Tribute to Union "Unknown Soldier" at Cahaba Federal Prison

 

 Tribute to the lone unknown Union soldier still buried at Cahaba,

 site of  a federal prison during the War Between the States, was paid 

Thursday by the April 1865 Society as part of the

 150th anniversary of the Battle of Selma.

 

While a wreath was laid at the soldier's grave, the ceremony

 at Cahaba Federal Prison also memorialized the 150 Union soldiers 

who lost their lives there and those who died shortly after the war 

on their way back home while aboard the steamship Sultana.

 

  This country's worst maritime disaster occurred April 27, 1865,

 on the Mississippi River near Memphis when boilers exploded,

 killing 1600 of the 2600 men on the overcrowded ship.

 Of those, 680 were former Cahaba prisoners.

 

While prison conditions were harsh, particularly with flooding and vermin, 

Cahaba's fatality rate of less than 5 percent was attributed to good artesian

 well water and the humanity of its Kentucky-born commandant.

 The overall death rate for southern prisons was 15 percent 

and for Union prisons, 12 percent. Historians estimate that

 more than 8,000 Union soldiers may have been housed

 in the unfinished cotton warehouse at Cahaba through the war years.  

 

Sources: Memories of Prisoners of War (Interned at Cahaba Federal Prison)

 compiled by John Lundquist, Cahaba Federal Prison, compiled by John Lundquist

 and Cahaba Prison and The Sultana Disaster by William O. Bryant