Notes from my Knapsack 8-14-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 8-14-2025
Jeff Gill

Shifting silt and scenes sliding astray
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If you haven't heard of the Sultana, it's not because Doug Stout, and Dan Fleming, and Chris Evans, and a number of us local historians haven't tried to let you know about it.

On April 27, 1865, after the Civil War was generally over, and as the nation's attention was focused on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and his funeral procession heading for Springfield, Illinois had only made it to Cleveland, Ohio — on that date, a side-wheel steamboat on the Mississippi River, built for a maximum 376 passengers, was carrying at least 2,100 soldiers, most of them recently released from Confederate captivity. 

Seven miles north of Memphis its steam boilers exploded, ultimately killing over 1,800 passengers, by either searing steam in the initial blast, or by way of the still frigid springtime waters of the mighty river, to this day the worst maritime disaster in the United States.

The Titanic sinking in 1912, some 47 years later, killed about 1,500. The steamboat Sultana's sinking killed 20% more people, but it was a footnote at the end of the Civil War's carnage. With something at or over 620,000 deaths North and South, about 2% of the nation's population, another 1,800 dead in the wake of Lincoln's death just didn't get too many headlines.

The released prisoners who filled the Sultana's decks were mostly Midwesterners, a majority of them from Ohio. They had been held in Cahaba prison outside of Selma, Alabama, and the even more notorious Andersonville prison camp near Atlanta, Georgia. These Union prisoners had been brought to a transfer camp outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi for release to their homes. The federal government was offering $2.75 per enlisted man and $8 per officer to steamboats who would take them north, so steamboats were interested in loading up as many released prisoners as possible.

We're sure of William Albert Norris in Granville's Maple Grove Cemetery, and of Daniel Lugenbeal in Perryton Cemetery, as Licking County survivors of the Sultana disaster. How many Licking Countians died in the waters of the Mississippi on the dark night of April 27, 1865?

Mansfield, Ohio has a Sultana marker saluting some 73 residents of that city who died on the Sultana, and Richland County claims 101 citizens who did not make it home due to the disaster. Licking County is not so clear, but even if behind the Mansfield area, it probably wasn't too far off.

Marion, Arkansas has a new Sultana Disaster Museum. East of that town, you can meander down gravel roads to the levee today, alongside of the Mississippi. Even now, the site of where the burnt wreckage of the Sultana came to rest is in a backwater, a bayou, an oxbow of the Mississippi River far to the east. The channel of the Mississippi River in 1865 is today a side stream, a western addition to the larger main channel. The site of the explosion of the over-loaded boilers was miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, and the last resting place of the wreckage is now on the Arkansas side of the river, located in 1982 near the complex historic location of Mound City, Arkansas.

Not all history can be solidly located. But it is interesting to look to curving streams and bent bottomlands, and think about the impact in history of those deaths, and that ending atop the Civil War's ending, as we continue to seek that elusive thing called closure.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad he went to the Sultana wreck site, even if he couldn't really see it. Tell him about obscure successes you've known at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 8-8-2025

Faith Works 8-8-2025
Jeff Gill

When the Bible Belt comes unbuckled
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"Is this a no-sin zone?"

That was the question Rev. Dr. Lee H. Butler Jr. asked at a conference I just attended in Memphis, in the shadow of the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid, next to the American Nile.

Dr. Butler is a seminary president, recently dean, with wide ranging ecumenical credentials as well as his academic work in history, psychology, and pastoral theology. With all of that background, he was asking us on a hot July day alongside the Mississippi River to consider the images of ancient empires, such as Egypt, and the social context we are called to preach to and minister in today.

"We are in the heart of the Bible Belt here, almost at the very buckle of its embrace," Dr. Butler said. Especially in the early years of Memphis and the Mississippi valley, across the legendary Delta bottomlands extending south from here towards New Orleans, Christianity was pre-eminent. Christian teaching was dominant, the (Protestant) Bible at the center of the culture, ministers and congregations the heart of civil affairs, and well past the Civil War into the modern era it has been Christian teachings which stood to the fore of the schoolhouse, the courthouse, even in the storehouse and into the jail house.

Yet it is also an area where infidelity and illegitimate birth, abortion and poverty, robbery and murder along with illiteracy and illness are present at record levels. What's wrong here, asked Dr. Butler? If the Christian church is allowed to be a dominant influence, as it has been in so many ways over the last two centuries, shouldn't this be a no-sin zone? "Is this a no-sin zone?" he asked, piercingly?

So what went wrong? Dr. Butler suggested there was a flaw in our theology. It could be, he allowed, that Christianity if practiced might not reduce sin, but he did not believe that was true. Faith in God and trust in Christ should reduce, if not completely eliminate sin. If the church was largely in control of a culture, and sin abounded, there is a flaw, even a heresy at work. He called his primary suspect "theological narcissism."

Theological narcissism, Dr. Butler said, is an assumption that one's own self is closer to God than someone different than one's self. And I trust I do no violence to his thesis to fill in from a theologian of a century ago but just two hundred miles to the east, in Nashville.

In my religious tradition's history, there are few figures more amazing in range and scope of their work and thought than Preston Taylor (1849-1931). As a leader among African American churches in the Restoration Movement, he served in the Civil War, had success in constructing railroads, and founded a funeral home and cemetery in Nashville, having served as an elder and preacher in his church from age 20. He formed the National Christian Missionary Convention for African American Disciples of Christ churches and preachers in 1917.

In his inaugural address to the convention, which he served as President for fourteen years, he proclaimed to the wider church "…if the white brother can include in his religious theory and practice the colored people as real brothers, he will have avoided the heresy of all heresies."

The heresy of all heresies. I thought of Rev. Taylor in 1917 Nashville as I listened to Dr. Butler in 2025 Memphis, and about the theological narcissism he warned us about. It was this blindness, this lack of fellow feeling, this absence of basic justice, this heresy of all heresies, which explained why the Bible Belt failed to become a no-sin zone.

Our faith can change human hearts and transform the world, but our cultural barriers and exclusions can block how that faith flows and moves people. By the banks of the mighty Mississippi, I found myself thinking about how we divert the flow of grace, and let sin flourish.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's interested in avoiding heresy and promoting justice. Tell him what flows through your gardens at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.