Monument to tragedy

I hope that readers of the Democrat-Gazette are now aware of the Sultana story. In April of 1865 our country had just ended the deadliest war in American history. During the war, newspapers were filled with stories of loss of life. By President Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, nearly all families suffered personal loss to war.

On May 5, 1865, a Memphis Argus article appeared, the reporter writing of numbness to death: “We have, as a people, become so accustomed to suffering of horrors during the past few years that they soon seem to lose their appalling features. … Only a few days ago, 1,500 lives were sacrificed to fire and water, almost within sight of the city. Yet, even now, the disaster is scarcely mentioned—some new excitement has taken its place.”

The survivors tried to keep the story alive, petitioning Congress every session from 1887-1914 to have a monument placed along the Mississippi River commemorating the disaster. They failed. Some survivors became bitter for our government’s failure to acknowledge this disaster.

Sgt. James H. Kimberlin of the 124th Indiana Infantry, not long before he died in 1924, summed up the bitterness, writing: “The men who had endured the torments of a hell on Earth, starved, famished from thirst, eaten with vermin, having endured all the indignities, insults and abuses possible for an armed bully to bestow upon them, to be so soon forgotten does not speak well for our government or the American people.”

Thank you, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, for covering the Sultana Disaster Museum groundbreaking. It has been almost 100 years since Sergeant Kimberlin wrote of his bitterness. There will finally be a “monument” in the form of a museum that tells the full story of the Sultana and her soldiers.

JOHN N. FOGLEMAN

Marion