April 27 · This Day in America
Two in the morning, ten miles above Memphis. The steamboat Sultana is licensed for 376 people and is carrying more than 2,000 — most of them Union soldiers just released from the prison camps at Andersonville and Cahaba, skeletal men finally going home. Then three of her four boilers burst. The river fills with fire and bodies and the cold spring current. Somewhere near 1,800 die: the worst maritime disaster in American history, worse than the Lusitania, worse than the Titanic. These men had survived the war. They had survived the camps. They were almost home. The country barely notices — Lincoln is freshly buried, Booth was killed yesterday, the papers are full. So they slip from the news, and almost from memory. Say their names today. They earned that much.
Source: www.battlefields.org
Also on this day · 1822
In a two-room house at Point Pleasant, Ohio, a tanner's son is born and named Hiram Ulysses. He will hate the tannery, drift through West Point under a clerk's misspelling of his name, fail at farming and at business, and then find — in the worst war the country ever fought — that he is one of the few men alive who can end it. He takes Lee's surrender with grace, and later writes one of the great American memoirs while dying. The quiet ones surprise you.
Source: www.nps.gov