April 1865: Cincinnati touched by the tragedies of a historic month

“April is the cruelest month,” poet T.S. Eliot wrote. An inordinate number of tragedies have occurred in April. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine school shooting. In Cincinnati, both the 1968 Avondale riots and 2001 unrest were in April.

Then there was April 1865, perhaps the most momentous month in U.S. history. “It is a month as dramatic and as devastating as any ever faced in American history – and it proved to be perhaps the most moving and decisive month not simply of the Civil War, but indeed, quite likely, in the life of the United States,” historian Jay Winik wrote in his book, “April 1865: The Month that Saved America.”

Certainly, there were major developments and ordeals that affected the entire country, Cincinnati included.

April 9: Lee surrendered to Grant

After 10 months of trying to infiltrate the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, a native of Clermont County, led a major offensive against Gen. Robert E. Lee in early April 1865. The Confederate government collapsed and officials fled. Lee ordered retreat from the city. Grant and the Union Army captured the capital on April 3, then relentlessly pursued the fleeing Lee, engaging in battles over the next few days.

Lee, short on supplies and soldiers, knew he had few options. On April 9, he agreed to Grant’s terms to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, essentially ending the fighting of the Civil War.

Breaking news, coming from telegraph dispatches, regularly appeared on page 2. “Last night (Sunday) at about ten o’clock, news of the surrender of General Lee came clicking over the wires,” The Enquirer reported. “The fire bells all over the city pealed forth, bonfires blazed throughout the city. In a few minutes thereafter tens of thousands of people thronged the streets, and the wildest enthusiasm prevailed.”

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The victory propelled Grant’s popularity in the North, surpassing all other Union generals and rivaling President Abraham Lincoln. Grant went on to be voted to two terms as president (1869-1877), and his tomb in New York was one of the city’s most visited landmarks for years.

In 1888, Grant’s birthplace, a cottage in Point Pleasant, Ohio, was uprooted and brought down by raft to Cincinnati to be on display at Race and Canal streets for the Centennial Exposition of the Ohio Valley and Central States. The house later toured the country on a flatcar, then was displayed at the Ohio State Fairgrounds in Columbus until 1936 when the Ohio Historical Society returned the house to its original site.

April 14: Jubilee celebration

Four years of heart-wrenching, bloody conflict, with between 620,000 and 750,000 dead, but the Civil War was over at last. The Union was preserved. Slavery was abolished. Time for celebration. Cincinnati, as in many cities around the nation, held a jubilee on April 14. Nearly all business was suspended, church and fire bells rang out, officials gave speeches, and a procession marched through the streets.

“Never before had our Queen City appeared to such advantage, as in her beautiful holiday garb of yesterday,” the Cincinnati Daily Commercial wrote. “The same brilliant spectacle was presented on every street and avenue, from Fulton to Sedamsville, and from the river to the hills on the north.” Gaslights illuminated every building. The night ended with a fireworks display at Fourth and Race.

The Enquirer offices were closed for the celebration and did not put out a paper the next day, and so missed the big story.

April 14: President Lincoln assassinated

On the same page as coverage of the jubilee, the Commercial published late-breaking news.

“At a very late hour we have the terrible intelligence that the President was shot, while in attendance at Ford’s Theater, in Washington, last night. The attempt upon his life was made about eleven o’clock.

“The city of Washington was filled with the most extraordinary excitement, and something of the incoherence of this appears in the dispatched that reach us.

“The report is that the assassin was J. Wilkes Booth, the actor, but, in the absence of confirmatory evidence, this seems almost incredible.

“At the moment of this writing we do not know whether to expect that the wound of the President is mortal. We fervently hope not. Millions will utter heartfelt prayers that he may be spared for his country’s sake. Perhaps there was no man in the world upon whom so much depended – no life so valuable to the people as his.”

Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, about the time people were reading the morning newspaper.

Newspapers printed telegraph dispatches with the latest running beneath previous reports. On one page, beside a story about the dying president and “J. Wilkes Booth missing,” there was an advertisement for Pike’s Opera House on Fourth Street, which was scheduled to stage an adaptation of “The Three Musketeers” starring Junius Brutus Booth Jr., the assassin’s brother.

The Commercial reported that Junius had arrived at the opera house for rehearsal, unaware that his brother had slain the president. An excited crowd had torn down the playbills and the performance was canceled. Told what had happened, Junius swooned and exclaimed, “My God! Can it be possible!” He quickly left town and was later taken in for questioning and released.

Over the next weeks, newspapers were filled with reports of Confederate leaders on the run, Confederate soldiers being pardoned and Andrew Johnson being sworn in as the new president. A manhunt for John Wilkes Booth ended after 12 days. The assassin was cornered by U.S. troops and killed at a farm in Virginia on April 26.

Lincoln’s body was taken by train from Washington, D.C. to his home in Springfield, Illinois, roughly following the reverse of the route he had taken as president-elect in 1861. Due to the deterioration of the body, the stop in Cincinnati was canceled, but local officials traveled to Columbus where Lincoln’s body was placed in the statehouse rotunda.

But the month wasn’t over yet.

April 27: Sultana disaster

Lost amidst the many tragedies of that April was the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history: the destruction of the steamboat Sultana on the Mississippi River near Memphis on April 27, 1865.

The Sultana was built at the John Lithoberry boatyard in Cincinnati in early 1863. Local manufacturers and craftsmen built the superstructure, outfitted the cabin and installed the waterwheels and boilers constructed by local engine builders Moore & Richardson.

During the Civil War, the Sultana made most of its money transporting Union soldiers, a source that would soon dry up with the war’s end. On April 25, the Sultana loaded up some 2,000 soldiers at Vicksburg, Mississippi, many of them recently released from Confederate prison camps, for transport to Cairo, Illinois. The boat was severely overloaded with an estimated 2,300 on board, five times the official capacity.

At 2 a.m. on April 27, the boilers exploded. People and debris were propelled into the air. There were no lifeboats and few life preservers. The burning Sultana sank as the river was awash with blackened bodies.

The real number of deaths is unknown, but U.S. Customs listed 1,547 dead while historians place the number closer to 1,800 as hundreds died from their injuries in the weeks following. Either number is more than the 1,517 who perished on the Titanic. Among the Sultana’s dead were 791 people from Ohio, including about 50 from Cincinnati.

The disaster was mostly overshadowed during a time when the nation was reeling from tragedy after tragedy. In 1892, Sultana survivor Chester D. Berry wrote, “The idea that the most appalling marine disaster that ever occurred in the history of the world should pass unnoticed is strange, but still such is the fact, and the majority of the American people today do not know there ever was such a vessel as the Sultana.”

A historical marker for the Sultana stands at Sawyer Point, not far from where the fateful steamboat was constructed.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: April 1865: Cincinnati touched by the tragedies in historic month