Product Description

In April 1865, the steamboat slowly moved up the Mississippi River, its overtaxed engines straining under the weight of twenty-four hundred passengersmostly Union soldiers, recently paroled from Confederate prison camps. At 2 a.m., three of 's four boilers exploded. Within twenty minutes, the boat went down in flames, and an estimated seventeen hundred lives were lost. The worst maritime disaster in American history, the sinking of the is a forgotten tragedy lost in the turmoil of the timesthe war's end, the assassination of President Lincoln, the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth. Alan Huffman presents this harrowing story in gripping and vivid detail and paints a moving portrait of four individual soldiers who survived the Civil War's final hell to make it back home.