movement it created a divide between those saying the ends justify the means and those thinking it was going too far, we don’t need to do this.”