Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• The deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history killed as many as 1,800 people near the end of the Civil War, but it earned scant attention.
• News of Sultana’s explosion on the Mississippi River was overshadowed by the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
• The ship’s dramatic sinking included criminal acts and a disregard for human life, but even the minimal prosecution was overturned.

In 1865, a massive explosion just outside of Memphis lit up the night sky in the deadliest ship disaster in 19th-century United States history. Despite the devastating scale of the incident, most folks in America at the time never heard about it, as the news was quickly buried by another national headline from the tail end of the Civil War.

On April 27, 1865, the Sultana was laden with roughly 2,200 Union soldiers and officers, even though the ship was legally allowed to carry no more than 376 passengers. The overloaded vessel was limping along the mighty Mississippi River, bringing the former prisoners of war back north. But suddenly, the ill-maintained ship’s boilers exploded just seven miles outside of Memphis, killing as many as 1,800 people. The blast was deadlier than the sinking of the Titanic and still stands as the worst maritime disaster in the nation’s history.

But it barely registered as a blip in the national conversation. April 27th was less than two weeks after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and only a day after the Lincoln’s shooter, John Wilkes Booth, died in a shootout with United States cavalrymen.

The Daily Ohio was one of the first newspapers to report on the Sultana’s explosion. In its April 29 edition, it described the fate of prisoners heading home from the Cahaba and Andersonville prisons: “At 4 o’clock this morning the river in front of Memphis was covered with soldiers struggling for life, many badly scalded.” Beyond this, little else was reported about the event—even though there was plenty of blame to go around, none was ever assigned.

The Sultana was a 260-foot-long wooden steamboat built in 1863 in Cincinnati, offering regular service along the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans. But the vessel was out of its depth. Just four days before the disaster, it had been stuck in Vicksburg, Mississippi, due to boiler malfunctions—and the steamboat’s mechanical issues were nothing compared to Captain J. Cass Mason’s financial troubles.

As the Civil War drew to a close, returning soldiers home from Confederate prisons became a logistical nightmare. Union officials contracted the effort to private parties, offering $5 for each enlisted man and $10 for each officer. The per-soldier price was enticing for private ship captains like Mason. Rather than undergo the much-needed—and time-consuming—full boiler replacement, he simply patched the leaky boiler. He then concocted a scheme with Union Lieutenant Colonel Reuben Hatch, who was known to be amenable to bribes, and Union Army Captain George Williams to pack more than 2,000 troops onto the steamboat—more than five times its legal capacity. When other officers protested, Williams shouted them down, and Captain Frederick Speed ultimately approved the boiler fix and the excessive passenger loading.

The ship was so crowded that soldiers were lying all over the deck with no space to walk. At a stop in Arkansas, a photographer tried to take a photo of the soldiers on the ship, but when the men congregated on one side of the boat for the photo, the Sultana started tilting and they were ordered back before it completely tipped over.

As the Sultana headed north, the spring thaw provided a powerful current. Combined with the intense overcrowding, the already limping boilers were asked to do too much, leading to a massive explosion and fire around 2 a.m. Many soldiers were killed instantly, and more drowned in the dark waters of the four-mile-wide Mississippi River.

With nobody certain quite how many more passengers the ship was ferrying beyond the reported 2,200—the real figure may have been well over 2,300, according to some sources—the death tolls aren’t exact, either. But early reports tallied between 1,400 and 1,700 deaths, and with at least another 200 or 300 soldiers dying from injuries after the explosion, the final toll was even higher.

The bodies of those who perished continued to wash ashore for weeks after the disaster.

Still, the Sultana never quite entered the national discourse. Was the silence due to a cover-up, the blame that could be squarely placed on the greed of officials, or simply a timing issue? Captain Speed was eventually court-martialed and the only one actually found guilty of any wrongdoing, but even he was later exonerated by a judge and went on to be a prominent Vicksburg lawyer.

The Sultana tragedy occurred when the public had become numb to massive death tolls by the final days of the Civil War—1,800 men was sadly a fraction of the losses that has occurred during four years of war. The public was keen on moving past war news by that time. Considering the state of shock from the Lincoln assassination and the pursuit of Booth, among the other events of the war’s end, there was plenty of other national news filling the papers at the time. And it evidently took precedence over 1,800 lives done in by sheer greed.