On This Date…
History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit.
~Fustel de Coulange
On April 27…
1865: An explosion on a Mississippi River steamboat killed an estimated 1,547 people, mostly Union soldiers returning home after the Civil War. The previous day had marked the final surrender and end of armed resistance by the remaining Confederate forces.
Only two weeks earlier, President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. Prisoners of war who had been held in hellish conditions in Alabama’s Andersonville and Cahaba prison camps were trying to make their way home to Illinois. The steamboat Sultana was one of their only options.
The steamboat was built to hold 376 passengers, but reports say that there were as many as 2,700 people on board as it lumbered slowly up the Mississippi River. It took 17 hours to make the journey from Vicksburg to Memphis, where it stopped to pick up more coal.
A couple of hours past midnight, the trip came to a sudden end: near the Arkansas side of the river, one of the Sultana‘s three boilers suddenly exploded. Hot metal debris ripped through the vessel and two other boilers exploded within minutes of the first. The passengers were killed by flying metal, scalding water, collapsing decks and the roaring fire that broke out on board. Some drowned as they were thrown into the water, but rescue boats were immediately dispatched, saving hundreds of lives.
1945: Russian and American troops joined hands at the River Elbe in Germany, bringing the end of World War II a step closer. By joining forces at Elbe, the American and Soviet troops successfully cut the Germany army in two.
President Harry S Truman proclaimed, “This is not the hour of final victory in Europe, but the hour draws near, the hour for which all the American people, all the British people and all the Soviet people have toiled and prayed so long.”
1965: Broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow died of cancer at the age of 57. Murrow’s career with the Columbia Broadcasting Company spanned 25 years. It ended in January, 1961, when President Kennedy named him head of the United States Information Agency.
1987: The Justice Department barred Austrian President Kurt Waldheim from entering the United States, saying he had aided in the deportation and execution of thousands of Jews and others as a German Army officer during World War II.
Although he had served as U.N. Secretary-General from 1972-1981, Waldheim’s past as an officer in the mounted corps of the SA was revealed when he ran for President of Austria, although declassified CIA documents showed that the CIA had been aware of his wartime past since 1945.